The , which has records of every expedition in Nepal聽since 1905, is regarded as the statistical bible of mountaineering. It tracks everything from summits to deaths to demographics, and in the past, it was only available for purchase as a $69.95 CD or annual book. But as of last month, for the first time ever, the complete archive is free to download online.
The database can be filtered by expedition, climber, peak, nationality, gender, season, mortality rates, cause of death, and more. It also has the capability to run custom searches and analysis, which I鈥檝e often requested on behalf of 国产吃瓜黑料. Professionals seeking data about a specific climbing season or just mountaineering nerds in it for the trivia hit can use the archive to answer all sorts of questions. One popular query: Which is safer鈥攖he north or south side of Everest? In 2013, the numbers pointed to the south side. Now they鈥檙e pretty even, says Richard Salisbury, a former professor specializing in database processing at the University of Michigan who led the charge to digitize the archive. 鈥淓verest has just about reached its capacity in what it can support.鈥
Between 1905 and 2016, a total of 44,137 climbers have climbed above base camp on the 6,000-to-8,000-meter peaks in Nepal. And for those wondering if all that traffic means the age of exploration is over, Salisbury says there are still 130 unclimbed peaks in Nepal, plus a few hundred unlisted, unnamed, and unclimbed peaks in the 5,000-to-6,000-meter range. People often ask Salisbury whether something has been done before or if they鈥檇 be the first to do it.
The original database was the brainchild of , who started archiving expeditions in 1963 when she was on an assignment for Reuters to cover the first U.S. ascent of Mount Everest. Hawley, who聽at 93聽still lives in Kathmandu, liked the work so much that she continued it after the assignment ended. In the early days, there were only 50 to 100 Nepal expeditions per year, so Hawley could record everything simply by showing up at mountaineers鈥 hotels with a clipboard to interview them. Today, there are more than 400 expeditions annually, and while the team still tries to meet as many in person as possible, they use Survey Monkey to cover the remaining ground.
Salisbury met Hawley in 1991 after he led an expedition on Annapurna 4. 鈥淚 came with a bunch of information from Annapurna and realized she also had a lot,鈥 he says. 鈥淚 asked her if she considered putting it on a computer. A year later we went ahead and tried that.鈥
I asked Salisbury what data he found most interesting. 鈥淥ne of the things I鈥檓 interested in isn鈥檛 just ascents and deaths, but why people fail,鈥 he says. 鈥淲e have 14 to 15 categories that we put people into when they don鈥檛 succeed.鈥 These factors include bad weather, injuries, fitness, exposure, and frostbite. 鈥淪ome people are just not capable of what they鈥檙e trying to do. I think one of the things I noticed is that for people climbing without oxygen, they get cold first before they hit altitude trouble. And the people that climb with oxygen are more apt to have altitude problems because they run out of oxygen.鈥
Here鈥檚 some data I pulled that I found particularly interesting.
First Ascents
A History of Everest Climbs
A History of Nuptse Climbs
The Demographics of the Climbers
The Nepali Climbers
