Xenon Gas and the Future of Big Mountain Expeditions with Lukas Furtenbach

00:00:08.41
Uphill Athlete
Welcome. Today, I’m happy to welcome lukas Furtenbach to the podcast. Welcome, lukas.

00:00:15.42
Lukas
Thank you for having me.

00:00:16.21
Uphill Athlete
Lukas. Of course, it’s my pleasure. Lukas is a very well-known mountain guide and the founder and CEO of Furtenbach Adventures. His company has redefined, I would say, high altitude expedition guiding through innovation.

00:00:33.86
Uphill Athlete
but always with a very strong commitment to the safety of their climbers. Over the past two decades now, his expeditions street his expeditions have achieved an extraordinary track record, including a rare zero fatality history on Mount Everest.

00:00:52.69
Uphill Athlete
lukas’s pioneer techniques like hypoxic conditioning and is now exploring the use of xenon gas for pre-acclimatization, which potentially makes it possible for climbers to attempt to climb Everest in ever shorter times, faster times. However, these innovations, of course, raise questions about safety, ethics, and the evolving nature of modern mountaineering. Today, I want to dig into this with lukas, get his insights into the future of high altitude guiding, as well as the wider role of science and technology in the mountains.

00:01:19.62
Lukas
Thank you.

00:01:27.40
Uphill Athlete
So lukas, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:30.48
Lukas
Thank you very much.

00:01:33.27
Uphill Athlete
I just want to remind our listeners that we are sharing lukas’s voice and knowledge today to deepen our understanding of ourselves and the mountains. And at Uphill Athlete, our mission is to make the profound experiences that we’ve personally had in the mountains accessible to more people.

00:01:48.19
Uphill Athlete
much like lukas does through his guiding. If our work has inspired you, please consider joining one of our training groups, following a training plan, or working with one of our coaches. Your support helps us sustain this work and empowers you to unlock the full potential of your mountain experiences. So lukas, let’s start off by, can you just tell me what hypoxic conditioning is and why it’s helpful for high altitude climbing?

00:02:13.89
Lukas
So in a nutshell, hypoxic conditioning, or we call it hypoxic pre-acclimatizing, is using a temp with a generator that is simulating the oxygen level of a higher altitude. So you simulate altitude and you trigger the same processes in your body to start with acclimatization adapting to this lower oxygen level. That would also have mineral altitude.

00:02:44.01
Lukas
It helps also.

00:02:43.67
Uphill Athlete
How is the simulated altitude achieved?

00:02:49.64
Uphill Athlete
How does it how does it work?

00:02:52.56
Lukas
So these ah generators, they have a filter built in a zeolite filter and can filter oxygen out of the environment air, and then either with a mask or a tent, a sleeping tent, or just a head tent.

00:03:08.83
Lukas
make an atmosphere with this lower oxygen level that correlates to a certain altitude. And this certain altitude and oxygen level can be set on the generator.

00:03:23.32
Uphill Athlete
Okay, so you’re not changing the pressure in the tent or at the mass, you’re changing the relative availability of oxygen.

00:03:31.56
Lukas
Yeah, so these systems are all in normabarich hypoxic systems, so the pressure stays the same. It’s not changing the pressure to the levels that we have in high altitude, but as what is known and in high altitude medicine so far is that the oxygen level is the component that is important to trigger the acclimatization processes in your body and not pressure.

00:03:59.24
Uphill Athlete
And how did you start using this kind of, I technically, I think it’s called a normabaric hypoxic conditioning, a normabaric hypoxic pre-acclimatization, as you say. How did you come to start using this? What’s your personal history with it and history with it in regards to guiding and the greater ranges?

00:04:21.76
Lukas
So I started using this normal baric hypoxic pre-acclimatizing in 2000 or 2001 for a research study at the University of Innsbruck with Professor Martin Borcher, who was one of the leader leading researchers in this field. And I got there as a test person and I’ve found out that the first user of the first time I could use this hypoxic pre-acclimatizing at the university in the laboratory. So the mobile systems have not been ready back then. I found out that it works perfectly well for my expeditions, for my personal expeditions. I was very surprised how how good my acclimatization was. I had the comparison to real ITTU to traditional acclimatization.

00:05:19.45
Lukas
So I started to work with these systems and then soon the mobile systems like mobile generators with tents and masks came out. Actually they first came out for cyclists to make a form of high-altitude training during the races.

00:05:42.15
Lukas
And ah these mobile systems were a game changer. So you don’t have to go to a university or clinic to a hypoxic chamber. You could do it at your home with just a system that costs maybe including all accessories, $5,000. And it’s 25 kilograms, 50 pounds. And you have the whole setup to simulate IT tools up to, if you want, up to 9,000 meters.

00:06:10.29
Lukas
so I started using these systems for all of my personal expeditions. We started using the just to get experience with it, data.

00:06:21.03
Uphill Athlete
Mm hmm, mm hmm.

00:06:21.44
Lukas
My friends started using it just to see if it works. The first studies came out in 2005 and 2006, I guess it was. And then in 2007, for the first expeditions in Pakistan in tibet two thousand six two thousand and 2007, we started using it for for the whole team, for the whole group and in our expeditions. And we could see that it’s not only working for me or other people that are in ITTute a couple of times every year, but also for regular clients that have one ITTute exposure per year maximum and that haven’t spent so much time in ITTute before.

00:06:59.77
Lukas
We could see that the acclimatization is, I would go as far as saying, the same quality as a traditional acclimatization. But even better, people arrived at base camp better rested than recovered. They didn’t waste energy on doing rotations on the mountain. So what from the beginning, we could see that People who used hypoxic system for acclimatization performed better on the summit days. For example, after the summit, coming down as far as possible is important for us as a guiding company. We want everyone as low down as possible.

00:07:41.99
Lukas
If you say Everest, after the summit, we want everyone back in camp towards 6,400 on the same day. That’s a long way down. People who use hypoxic pre-aclimatization and have not done the rotations on the mountain have been significantly better performing on the descent after summiting and that was the first eye-opener for me. And I said, oh OK, it makes a difference, a huge difference. So we started

00:08:12.41
Lukas
further exploring the possibilities if we can not only use it for enhancing our acclimatization but maybe also make the the duration of the expedition shorter. Shifting one part of the acclimatization process from the mountain to our home in this time, 2,000 years, it was very new, this idea. People have been acclimatizing on other mountains, climbing this mountain and then going to an 8,000-meter beacon doing a faster sand. This was not new. But shifting the acclimatization process in your bedroom was new. And there was very little experience with that very little data and very little studies.

00:08:59.01
Lukas
So we just tried, it and we went further and further. Martin Borcher from the University of Innsbruck was very supportive and helpful during this time, and and he developed already acclimatization programs with us.

00:09:13.89
Lukas
So we we started to make expeditions shorter by making them acclimate, and that’s maybe wrong to say, the expeditions didn’t become shorter.

00:09:25.01
Lukas
It’s just that the location of the expedition changed or shifted from Nepal to your home country.

00:09:32.99
Lukas
So when a traditional true you expedition let’s say in this time was eight weeks we said okay let’s do three or four weeks of hypoxic sleeping at home and then make the expedition only four or five weeks ah so it’s the same duration at the end but the location of the acclimatization went home. With all the benefits it has, it means less rotations on the mountain, it means being with your family, being at the top, being at home when you have an infection and getting sick, you just open the tent and you are at sea level again. You can recover faster, you can eat better, ah you save energy.

00:10:19.11
Lukas
and of course you have less exposure time in a dangerous environment and this is when it became important for us as a guiding company because as a guiding company we have a moral but also a legal more important a legal obligation for the safety of our clients so everything we can do to make an expedition safer we have to do.

00:10:42.52
Lukas
It would be a legal problem for us if there is a possibility to make an expedition safer and we would not use it. This is another reason why, for example, we can’t let our climbers climb without oxygen on average.

00:10:49.50
Uphill Athlete
Right.

00:10:56.23
Lukas
It’s a legal problem. um Even if we wanted to, it’s not possible for a guiding company.

00:11:06.02
Lukas
But yeah, again, but we started to explore what is possible. And already back then, we could see the potential that we were thinking that one day we will be able to have the full acclimatization process, including rotations, including high camp nights at home, so that you fly or, however, reach a mountain

00:11:35.54
Lukas
only to do the final summit push. We started in Pakistan on mountains like Broadbeak or in Tibet, on mountains like Choyu, and then used this approach on Everest only when we had our first Everest expedition.

00:11:56.42
Lukas
That was 2016. We didn’t touch Everest because the Everest market and the Everest guiding landscape was so

00:12:04.95
Lukas
competitive with people like Russell Bryce, like people at IMG, Alpana Sense, companies that have been guiding there for years or decades and famous guides. We couldn’t see how we could enter this market.

00:12:23.09
Lukas
And I personally had never an ambition to climb Mount Everest. So in 2016, we got a chance to film a documentary on Everest. And we said, OK, this would be maybe our step into the Everest guiding market.

00:12:40.42
Lukas
But if we do it, we do it different. We try to make a short expedition. The experience with hypoxic pre-acclimate testing we had from Pakistan and Tibet, we bring it to Everest and we try to make an Everest expedition in six weeks. Six weeks was revolutionary in 2016 for an Everest expedition. The average ever Everest expedition was eight to ten weeks. So six weeks was pretty progressive But we said, okay, we can do this.

00:13:08.86
Uphill Athlete
Mm hmm.

00:13:10.21
Lukas
We did a whole team pre-acclimatizing at home with hypoxic system. We flew to Merritt Peak with a helicopter.

00:13:20.65
Lukas
We climbed Merritt Peak, it’s 6,000 or 22,000 feet, mountain close to Everest in the Kumbu Valley, to do a safety rotation there. to see if the hypoxic pre-acclimatizing worked for everyone because everyone was watching us.

00:13:35.93
Lukas
It’s our first Everest expedition and tt was, yeah, a difficult situation.

00:13:39.35
Uphill Athlete
Lots of pressure.

00:13:40.71
Lukas
Yeah, a lot of pressure. It went well on Island Peak. From there, we went into the Everest base camp and we climbed Everest with the whole team.

00:13:50.73
Lukas
We had one guy not summiting. It was a doctor and he was afraid of his hands because of cold fingers.

00:13:56.25
Uphill Athlete
who

00:13:57.33
Lukas
But the rest of the team summited and it was less than six weeks. So it was for us, at least, our proof of concept. And we knew immediately, okay, two things, two learnings.

00:14:09.13
Lukas
We have to move to the north side, to China, because it’s a mess in Nepal. And the second learning was we can do it much faster than six weeks.

00:14:17.67
Uphill Athlete
Hmm, okay.

00:14:19.53
Lukas
So next year, we moved to China, to the north side, where everything is more restricted and regulated than on the Nepalese side.

00:14:30.72
Lukas
The Chinese implemented a monitoring program, so as a new guiding company, you had to go through a monitoring program of two or three seasons, so that the authorities can check how you operate, how you run your expeditions, if you have accidents, in do how your clients perform, Are they experienced or do you bring anyone to the mountain?

00:14:52.73
Lukas
It went well in 2017 and we already had this project of one guide of us climbing the mountain in two weeks from home. It didn’t work out at the end because it became sick and in base camp with a flu so we stopped it for safety concerns but we could see that logistics would work and acclimatization was perfect.

00:15:17.51
Lukas
We then, the expedition was four weeks, everyone summited, everyone was healthy back down in base camp. And then we said, okay, this is the new benchmark will be three weeks, 21 days expedition for Everest.

00:15:32.97
Lukas
That we launched in this in the year, in the summer from 2017 for 2018, first time, or we called it a flash expedition because we needed a name.

00:15:43.52
Lukas
Some of our competitors already had names for this form of expedition. We called it a flash expedition. When we launched this idea, or this product, let’s say, we were sold out for the next two years within two weeks. The market was waiting for this but this expedition. You can say you like it or you don’t like it. You lose some of the of the experience if your expedition is that short. But for many people, eight or nine weeks is just not an option because of the family business, truck, whatever. When we launched this expedition, we had immediate, a lot of

00:16:28.13
Lukas
criticism like it is it what we were called like we are killing we will be killing people it won’t work nobody will summit it is doping it is cheating it is whatever so the same things that are coming now with the new genome and stuff and the same voices by the way.

00:16:50.61
Lukas
Yeah, we proved them wrong the following year in 2018. Again, a full team, everyone summited, and it was exactly 21 days. So it was a full success. And we could see, yeah

00:17:04.81
Lukas
more as possible. We can do this even quicker, but still we said, okay, as a product to sell to clients, we need this 21 days because this involves some spare days for weather, for politics, for whatever can happen, route fixing problems.

00:17:24.92
Uphill Athlete
Yeah, I want to share my experience with hypoxic conditioning because as we both know, like we’re about the same age and so we came up really close to the same time both as mountain guides.

00:17:37.72
Uphill Athlete
and but also as climbers. I’d tried hypoxic conditioning in 2003 for the first time, slept in the tent at my home at the time, before an expedition to Mashabrum. I didn’t notice, honestly, like an effect, and I decided that the reason was that it had taken too long to get from… And you got to remember, like I was climbing with a couple of Slovenian guys, our total budget for all three people, including air fares was $8,000. You know we’re like shopping for our own food in the markets. Like so we don’t quite have like, it took us four because of that 14 days. And I think you’ll agree, like it was just too long between the last session and the tent and getting to base camp. Right. Like, and I realized that that was too much time.

00:18:36.87
Uphill Athlete
And I was like, okay, that was an experiment. Then the next year I tried it, going up to Alaska, going to Denali, had a similar problem that time, but for different reason, we just couldn’t fly onto the mountain and we had to wait until Keetna for quite a number of days. And again, like got up on the mountain, went straight up to 14 and felt pretty much like I always felt when I went straight up to 14 and thought.

00:19:03.85
Uphill Athlete
This doesn’t work, but I didn’t know that I really could not separate it between, is it just the time that I’m losing all the, can you know, pre-acclimatization effects by the travel and the bad logistics, or is it just not working with me? I didn’t really know. And I think it’s really interesting because what you had a very different position, I would say, that is very advantageous for sort of uncovering these correlations.

00:19:32.68
Uphill Athlete
which is that you were going to relatively not, if not the same mountains, like quite similar mountains with similar logistics or similar altitudes with similar people. And you were doing that repetitive or you’re iterating on that pretty fast, right? So for me, it was like, as a struggling, you know, professional climber barely scraping by, I was like, man, this is kind of a big expense.

00:19:57.34
Uphill Athlete
It’s not really helping because every time I get stuck with logistics, it takes too long, so I’m just not gonna do it anymore, right? And that was sort of the end of my investigation.

00:20:08.73
Uphill Athlete
Of course, I watched as you know you and other people started doing this and as a mountain guide and knowing the community.

00:20:09.51
Lukas
Right.

00:20:15.54
Uphill Athlete
I was absolutely paying attention to that and watching these developments. I was very curious to see how it would work, but I personally never really used it We tried when we started coaching, when an uphill athlete was started in 2016, we started coaching athletes. We were sometimes getting athletes that wanted to use this, but the problem was that I didn’t have, we internally didn’t have the expertise. Like we at that time, we didn’t know, like if it was one of

00:20:46.73
Uphill Athlete
your climbers that was going with you’re managing that with with the climber directly. You’re telling them what altitude to sleep at and of course the coach was looped in so they knew how to manage the training and recovery around that additional stressor of sleeping at and a simulated high altitude, but we didn’t know what the right I guess dosage.

00:21:11.38
Uphill Athlete
I mean, it sounds like a medical term, but what with the right dose and what the right timing was.

00:21:16.66
Uphill Athlete
with the altage. And we didn’t really have that internally until the last few years. And I think that a couple of things have really changed in the last few years.

00:21:26.70
Uphill Athlete
One, it’s enough time has gone by where you and others have done this enough times where it’s like for example, I coached, Roxanne Vogel who was, or actually I didn’t coach her.

00:21:42.75
Uphill Athlete
Was I coaching her then? I did coach her for a while. I can’t remember if I was coaching her or if Seth was coaching her, but up to lastly was coaching her at the time. She went and did the two week, round trip of Everest with one of your competitors as the guide, but it was like, okay, like she went from San Francisco.

00:22:02.76
Uphill Athlete
And granted, she’s an absolute beast of an athlete. She’s an incredible athlete. But it’s like, OK, she did that. It’s obvious that there’s something here that’s working. We just didn’t know what it was. And then as after that, that really triggered it. So then we started to have enough, like a gather enough, like this internal information as the coaching team to start to understand what the dosages need should be, what the timing needs to be.

00:22:57.57
Uphill Athlete
You know, and also looking at it from our perspective of like, how does that, how do we integrate the training stimulus and the recovery prescription within the context of pre-acclimatization protocols? And that really in the last, like I’d say really a year ago, it really gelled and we’re like, okay, we know how this works now. We understand it. We’ve been around it enough. We’ve like, and also I think you and others have really helped us understand these dosage and timing is actually it’s something that requires a pretty fine touch. You can’t just like go sleep in the tent a bunch.

00:23:40.69
Lukas
Yeah.

00:23:40.64
Uphill Athlete
You have to really know what you’re doing. And it’s, it’s much like training. When you apply a stress, you do it not to torture the person, you do it to an illicit, a physiological response from the body.

00:23:53.36
Uphill Athlete
And with these, applying the pre-acclimatization stress, you need to do it very quite precisely and in the right order.

00:24:04.34
Uphill Athlete
You need to do the right things in the right order at the right time, and it takes quite a lot to learn that. And you’ve known that, you’re kind of the pioneer of that, but others of us have now kind of caught up and figured it out.

00:24:11.90
Lukas
Right.

00:24:17.47
Uphill Athlete
But I think part of it, there’s a bunch of reasons why guys like me didn’t figure this out, and guys like you did, because you had this captured group of people that you could regularly go to the same place.

00:24:28.54
Lukas
Right.

00:24:31.78
Uphill Athlete
You could you could do these tests and you were you were experimenting, you were developing, you were innovating, be like, OK, well, that seemed like too much. What about this? And you were making these basically it’s classic.

00:24:45.30
Uphill Athlete
It’s a classic way that innovation is made in sports physiology as well like the innovations never come from the laboratories. It’s always the other way. Oh, nice.

00:24:55.57
Uphill Athlete
And to always. It’s almost always the other way around, where coaches and athletes experiment and fiddle and start to see things and kind of follow their noses. And then like something works. We’re not really exactly sure why. And then later, the scientists can come and be like, OK, when you do this, this is what’s happening. Therefore, there must be a causality.

00:25:18.22
Lukas
Yeah, I totally agree. That’s a good point. Especially, that was one finding and one learning, and it was a hard way of learning this over years, with many failures, and that you have to follow

00:25:30.46
Uphill Athlete
Yes. Absolutely.

00:25:38.06
Lukas
No, let’s start like this. Acclimatization is very individual. so like You will acclimatize different to me. It’s different from every person. Of course, the acclimatization schedule or protocol is also different, as standard acclimatization, as we see in traditional expeditions of tracking to base camp and then doing rotations.

00:26:02.74
Lukas
And that’s an itinerary for a whole group. It might work for most of the group, but not for all. So that’s one reason why we still see so many people failing on traditional expeditions.

00:26:12.12
Uphill Athlete
Yeah, the middle of the bell curve.

00:26:20.88
Lukas
with developing any form of altitude sickness or even hape or haze.

00:26:28.43
Lukas
So that the crux or that the point was our most important learning was to use individualized protocols to understand that every person acclimatizes differently.

00:26:38.63
Lukas
It needs a different protocol for sleeping in the tent, a different progress of sleeping attitude, a different amount of total hours spent in an average attitude.

00:26:51.94
Lukas
We have different responders. We have responders that are more responding over SBO2 and we have responders that are more responding with their heart rate in different stages of the acclimatization process.

00:27:04.70
Lukas
You have to consider all of that. So only someone with experience or a perfect data pool is able to individualize your acclimatization protocol called with a hypoxic tenet.

00:27:20.40
Lukas
That’s also a reason why we can

00:27:23.35
Lukas
see so many do-it-yourself hypoxic acclimatization attempts fail every year. Competitors that are just trying with standard protocols because they don’t understand how it works and then their clients arrive in base camp get flying out with a helicopter the next morning. And that’s a problem for us as well because it then people see this and think oh it doesn’t work these people have been using hypoxic trans for pre-acclimatizing and still they get hyped, hate and base camp.

00:27:53.98
Lukas
But I can say that never ever any of our clients, and we had a lot now, has developed hape after a fast approach to base camp.

00:27:54.30
Uphill Athlete
Yeah.

00:28:04.58
Uphill Athlete
Yeah. So, um, I want to shift the conversation now to your latest innovation that is, you know, as you pointed out, turning out to be very controversial.

00:28:20.43
Uphill Athlete
And that is the use of xenon treatments for acclimatization. And I want to just frame this up quickly for people that. Well, this is, I think the main sort of, I guess, allegation, if that’s the right word or criticism is that this is some sort of, you know, shortcutting of the process or it’s doping or
00:28:48.94
Uphill Athlete
something like that. And you alluded to those criticisms earlier. I want to call out that, you know, they once did a study and they tested the urine in the toilets, that caused me to cut, you know, about this, right. And they found the whole spectrum of performance and enhancing drugs in that. So, climbers have been trying to dope for a long time.

00:29:16.89
Uphill Athlete
It goes back as old as the history of mountaineering, where you know climbers used performance-enhancing substances, or at least what they thought were performance-enhancing substances, like methamphetamines and other things, way back like in you know the first a sense of many of these 8,000-meter peaks. I’m not saying that makes it right or makes it wrong. I’m saying that we need to recognize that this human searching for pharmacological or technological aids to help them do what they want to do, climb these mountains, is nothing new. And to your point, you are providing a service and that if you can allow someone to achieve a dream with less time commitment, or rather by shifting the duration of the acclimatization, for example, more to their

00:30:15.60
Uphill Athlete
Bedroom at home and spend less time away from their businesses and their families and so on That you know, there’s people that want to do that. Part of my aim here with this podcast is not to tell anyone how to think. I want you to have a platform to share your thoughts. I want to be able to share my thoughts and our listeners are intelligent people. They can come up with their own opinions and decisions and will tell us you know eventually what they think, which is part of what’s great about this format.

00:30:50.64
Uphill Athlete
Let’s go to xenon. Can you explain to us what the physiological benefit is? First of all, what is xenon gas? Where does it come from? And what are the physiological benefits of it, as especially particularly as it regards to acclimatization?

00:31:09.73
Lukas
Yeah, so it is important because there has been so much misunderstandings in the media and in the recent two weeks that I think it’s important to to give this context. Xenon is a noble gas that is part of our atmosphere that every one of us is breathing every day.

00:31:30.24
Lukas
With a technical system you can how to say you can extract xenon from the atmosphere and then you have xenon as a medical gas that is used in medicine and anesthesia for more than 75 years now.

00:31:52.01
Lukas
It is a very safe, very well-researched gas with very little side effects. One side effect is that you can get a little bit dizzy.

00:32:03.81
Lukas
Of course, you can get unconscious. It’s used for anesthesia for surgery.

00:32:10.87
Uphill Athlete
Yeah.

00:32:12.71
Lukas
But it is considered a very safe medical gas. It is also a lot of research going on right now with xenon in the field of Alzheimer research and Parkinsons and different other forms because xenon has some side effects one of them is it a neuro and cardio protective for example another one is it and that was found out by coincidence it triggers your own

00:32:51.85
Lukas
body’s epoch production. So, and that is one misunderstanding. We are not working with a synthetic epoch as a substance that is injected like we all know it from the cyclists around Lance Armstrong in this area. This has nothing to do with this. So it triggers epoch production in your body. So that’s a natural process and the same process is triggered when you are either in real IT2 or in simulated IT2.

00:33:25.50
Lukas
xenon is just one other way to trigger this process. And let’s call it one of the processes that is making and adapting to a lower oxygen level. Epo in your body is, is and I put this very simple because i’m I’m not a doctor, I’m not a researcher. So epo in your body is responsible for the production of red blood cells. So ultimately this will increase your hematocrit.

00:33:55.64
Lukas
This is the same thing that happens when you are acclimatizing in real IT2 or in simulated IT2. We use xenon as one form of a wider acclimatization strategy that consists of hypoxic sleeping protocol, active hypoxic training, intermittent hypoxic training, and the xenon treatment.

00:34:20.42
Lukas
we found out that the xenon treatment is enhancing your acclimatization. We are not using it for enhancing performance because this is something that we still don’t know if this is really happening. There are some studies that implement, there would be an increased performance after a xenon treatment. That’s also one of the reasons why it is on the international list of prohibited substances from the anti-intermission anti-doping agency.

00:34:51.92
Lukas
but this is not our intention of using it and the intention is to have an enhanced acclimatization with the goal of a safer expedition. We are not, it became now big in the media, a big story because we are telling this story, this xenon story related to a one week expedition. It was the the missing link for us to go out with a one, it was always an idea of mine to have a seven day Everest expedition, seven day from home to home.

00:35:27.76
Lukas
I think from logistics it’s absolutely possible for a fit climber who can also maybe skip one or the other a camp. But to make sure that the acclimatization, we didn’t want to cheat on this. We didn’t want to let someone climb somewhere else in Argentina or anywhere and then fly to Nepal and climb Everest in a week. We wanted to have it right like the full acclimateization process at home in Europe or in the US and then from home to the mountain and back within seven days just to show that it’s possible. It will never be a big market for this but just to show what is possible.

00:36:10.92
Lukas
With these forms of acclimatization, like intermittent hypoxic training active hypoxic training and hypoxic sleeping protocol, we were very confident that this is doable.

00:36:24.75
Lukas
But we still had this idea that we need just a safety backup in the acclimatization.

00:36:31.26
Uphill Athlete
Mm hmm.

00:36:32.13
Lukas
We have a lot of safety backups on the mountain.

00:36:32.34
Uphill Athlete
Mm hmm.

00:36:35.62
Lukas
We have a ah very good safety infrastructure on the mountain with oxygen everywhere, with redundancy in oxygen systems everywhere, at any time a climber is on the mountain.

00:36:44.55
Uphill Athlete
Mm hmm.

00:36:48.30
Lukas
But still, we needed a backup for the acclimatization. And xenon was the missing link. We have been experimenting. We did the same as with the hypoxic times 20 years ago.

00:37:00.82
Lukas
There’s not much data. There’s not much scientific studies. That’s true. So we started to do it ourselves, just test trial and error. But it worked so well from the beginning. And then we say, okay, this this must have a lot of potential. We widened the circle of people who were testing it. And it worked so well for every single person who was trying but to use it.

00:37:30.51
Lukas
that we had, finally, we set last year in 24. When I climbed Everest, using only xenon acclimatization, nothing else, no hypoxic, no intermittent hypoxic, training nothing else, just the xenon. And that was for the second time on Everest. I did this on other mountains, and it worked so perfectly well. So now you can say it’s because my body maybe spent so much time in high altitude that just the altitude memory is adopting faster, and more efficient, whatever.

00:38:02.72
Lukas
Maybe I don’t need any acclimatization at all anymore. But for myself, I could compare my experiences, how it feels arriving there and climbing the mountain with a scene on acclimatization compared to a hypoxic acclimatization and compared to a traditional acclimatization.

00:38:12.37
Uphill Athlete
Thank you.

00:38:27.23
Lukas
I had all these experiences, so I knew it for me. But of course, that’s not enough to sell it to a client. That’s why we’re going to sell it as one part of the acclimatization only.

00:38:34.13
Uphill Athlete
yeah

00:38:40.85
Lukas
But not only for the seven-day expedition, we will of course offer this for everyone climbing Everest or any 8,000 meter peak, just as an enhancer for your acclimatization.

00:38:52.60
Uphill Athlete
I want to take a short side note into sort of what we know about the science of how xenon works.

00:39:04.44
Uphill Athlete
particularly as it would, particularly as it would affect in endurance training generally, because I think that there’s it’s, so as you mentioned, it’s a lot of banned substance. It was xenon gas bottles were found at the Sochi Olympics. And, you know, there’s a whole story there if people want to dig into that. Most of the research around this that is published is coming from Russia.

00:39:33.83
Uphill Athlete
There are some, I’d say, questions about whether or not some of those results are either overstated or understated. That’s another topic. But again, as i said earlier, you know the innovation usually comes from practice, and then it gets kind of verified by science later in most of these cases. So here’s what we know. We know that xenon is a key. It affects a key mechanism.

00:40:02.79
Lukas
Thank you.

00:40:03.01
Uphill Athlete
It affects a key mechanism involved in stabilizing a protein. And it is called HIF-1 alpha. HIF stands for, what does it stand for? I’m going to have to, inusible factor hypox hypoxy Inducible factor, factor. All right.

00:40:33.08
Lukas
Yeah, I don’t remember, but yeah.

00:40:33.77
Uphill Athlete
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So, HIF stands for hypoxia-inducible factors, and then there’s but they they give them numbers like one alpha after that. Under normal conditions, normal atmospheric condition, HIF one alpha gets broken down pretty quickly. But when it’s stabilized, which happens at high altitude and also in certain interventions, and xenon is one of them, the adaptations that come out of this are the boost in EPO production and re-throw point in production and a higher red blood cell count. Now that gets a lot of attention. As you said, that’s been mostly what’s in the news. I think that people need to realize that’s probably not the thing that’s happening here that’s really important. So for example, I mean, red blood cell production just takes a long time. It takes weeks. And so our, you know, the kind of scientific consensus as I understand it is that,

00:41:32.95
Uphill Athlete
you need about a hundred hours in hypoxia to get a 1% increase in your hemoglobin. So, you know, and that’s going to be a four to six week process. So you’re talking about a climb of taking seven days. Like obviously red blood cell new production isn’t increasing in seven days. like I mean, it’s that process is starting, but it’s not going to be really the reason that explains these changes. Another,

00:42:03.06
Uphill Athlete
Uh, I think that’s, that’s derived from this, uh, HIF one alpha is the new blood vessel formations that we know. So that could be part of it. New blood vessels are, are. Especially in places like the heart muscle, that’s already very vascular that has a huge effect. That’s very important in high altitude climbing.

00:42:28.24
Uphill Athlete
Another one is there’s a shift in glycolysis, which means that there’s seems to be better anaerobic energy production, which is, you know, anaerobic. Of course, we all know the production of energy in an anaerobic condition or without oxygen.

00:42:42.89
Uphill Athlete
So people, this may not really apply to high altitude climbers because we never really go anaerobic when we’re at a high altitude. People are like, oh yeah, it must be anaerobic because there’s not much oxygen around.

00:42:53.40
Uphill Athlete
And then it doesn’t work that way. You’re still aerobic.

00:42:55.32
Lukas
Right.

00:42:57.20
Uphill Athlete
A really important one is there is a better cell survival in the low oxygen environment when you’ve undergone a xenon treatment. And this seems to have both a metabolic pathway and it’s not well understood. And there’s also a pathway that is mostly researched around cancer. There’s something called, and I’ll probably say this wrong, a poptokic pathway. And that is the process whereby the,

00:43:26.45
Uphill Athlete
Cells know when to die, right? And it’s often, the reason it’s of interest in cancer is like, this is sometimes turned off in tumor cells, right? They don’t know when their time is up and they just keep growing. Um, so there may be something in that it’s very complicated and frankly, not very well understood these areas. And then the other part that I think is very interesting and with regards to commoditization is the vascular regulation.

00:43:54.46
Uphill Athlete
So this is, it essentially affects the N O production and that helps you yeah there as we, I’m going to go into how to physiology a little bit. When we breathe more, we blow off more CO2. And when we blow off more CO2, again, I’m going to simplify it changes the, pH of our blood. And so when,

00:44:22.43
Uphill Athlete
this vascular regulation happens due to the xenon treatment, it may be helping that balance. I mean, again, this is pure speculation. We don’t know exactly what it works, but we know something is working. So medical science kind of uses some of these effects of xenon for treating things like anemia or ischemic conditions. And we know it has been and used artificially for sports performance to to boost endurance. And so this is a big topic. How do you respond to people when they say that using xenon in addition to these other therapies is doping?

00:45:38.88
Lukas
I mean, I would say doping or the banned list only applies to a regulated competition sport. So commercial guided expeditions on Mount Everest are no competition sport. It’s not about records. There’s no regulations about how fast you can climb, how much support you can climb. It’s just, yeah, no competition.

00:46:07.67
Lukas
The other thing is we are not using a substance. It’s something, because this is something, it came on the barter list after the barter inspectors found xenon equipment at the Russian cross-country’s case in Sochi. But did the Russian cross-country’s key federation is still fighting this barter.

00:46:35.64
Lukas
how to say this Vada, the band, because they argument that it is not a substance because it’s in the atmosphere.

00:46:36.76
Uphill Athlete
Ban.

00:46:44.21
Lukas
And that’s actually, it is very indeed detailed, but it is a good point. For example, the FIS, the International of feeds Key Federation, they put oxygen on and the list of prohibited substances.

00:46:58.06
Lukas
So for skiers, for in competition, it is not allowed to inhale pure oxygen right before the race. Another thing is that substances like dexamethasone are on the barter list as well and are used by climbers on a regular basis, not only for treatment of an emergency, but especially dexamethasone is used for prophylactic or even for performance enhancement. So I would say that my approach is it would be doping if a substance is used for performing, ah for enhanced performance to reach a certain goal like reaching a record, reaching a podium in a competition. Using it for increasing safety on a guided expedition in a dangerous environment as a form of enhanced acclimatization, I don’t see it as doping.

00:48:01.44
Uphill Athlete
I think I want to just call out, because the audience will if I don’t, that I personally built my whole climbing career on the premise that we as climbers should you know strive to match the mountains challenges, not to reduce them or change them. But I also believe that one of the core tenants in life is that the mountains are freedom and that I don’t want to dictate what people are allowed to choose or not choose to do.

00:48:29.12
Uphill Athlete
So I think it’s, this is where, like, I think your point around organized competition, in an organized competition, there are rules so that the competition is, let’s say, fair. Like people can show up at a starting line and they can see who is the fastest skier that day, for example. And that’s the whole sport.

00:48:53.83
Uphill Athlete
is to do that right. And mountaineering is more or less the antithesis of that in my mind. There’s no starting line. We don’t even know when the climb is going to start. It’s the the freedom of the hills, as as we like to say sometimes. So I think you have a really strong point with that. And you know I myself have called you know oxygen using oxygen, like you know high flow rate oxygen.

00:49:24.03
Uphill Athlete
for climbing as doping. And I remember when I said that and then I thought about it. This was years ago when I was probably 20 years ago when I was in my early thirties and I was all fiery about this kind of stuff. And then I thought about it and I was like, you know, what difference does it make to me if people want to do that or not? Like it actually doesn’t, as long as, you know, yeah. So I kind of come full circle on that myself. And I also, as a coach have now for years taken great pleasure in writing books and coaching and educating athletes, and many of them go climb mountains like Everest, and many of them have used supplemental oxygen and other things like hypoxia conditioning and now xenon to allow them to make the ascent. And they have incredible experiences that are not really, arguably not accessible to them without these interventions, including the training, right?

00:50:21.42
Uphill Athlete
I sort of feel like, you know, that’s kind of an argument we, in my opinion, I’ve put to rest. Like, I don’t really see how we can call this doping. Is it ethical? I think that’s a different question because ethics are different than rules. Rules apply to organized competition, as you rightly point out. Ethics is is another another thing. So, you know, the next topic that I think is like, you know, tools like xenon or using a hypoxic tent, have it’s been argued that they detract from the purity, the beauty of mountaineering. So how do you personally, not not for the rest of the world, but you, for you and those that you’re responsible for in the mountains as a mountain guide, how do you define these ethical boundaries of what is acceptable technological and pharmaceutical aid.

00:51:20.64
Uphill Athlete
How do you navigate that? How do you think about that?

00:51:26.13
Lukas
That’s a very difficult question because I think it’s different for me personally, my approach to the mountains when I go climbing for myself or when our company is having guided clients and we are responsible for them. And I come back to the beginning when I said, as soon as we take responsibility for the safety of our climber,

00:51:52.23
Lukas
We have limited possibilities. We have to work in a frame that keeps the client safe and that has client safety as a number one priority. I think it is important to understand. A good example for this whole ethics discussion is the use of oxygen.

00:52:18.11
Lukas
So you have one extreme. Reinhold Messner, who is saying ah real Alpinism involves the risk of dying. If you can’t die anymore, then it can’t be alpinism, if it must be tourism.

00:52:35.56
Lukas
On one side, I 100% agree that that’s true. And for outstanding professional athletes like yourself, this is the way like you would go or you have been going to the mountains in your career. And this is the style you choose for your climbing, a pure and ethical, pure and clean style without technology, without aids, without cheating. Let’s call it cheating. Cheating is making

00:53:05.88
Lukas
things easier on the mountain.

00:53:09.26
Lukas
But this is not the reality for most of the people who go to the mountains. And for most of them, dying in the mountains is not an option and it’s not part of the game.

00:53:21.10
Uphill Athlete
Mm hmm.

00:53:22.66
Lukas
They want to go there to enjoy the mountain, nature, freedom, in their style, they choose. So obviously, for us as a guiding company,

00:53:34.34
Lukas
It is not an option that our clients die because we are not using all the safety and all the cheating tools that exist. We come to Oxygen. Yes, we have an obligation to use Oxygen on guided expeditions because Oxygen is the number one factor why people would survive in this extreme environment, everyone, including professional athletes, including people like Reinhold Messner, would come to a certain point where they would die up there without oxygen. It is an international medical consensus in in science that this extreme hypoxic environment will cause damage on your brain, on other organs, if you stay there for too long time.

00:54:33.19
Lukas
There’s only one way to avoid this, and that’s using bottled oxygen. You can say oxygen is cheating, yes, because it makes the mountain much lower.

00:54:43.77
Lukas
but it feels much lower for your body. It’s much easier. But it’s still probably the same experience that a climber has.

00:54:54.44
Uphill Athlete
Yeah.

00:54:55.29
Lukas
The same enjoyment, the same view from the summit. And within their possibilities, maybe the same amount of effort they have to put in to reach the summit.

00:55:08.42
Lukas
It’s just a different style of climbing, but it stays the same mountain to climb. And that’s what you said. I like this. It’s the freedom of the mountains and everyone can choose ah his or her style to climb a mountain.

00:55:21.66
Lukas
And I think this is so important and we need tolerance against other people who choose a different style as long as I do not harm other people or bring them into danger. And what we can see as a guiding company with a lot of infrastructure on Everest, with a lot of support stuff, guides and oxygen on Everest, we have to provide our resources to people who climb in a pure style.

00:55:31.34
Uphill Athlete
Sure.

00:55:48.61
Lukas
every year. We see people dying up there in the Pew style every year. ah So if people are now criticizing us that using something like xenon would be dangerous, would put our people at risk, I have to tell them, this our climbers will never be the problem on Everest. Our climbers that are always climbing with oxygen, with a guide, with experience, with training program, with good equipment, ah with safety backups,

00:56:23.62
Lukas
they will never be the problem on Everest. People that are inexperienced, people that are taking shortcuts, people that are climbing without oxygen, these are the people that become the problem on Everest every year.

00:56:37.04
Lukas
So now we saw this statement from the UIAA that was recently released questioning if using xenon as acclimatization could be dangerous, or at least at and I would say they state that it is dangerous. And what I’m missing here is what they are not saying that our climbers that are using xenon, they will climb with oxygen. They are always safe. Nobody will die up there.

00:57:05.95
Lukas
But every year people climb, people die climbing this mountain without oxygen every year. So if there’s a warning about a very dangerous style of climbing Mount Everest, it must be the warning of climbing without oxygen. And I know it may sound hard, but we need, I think we need a shift of of paradigm here, especially in Europe and German speaking countries.

00:57:33.84
Lukas
this idea or almost an ideology of climbing without oxygen is the only true way of climbing an 8,000 meter peak. It’s just, in my opinion, it’s just wrong. It is one way to climb this mountain, but not the only one.

00:57:49.95
Uphill Athlete
Yeah. Years ago, when I was probably about 30, I used to work as an avalanche forecaster for as a mountain you know was in my role of ah a mountain guide for a heli ski operation. And part of our outreach that we did was to the snowmobiling community, the ski-do community, right? And of course we were heli skiing, so obviously people would say that there’s something wrong with that probably.

00:58:19.80
Uphill Athlete
But for me as an alpinist and as a mountain guy, like these, these sled heads, as we call them, they were, they were like, you know, they were culturally very different than us, right? Like they showed up at the parking lot, usually really late. They, were definitely not, you know, what we considered athletic or any of these things. So I went out.

00:58:46.19
Uphill Athlete
and did like a workshop, avalanche awareness kind of safety workshop with this group of about 12 people. And at the end, they wanted to ride up onto this ridge. And this is an area where riding is allowed and there’s these old mining roads. And we went up, we rode the sleds up onto this peak and it was sunset and everybody just shut off their machines. And they were just sitting there watching this one guy who was like, you know,

00:59:15.69
Uphill Athlete
hundred kilos, really big guy, ah you know, very much culturally different than I am, very politically, every way, right? And he just looked at me and he’s like, God, that’s beautiful. And that really changed my perspective.

00:59:32.90
Uphill Athlete
I showed up that day ready to just not like these guys right because they were different than me and it had different beliefs and different came from different culture and stuff. And what they most appreciated about the whole day was sitting there at the top of that mountain watching the sun go down. And they just you’re looking out over this incredible wilderness area and it was all about the awe of the moment and seeing this incredible sunset and just being out in the winter environment. And it was like, I’m way more like these people than I ever thought, you know? And I think that this is sort of a similar thing. What I think we have to acknowledge is that, you know, I can go climb Alpine style. Not that I do very much of that, certainly not the Himalaya anymore, but, you know, I could also appreciate people who go and climb Everest.

01:00:27.34
Uphill Athlete
and use the tools at their disposal to make the experience as rich and rewarding and also as safe as they want it to become. And then they can dial that all the way down to, yeah know and you know, our friend Jost Koba, who who was recently on Everest West Ridge in winter by himself.

01:00:48.81
Uphill Athlete
I mean, yeah, that’s the opposite. Like you could dial all the way to that and hats off like to him and that can coexist, right? Like I think that both things can, we’re not going to do, Yoast isn’t going to be able to go and find that level of adventure on the South Col route in May, of course not, but it’s still available.

01:01:06.73
Uphill Athlete
It just has to change the dial, the knobs a little bit and make some adjustments.

01:01:09.43
Lukas
Hmm.

01:01:11.01
Uphill Athlete
So I agree that we could all use a little more understanding and compassion, in a sense, for one another, for our differences. I think that a lot of people will say things like, EPO is also natural. It’s produced by our body to promote the creation of red blood cells. And xenon is in the air. But that doesn’t mean it’s not doping. I think at this point it gets like so down in the weeds that you know, it starts to get a little bit the best answer to this is, that’s great and you don’t have to use it.

01:01:55.38
Lukas
Exactly. Exactly. 100% of the week from that, yeah.

01:02:01.38
Uphill Athlete
You know, you’ve mentioned that a number of times, and I mean, it actually stands out that Fürtenbach Adventures has a remarkable safety record on on big mountains. And we know that there are unknowns with xenon, right? Like, you know, you’ve said you’ve used it on your, like, you took it, that took this process like you did with the normal baric hypoxic tents. How do you manage particularly this season coming up, how do you manage the the unknowns? I mean, there’s different kinds of risks, right? And then there’s also like the unknown risks. There’s the things that could go wrong that we don’t even know are things that could go wrong, right? Like, do you feel like you have a good handle on those? Or do you feel like there’s still some of those out there with this

01:02:59.97
Uphill Athlete
therapy potentially and how do you how do you manage that?

01:03:04.74
Lukas
So I would say, that there’s you’re right, saying that there’s still a lot that we don’t know, especially with xenon. But I would say we know enough to run this first xenon-supported trip with these four where British climbers that are, by the way, all very experienced mountaineers, very fit athletes as well.

01:03:27.46
Lukas
We know enough that we are confident to run this seven-day trip with them that without having more risk than with any other client or team we have. So we have seven teams on Everest this year, three on the on the north side and four on the south side on different schedules and different itineraries.

01:03:54.51
Lukas
I would say this one Xenon supported trip in seven days has not definitely not more risk. I would say even less risk than any of the other teams and especially than any of the other climbers of the mountain for different reasons. One reason is because they spend so little time on the mountain. So in risk management it’s a lot about exposure time. The exposure time is very very little compared to all other climbers among Everest. The other thing is we have a double safety network for this first trip because of course I’m aware that the whole world will be watching us and waiting for something to happen for an accident. So we make extra footage that nothing can happen.

01:04:46.39
Lukas
Yeah, at the end, I know our operation. I built this operation. So I know yeah how it works.

01:04:51.90
Uphill Athlete
Yeah, you built a system.

01:04:55.71
Lukas
And I’m so confident that it works perfectly safe. I never gave a guarantee that the seven days will work out. That’s a plan seven days, if it’s eight or nine days at the end.

01:05:08.06
Lukas
There are so many factors that we can control a flight weather for the helicopter. Even for the plane from the UK, it can be delayed. There are so many things that can be delayed with the rope fixing in the Kumbu Icefall.

01:05:21.42
Lukas
So yes, it can be longer than seven days, but it it will not involve more risk for the climbers than any other expedition that we run.

01:05:30.17
Uphill Athlete
And I think one of the one of the nuances that I think is lost in some of this debate at times is that you’re not, you’re changing one variable of many, right?

01:05:43.61
Lukas
Yeah.

01:05:43.43
Uphill Athlete
You’re not changing all the, it’s not like you’re throwing out everything else and just doing, oh, like, let’s just do this through, you know, intensive xenon program and nothing else. Then we’re going to go up there in seven days.

01:05:54.47
Uphill Athlete
No, you have, all these other things and you’re adding one additional thing. And you’re also probably pretty confident that if you remove that thing that these four guys have a good chance of pulling this off in a short timeframe too.

01:06:07.45
Uphill Athlete
This may just give you that that extra, extra boost. Am I wrong?

01:06:13.77
Lukas
you are absolutely right and thank you for for bringing this point because you’re actually the first one who understands that these people are still climbing in the same style as everyone else with the same support with oxygen. And they are pre-acclimatizing with different acclimatization systems. And it’s just one component that we change. And you are absolutely right. I’m also confident that they could do possibly the same seven days, even without Xenon or even without the hypoxic and intermittent hypoxic training. I’m not confident

01:06:51.68
Lukas
that they could do it without any of them. But the combination makes it not not only possible, but even safe.

01:06:54.11
Uphill Athlete
Right. Of course. Yeah.

01:07:00.37
Uphill Athlete
What do you say about the criticisms, and this isn’t necessarily limited to Xenon, but just around the commercialization of Everest. And, you know, of course there was a lot of publicity when there was this photo a few years ago of all the people on the on the ridge going up from the South called where the Hillary step used to be and so on. How does Furtenbach adventures fit into that and how do you see your role in this?

01:07:29.71
Lukas
So overcrowding on Everest’s south side is a problem on certain days in the season. Or let’s say it can be a problem on certain days in the season if we have a very limited amount of possible summit days.

01:07:43.30
Uphill Athlete
Yep.

01:07:45.50
Lukas
We had this situation in 2019 when this picture was taken from a shepherd from NIMS.

01:07:53.22
Lukas
But we had other seasons in the years after, in 22 I think it was, a consecutive period of almost 30 possible summit days.

01:08:07.03
Uphill Athlete
Wow.

01:08:07.51
Lukas
So almost the whole season you could summit every single day.

01:08:09.69
Uphill Athlete
Incredible.

01:08:11.49
Lukas
We had no problems with people with traffic jams on the Southeast Bridge, nothing at all. But yeah, it can be a problem and of course something has to be done about it.

01:08:22.69
Lukas
I would say that China was leading the way in in this regard when they implemented a system where they gave full responsibility of the experience and the performance level of the clients to the operator.

01:08:39.14
Lukas
And with all the consequences, like when you bring people that are not enough prepared or experienced to climb Everest from the north side in Tibet, and it resides in an accident, you will never run an expedition in Tibet again. That’s simple. And you as a guide and a guiding company take full responsibility for all consequences.

01:09:04.08
Lukas
that prevented the companies that cannot guarantee for the quality of their clients.

01:09:13.04
Lukas
If Nepal would follow this path, there would be no more problem on Everest.

01:09:19.37
Lukas
It also involves minimum safety standards, safety protocols for all operators.

01:09:28.73
Lukas
If this is coming by law from the government, no more problems on Everest. But I understand that Nepal is in a different position than China.

01:09:34.84
Uphill Athlete
Yeah.

01:09:39.59
Lukas
Nepal needs the income from Everest tourism and it’s not that easy to implement these rules and limit climbers as China is doing. that The limitation of permits on the north side in China is 200 or 150.

01:09:54.73
Lukas
It changes every year in a little bit but compared to the unlimited permits on the south side. It makes a huge difference. You have something between 450 and 480 permits for foreigners.

01:10:08.46
Lukas
And then twice this amount of people climbing us support stuff that makes 1,200, 1,300 people in one season.

01:10:13.23
Uphill Athlete
Yeah.

01:10:16.03
Lukas
And the actual climbing season within this two-month spring is only two or three weeks. So 1,300 people in three weeks, that’s a lot.

01:10:26.26
Uphill Athlete
yeah

01:10:27.43
Lukas
we could think about different ways like going back to the autumn season did yeah after the monsoon with climate change this season is becoming more and more attractive we still need more weather data from but when you look at the last 10 year period you can see that the autumn climbing season of Everest would become better in terms of wind and temperatures above 8000 meters and that was always the limiting factor for for the autumn season on Everest.

01:10:58.58
Uphill Athlete
Yeah, autumn is certainly colder than spring. I can personally attest to that.

01:11:03.69
Lukas
Yeah.

01:11:05.28
Uphill Athlete
Yeah, there’s a couple things that come to mind. One is I think I’ve done 12 expeditions in Nepal and in the spring and have never seen 30 days of good weather, so that is exceptional. But the other thing I think that has

01:11:22.12
Uphill Athlete
always been kind of a part of my attraction to lightweight expeditions and small climbing teams is that, you know, our impact on the mountain is lower, right? So I think that part of the potential benefit of these combinations of these therapies, you know, for lack of a better word, I’m just calling these all therapies, maybe they’re interventions. I don’t know the exact precise best term here.

01:11:52.63
Uphill Athlete
Is that people spend less time on the mountain and therefore there’s less overcrowding, right? Like if all of a sudden it shifts and in 10 years from now or five years from now, everyone is you know that’s going to climb Everest with a mountain guide is doing a seven to 14 day expedition, that significantly reduces the strain on that environment, right? Like in in every way, there’s just going to be fewer human days above base camp. There’s no question about that. In some ways, some of these innovations could have a very net positive effect on the overcrowding environmental impacts of climbing in these fragile environments.

01:12:33.22
Lukas
yes absolutely true

01:12:38.81
Uphill Athlete
One of the things that you have been willing to do for 20 years now is innovate and to frankly, like deal with a lot of criticism and criticism, not just from random people, like let’s admit, like this, our community is small.

01:12:57.44
Lukas
Yes, absolutely true.

01:13:06.16
Uphill Athlete
Like we all kind of know each other, right? I mean, and even, even historically, like, you know, your grandfather was a famous mountaineer, right? You’ve been part of this community, like, from arguably before you’re even born. And then you’re getting these criticisms from people who are part of our community. And yet you kind of, I don’t know what the right word is, but you push through Is that, is that a personal drive of yours?

01:13:46.07
Uphill Athlete
Is it a conviction or a commitment to client client safety? Are you thinking about, like are you curious about scientifically how all of this works? What goes into that? It’s a a lot of people simply would not put themselves out there the way you, they may even have all the ideas and have all the abilities to make the changes that you’ve made over the years. And they just wouldn’t, because they’re just like, I don’t want to be a target for all these attacks. and deal with all of this. I mean, that’s it’s a good reason to not do something like that, but yet you you do and have persisted and you continue to persist. What is that what is your thinking and around that?

01:14:29.34
Lukas
I think it’s a combination of all the motivations that you mentioned. Definitely, I’m burning for this. I really wanted to make high altitude, guided high altitude climbing. It’s a big difference. It’s important sort to say this. Guided high altitude climbing, commercial Everest climbing.

01:14:56.40
Lukas
I want to make it safer because I truly believe that you could avoid most of the people dying on 8,000 meter peaks today in guided expeditions.

01:15:07.40
Uphill Athlete
Yeah.

01:15:08.83
Lukas
And what I truly believe is that it’s really time for, as I said before, for a shift in the paradigm. Like this ideology of climbing without Oxygen is the only true and and real and legit way to do it. I think it’s a very traditional way of thinking and it’s just

01:15:44.08
Lukas
not the the best way forward. There’s no other sport, or at least I’m not aware of any other sport, where the acceptance of ah individual risk to die is so high as a mountaineering. And it’s not even not only accepted, it’s even glorified. Like dying in the mountain, you become a hero. There’s no other sport in the world.

01:16:09.68
Lukas
where this is accepted. And I think it’s just outdated. We need to change our thinking. And I think the Americans, people from UK, they are much further ahead of us. We, in old Europe, in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, it’s much of the German-speaking countries. Where capitalism started, we still have a very traditional thinking.

01:16:35.31
Lukas
And I think it’s time to change this. And this is one big part of what that drives me because I see people dying in the mountains every year because they do not follow it’s the simplest safety rules and and do not, like friends of mine died and I don’t, I stopped counting in the last 20 years how many people died without oxygen.

01:16:58.72
Uphill Athlete
yeah

01:17:01.24
Lukas
The last one was one of our lead guides. Louis Schitzinger, who died on Kanchen Sanger climbing and trying to ski down his 12,000-8,000-meter peaks without oxygen. He was such a great and experienced guide. He died because he also followed this idea that it is a great achievement to climb all 14,000-8,000-meter peaks without oxygen. And it is. It is a great achievement. It is outstanding if you can do this.

01:17:33.29
Lukas
But you can do this for yourself. But you can’t ask someone else to do it only this way. Otherwise, I wouldn’t count it. Otherwise, your summit only counts if it’s done without oxygen. Because so many, especially young climbers, follow this ideology. And their achievements only are important to the community if it’s done in this pure style.

01:17:59.47
Lukas
Let’s look at this. How many people die? How many young, talented climbers die? And then if they die, it’s almost how could this happen? Why is young, talented climber die? He died because he followed this idea of this pure style style of climbing. It’s the only way that counts, the only way that gives you respect and credibility in the community. And I don’t like this idea. Too many people die.

01:18:28.60
Uphill Athlete
Yeah, I can’t disagree with the statement that too many people die and I’m like you’ve lost count. So many thoughts. One is you know, I had a great discussion on one of my voice of the mountains episodes Will Gadd the Canadian climber and he had a way of putting out of like if someone has a different way of doing something and he had a specific example around climbing in the Canadian Rockies, ah there are some young kids and he, instead of calling them out for what they had done, he called them in. He brought them into the community and started to kind of mentor them and see their perspective, right? Like they were doing things, a certain and I think that you mentioned this paradigm needs to change

01:19:18.89
Uphill Athlete
I would say, make a slight change. And I would say that that we just need to be more expansive in our definition.

01:19:26.89
Lukas
Mm hmm.

01:19:26.74
Uphill Athlete
That they both can exist.

01:19:29.58
Lukas
Yeah.

01:19:29.45
Uphill Athlete
That people can go and they can climb you know in a very pure style. And you know like I would you know not trade my experiences that I had alone on K7, for example, for anything in the world.

01:19:34.99
Lukas
Yeah.

01:19:45.31
Uphill Athlete
That was such an incredible, group of experience and it’s such an incredible time of growth and in my life. And, you know, the the athletes that I’m coaching right now that are going to Everest, some of whom are climbing with Furtenbach, they’re also going to have incredible, and they’re the mountains enrich all of us. And we shouldn’t say that, you know, one is an acceptable means of enrichment and one is an unacceptable. We’re all climbers. We’re all

01:20:16.76
Uphill Athlete
out in the mountains because we love being in the mountains. Some people want to and are able to accept more risk. And they should do that, honestly. Like this is one of the things that I had to kind of come to terms with as I got older and I got really, really sick of my friends dying as I and had this really strong attachment right to to my friends not dying. Sounds funny, right? That seems like a pretty natural thing. And after, I don’t know how many times, it was just crushing me.

01:20:48.77
Uphill Athlete
It was just crushing me every time I got one of those phone calls. And I finally kind of came to this realization like that they had to do them. They had to go do their thing, what they wanted to do, and I couldn’t control it.

01:20:58.08
Lukas
Mm.

01:21:02.47
Uphill Athlete
And they weren’t doing it to, I don’t know, seek my approval or something like that. They had their own personal reasons for doing that, and they wanted to do that. There may be consequences to that that would lead to you know them losing their lives.

01:21:17.43
Uphill Athlete
And that wasn’t my responsibility. And as soon as I was able to kind of do that and really integrate that, it made it much easier for me in the ensuing losses.

01:21:26.06
Lukas
Mm.

01:21:27.47
Uphill Athlete
I mean, it never gets really easy, right? But it got me to the point where I was like, that climber is out there doing what they wanted to do. That was their vision. That’s so cool.

01:21:39.39
Uphill Athlete
I’m happy for them that they lived their vision. I’m not happy that they died. And I don’t think there’s anything about the platitude that they died doing what they love. They don’t want to be dead. Like that’s ridiculous, but they were at least living according to their own values and allowing everyone to have that right. And that goes both ways. You can’t have that just your way, right? Like if you’re going to accept that for yourself and your friends, you have to accept that for others too.

01:22:08.96
Lukas
Yeah, I like that. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a coexistence, that’s the key word.

01:22:16.98
Uphill Athlete
Oh, it’s big enough. I mean, people will disagree with this, but I think it’s big enough for all of us.

01:22:25.38
Uphill Athlete
So I think that’s really interesting. I think that, as a mountain guide.

01:22:36.60
Uphill Athlete
We share one final story as ah that as my youth as a mountain guide. When I was in my late twenties, I went and I was working in the Teton Mountains as a mountain guide. And the Tetons in the States are at that time, and this was boy, this was like 2000, 99, 2000, somewhere in there. It’s always been, it was kind of the birthplace of American guiding, which happened completely isolated from the rest of mountain guiding in in the Alps and also in Canada. So it grew its own tradition. And I was in the heat of my like purest era, right? I was in my late 20s. I had been an IFMGA mountain guide for a few years. I was one of the first to do that in the US. So I was kind of an anomaly and you know I had all this

01:23:26.55
Uphill Athlete
official training and I’ve done all these exams, right? And then I come in here into this like crucial bastion of climbing. And we had one of our team meeting, like our all guides meetings in the middle of the summer. And this one guy who I really respected. I mean, he’d been on Alpine style attempts of the, you know, Ru Paul face, which is, you know, is very special place to me on Nanga Parbat, like way back, like in the eighties and stuff. And incredible climber just was like, had lived his whole life in the mountains

01:23:55.82
Uphill Athlete
older at this point, he was probably like in the sixties and he had like bad knees and he had like the ski poles and he was like, you could tell he was in pain, like just being out there. And he got up and he’s like I’m out there when I’m guiding and I have this in my backpack because this, and all these other things could happen. And my responsibility professionally is to make sure my clients are safe.

01:24:26.09
Uphill Athlete
Right. And then I see this guy house running around with this little backpack and his tennis shoes, and he can’t do anything to help his clients if something goes wrong because he has like, you know, 10 meters of rope and one peaton and know whatever, you know, whatever it was. At first I was like upset, right? Like felt like I was being attacked, but then,

01:24:54.18
Uphill Athlete
I just, I just sat on my hands and I didn’t say anything and I let the conversation around me develop and I was listening to the different people talking and I was like, you know what, he’s right. Like, you know, my responsibility is to, when I’m working as a mountain guide, is to ensure the safety of the people that have hired me to ensure their safety. That’s the first, and get them to the top of the mountain if that’s something we can do within those parameters of safety.

01:25:22.17
Uphill Athlete
And it completely changed how I approached mountain guiding. Like I never went anywhere without, you know, backups to the backup after that. I think it’s served me really well. And it meant oftentimes that my pack was heavier and that my days were harder and all of those things. And one of the things that I really appreciate about you, lukas, is that, you know, your backpack, both actually, but also like just emotionally has been much heavier than most. And I think it’s because you’ve taken on the work of really doing everything you can in the name of your clientele and the climbers that sign up for you and take their trust that they place in you

01:26:12.96
Uphill Athlete
for their safety more seriously than most. And I think that’s really commendable and you’ve been a real pioneer in that way. And I hope that over time, you start to get to hear that more and less of like, I don’t know, you’re destroying mountaineering or I don’t know, whatever these these you know internet trolls are are saying about you because

01:26:35.47
Lukas
Right.

01:26:37.31
Uphill Athlete
everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, of course, but at the end of the day, like you’re out there innovating for the safety of your teams and your fellow mountain guides as well. And you’re sure posts that work with you as well. And you have the track record to prove it. And I can only hope that you’re successful with this next evolution.

01:27:02.04
Uphill Athlete
I just really hope that this season goes well and that everybody comes back and has another data point to find, to make that next change, that next little adjustment in the dial that leads to that safety net. Cause that really is what it is. It’s a safety system that you’ve built. So thank you for coming on and thank you for sharing your thoughts.

01:27:38.64
Lukas
Thank you very much, Steve. Yeah, it was a pleasure talking about all this stuff.

01:27:43.36
Uphill Athlete
Yeah.

01:27:44.18
Lukas
And yeah, it was the first time that someone with expertise and someone really looking at it was talking about the whole, especially the Xenon stuff.

01:27:56.14
Lukas
There was so much misinformation in the last two weeks, and it was a relief to talk to someone who was prepared about this topic. Thank you very much, guys.

01:28:05.45
Uphill Athlete
Yeah, you’re welcome. Well, it’s it’s very interesting. I think there’s a lot of, you know, I’ll be very interested to talk to you when you get back from this trip and debrief how it went and see what we can all learn because the mountains is big enough are big enough for all of us and we all can help each other. So thanks for doing that work. And how can people find you and follow you and follow your expeditions this spring and that that particularly the xenon, I don’t know. You guys have a name? Are you the xenon expedition now? Are you the seven-day expedition?

01:28:41.00
Lukas
Yeah, so for now, we call it the seven-day expedition. The Xenon treatment will be available as an add-on for all the others. You can find and follow our expeditions on Instagram, FurtenbachAdventures, or at the website, FurtenbachAdventures.com.

01:28:57.07
Uphill Athlete
Great. Thanks very much for your time. We’ll talk to you when you get back.

01:29:01.55
Lukas
Thank you very much.