Harry's 7 summits

()

Before Ivana and I loaded our Santos bikes in Alaska to cycle all the way south to Tierra del Fuego, I spent nearly a decade climbing mountains. Between 1999 and 2005 I climbed the highest peak on every continent, the 7 summits, and wrote three pocket summit guidebooks along the way. Today all of those routes, maps, gear lists and mountain stories are free to read on my climbing site, 7summits.com.

Everest (8,848 m) in Asia is the highest of them all. I climbed the North Ridge from Tibet in the spring of 2005, which is also where Ivana and I first met while she was cycling from Malaysia to India and I was on the way to Base Camp.

Aconcagua (6,962 m) in Argentina is the highest peak in the Americas and the highest mountain outside Asia. I climbed both the Normal Route and the Polish Glacier variation and wrote the Aconcagua Summit Pocket Guide for climbers heading to Mendoza.

Denali (6,190 m) in Alaska is cold, remote and heavy work, as you haul all your food and fuel on a sled and in a big pack up the Kahiltna Glacier and the West Buttress. Cycling back into Denali National Park with Ivana a few years later brought back a lot of memories from the high camps.

Kilimanjaro (5,895 m) in Tanzania is the roof of Africa. You walk from tropical forest through moorland and alpine desert to the glaciers around Uhuru Peak. I climbed it several times by different routes, and it is where I proposed to Ivana with a carabiner on the summit three weeks before we started cycling in Prudhoe Bay.

Elbrus (5,642 m) in the Russian Caucasus is a twin-coned volcano and the highest mountain in Europe. The long snow slopes look gentle on a sunny morning, but the weather can turn within an hour and catch out anyone who treats it as a simple walk.

Vinson (4,892 m) in Antarctica sits deep in the Ellsworth Mountains. There are no towns, no trees and no night during the southern summer, only twenty-four hours of low sun over the ice sheet and a long cold climb above Bransfield Strait.

Carstensz Pyramid (4,884 m) in West Papua is the highest peak of Oceania on the Messner list. Instead of snow and sleds, it is a steep limestone ridge of sharp rock above the jungle, with a summit block that asks for scrambling and a Tyrolean traverse.

Kosciuszko (2,228 m) in the Snowy Mountains is the highest point of the Australian mainland, the Bass list peak that many climbers walk to round out both versions of the seven summits.

If you are curious who has climbed all of them, I still maintain the finishers list with the statistics for both the Carstensz and Kosciuszko lists, including my own record. And if you are planning a climb yourself, the guides for all seven peaks, including the full text of my Denali, Aconcagua and Elbrus books, are online for free.