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You can Everest anywhere you can find a decent-size hill. You can Everest a big hill, or a small hill, and you can do it via bicycle or on foot.
You can Everest anywhere you can find a decent-size hill. You can Everest a big hill, or a small hill, and you can do it via bicycle or on foot. (Photo: Brendan Leonard)
Semi-Rad

You (Probably) Can鈥檛 Everest Mount Everest

And here鈥檚 why

Published: 
You can Everest anywhere you can find a decent-size hill. You can Everest a big hill, or a small hill, and you can do it via bicycle or on foot.
(Photo: Brendan Leonard)

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Maybe you鈥檙e familiar with this thing known as Everesting,聽in which people pick a hill of a certain height and bicycle or run up and down it until they鈥檝e climbed the equivalent height of Mount Everest.

If you鈥檙e saying to yourself, 鈥淭hat鈥檚 ridiculous!鈥 well, you鈥檙e correct. It is absolutely ridiculous, just like attempting to run a 100-mile ultramarathon, climbing mountains for fun, or eating an entire Taco John鈥檚 Six-Pack and a Pound in one sitting all by yourself.聽

But people are doing it. More than 7,500 successful such聽attempts have been logged on , including the original Everesting of Australia鈥檚 4,100-foot Mount聽Donna Buang in 1994 by a cyclist named George Mallory. If that name sounds familiar, it鈥檚 because Mallory shares a name with his grandfather, mountaineer George Mallory, who was lost on Mount Everest in 1924.聽

At the time he invented Everesting on his bicycle, Mallory was training for his own climb of Everest, which, as you might know, involves zero cycling. (You might not know, however, that Everesting sucks worse than actually climbing Everest, according to Mallory, who told 国产吃瓜黑料 in 2016: 鈥淓verest by bike is, in my experience, physically harder than any one day on Everest.鈥)

You can Everest anywhere you can find a decent-size聽hill. You can Everest a big hill, or a small hill, and you can do it via bicycle聽or on foot. If you wanted to Everest Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder, Colorado, via bicycle, which is a road climb a little over 1,000 feet, it would take 28 laps.

If you wanted to Everest the 52-foot Mount聽Trashmore in Evanston, Illinois, it would take 559 laps.

But no one has technically Everested Mount Everest itself. Seems pretty obvious, so why not?聽

If you guessed laziness,聽you鈥檙e a bit off the mark. If you guessed certain death,聽you鈥檙e closer. But really, the correct answer is because it鈥檚 pretty much fucking impossible.聽Now, we all love referring to elevation in terms of equivalence to Mount Everest, which is 29,029 feet above sea level. But you know who climbs Mount Everest from sea level?聽No one. (OK, not exactly no one鈥攎ore on that later.)

Most Mount Everest climbs begin in earnest at Base Camp, approximately 17,600 feet in elevation, where climbers acclimatize to the high altitude and carry supplies to higher camps for several days or weeks while waiting for good weather, and then ascend 11,430 feet to the summit in a push lasting a few days.

So if you wanted to Everest Everest from Base Camp, you鈥檇 have to climb to the summit twice聽and then up to roughly Camp III聽(23,500 feet). Easy, right? Well, not really. Only a few people have climbed Everest twice in one season, and only a couple people have climbed it twice in the span of a week. And no one鈥檚 climbed it twice without sleeping in between climbs.

And聽as one of states, you cannot sleep during an Everesting attempt. That rule, plus getting a weather window that would allow for 2.5-ish summit attempts, plus going through the dangerous Khumbu Icefall not once, not twice, but six times, makes it, you know, pretty much impossible. Oh and also: it鈥檚 pretty far beyond the limit of human endurance at this point, so there鈥檚 that. Oh, and permits.

A more feasible option for Everesting Everest might be to start in Lukla, Nepal, where the actual trekking to Everest Base Camp begins. Lukla sits at about 9,385 feet and is about a 40-mile walk from Base Camp. Because of some ups and downs along the trekking route, your actual elevation gain from Lukla to Everest Base Camp is about 13,700 feet. So if you just haul ass from Lukla to the summit of Everest without stopping, you鈥檇 get about 25,100 feet of elevation gain.

And then you could just romp down from the summit, back to Lukla, and bust out another 4,000 feet of elevation gain by trekking uphill almost to Namche Bazaar. The total would be around 100 miles.

You鈥檇 only need one good weather window and one permit! And I guess superhuman strength, endurance, and the uncanny ability to acclimatize to almost 20,000 feet of elevation change without dying.聽

Option three, the simplest option to Everesting Everest, would be to just climb it from sea level. Which takes a really long time, because the sea is not that close to the base of Mount Everest鈥攁s proven by , when he literally started his Everest climb standing in the waters of the Bay of Bengal, then walked 745 miles through India and Nepal, and then climbed Mount Everest solo, without oxygen. Not that he was going for a speed record, but as the only person to ever climb Everest from sea level, he does hold the current speed record at approximately 95 days (February 5, 1990, to May 11,聽1990).

Given the no-sleep requirement for Everesting attempts, the 鈥淐limbing Everest from Sea Level鈥擭o, Really, from the Actual Sea鈥澛燼pproach to Everesting Everest is probably not possible either. At least until we invent a human capable of running 750-some miles to the top of the highest mountain on the planet without taking a nap.聽

All this math to say: Mount Everest is probably safe from being Everested for the near future. I鈥檓 not saying it can鈥檛 be done, but I am saying I鈥檇 bet you $50 that you can鈥檛 do it. Which will buy me four Six-Pack and a Pounds with a little change left over.

Brendan Leonard鈥檚 new book, is out now.

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