Polish mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel just pulled off a feat no one has managed before: climbing Mount Everest without using supplemental oxygen—and then skiing down it, also without bottled oxygen. Bargiel reached the 29,032-foot summit on Monday, then clicked into his skis and made his descent, documenting the adventure on Instagram and thanking his team for the support, reports CBS News. While a few have skied parts of Everest before, and Slovenian Davorin Karnicar made a full descent in 2000 with bottled oxygen, Bargiel is the first to complete the route relying only on the mountain's thin air.
Heavy snowfall stretched his time in the so-called "death zone" above 8,000 meters (roughly 26,000 feet) to a grueling 16 hours: Powder reports he left Camp IV just before midnight Sunday and made it to the summit at 3:17pm Monday without supplemental oxygen. He had skied past the Hillary Step by 3:35pm and made it to Camp II at 8:30pm, where he stopped due to darkness. He resumed skiing at 7am—and skied through the dangerous Khumbu Icefall, "guided in part by a drone flown by his brother," per Redbull—and made it to base camp at 8:45am.
It's another big achievement for Bargiel, who previously became the first to ski down K2 in 2018 and has also conquered other major Himalayan peaks on skis as part of his Hic Sunt Leones ("here are lions") project, which aims to chart new territory in ski mountaineering. Foiled by dangerous ice and bad weather, he had abandoned previous attempts on Everest in 2019 and 2022. Redbull notes that while 6,000-plus people have summitted Everest, fewer than 200 have managed to do it without supplementary oxygen.
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