While working on our article "Training, Oxygen Systems, and Hypoxic Tents: Success Factors for Climbing Mount Everest and 8,000-Meter Peaks," about climbing 8,000-meter peaks and the use of normobaric hypoxic tents to pre-acclimatize, Dr. Monica Piris spearheaded the research effort. She culled the recent editions of High Altitude Medicine and Biology and conducted searches of Pub Med and PLOS One to find all publicly available articles about intermittent hypoxia, applied either in training or sleeping. It is worth noting that all of the following studies a) spanned periods of 7–14 days and b) only went up to moderate altitudes. Dr. Piris…

All three of us stood on the summit of The Gem, thrilled to have finally succeeded on something after so many days of bad weather. When we started up the spire, we didn’t have any information about it—no previous knowledge, no sense of what we’d encounter the higher we climbed. There was good rock, but also a lot of chossy rock. We were really far out there, deep in India’s Zanskar Range. I’m obsessed with the region, which is in Kashmir in northern India, near the border with Pakistan. There are all these sub-valleys with big rock spires—6,000-meter granite spires,…

The spring ski-touring season is close at hand. And as we’ve seen a surge of interest from our athletes, both coached and those following plans, in prepping for long ski tours across the globe, many have asked me for my hut-to-hut ski touring gear list. I developed this list over the past decade spent guiding hut-to-hut ski trips in Europe, such as the incredible HochTirol (High-Tyrol) Traverse through Austria’s wildest mountains and the much more famous (and much more crowded) Chamonix-to-Zermatt Haute Route. This gear list, like any such list, can be modified for your needs. I suggest fine-tuning it…

Before we talk about 2018 and what a new year means to each of us personally and athletically, I want to be clear about one thing: Anything I accomplished, any success I achieved as a climber, and indeed my very survival, was enabled by the training I did. I have no special athletic talent. In all likelihood, neither do you. And that’s okay. We’ve just completed our first year pursuing our mission to provide proven training knowledge to mountain athletes: coaching plans, training plans, phone consultations, numerous articles—144 and counting—and a rich intellectual framework based on 100-plus years of training…

In this video, Uphill Athlete co-founder Steve House demonstrates how to get off an ice climb with a naked A-thread rappel anchor. By "A-thread," he means the rappel will be oriented vertically, not horizontally. And by "naked," he means he will not leave any sling material behind. The advantage of the horizontal orientation is that if it’s snowing, the snow will slough out the bottom hole. He and Vince Anderson hit upon this solution after descending a lot of routes in storms with their V-threads filling up with snow. Steve begins by creating the bottom hole. After finding a flat…

This values list is meant to help readers align their personal and athletic values with their goals, as Steve House discusses in "Know Thyself," his New Year’s piece for 2018. "Identify your values," he writes. "And identify your goals. Then reconcile those two things; the goal must be the round peg that fits the round hole of your values. Square goals don’t fit round values no matter how hard you try. And your values, when you look deeply inside yourself, are immovable, for this moment in time." What Are Your Values for Your Sport? Authenticity Achievement Adventure Authority Autonomy Balance…

In late Spring of 2015, I was up high on Ama Dablam, shivering and staring up at a vertical couloir. I struggled to find my voice to ask for what I needed. “I need to go down,” I whispered to myself. “I need to go down.” With tears on my face, I finally said it loud enough for Pemba—my friend and Sherpa—to hear me. I told him the truth: “I want to go up, but I need to go down.” Making the right decision doesn’t always feel good. There were a number of things that contributed to my failure on…

I am not a climber. In fact, until recently I had never climbed a single mountain. So when I made the very ambitious decision to leave my job, my beautiful fiancée, and all the securities I have known to spend a year following my dreams to climb the highest mountain on each continent, I knew it would be a monumental endeavor, not to be taken lightly. My training and preparation led me to the very thin air of Manaslu—the eighth-highest mountain in the world. My fascination for climbing high mountains began during a trip to Nepal in 2002, when I…

To some people, climbing Kilimanjaro wouldn’t be a big deal. But to me, a 55-year-old lady from Oklahoma, it means a lot. Especially since the first time I tried it, I didn’t succeed. My attempt on Kilimanjaro in 2016 wasn’t my first brush with climbing. I was pretty lucky to have a dad that was before his time in wanting his family to be outdoor oriented, and I fell in love with mountains as a child. But for one reason or another, my life kept taking these paths and deviations away from climbing. There was college, then medical school, then…

-by Kilian Jornet In spring 2017 Emelie Forsberg and I traveled to Tibet to attempt to climb Cho Oyu and Everest. I want to share how we approached our Cho Oyu and Everest preparations and acclimatization programs. Most of what I did was what many alpinists have been doing for years, and I have been trying and adjusting the last five years in the Himalaya. We placed a strong emphasis on traveling light, not spending nights sleeping above base camp, and returning to lower elevations as soon as possible. Also I used a hypoxic tent one month before departure; I…