Greatest Mountaineers of All Time: Pioneers Who Shaped Climbing

The greatest mountaineers of all time include Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders without bottled oxygen; Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who first summited Everest in 1953; Poland’s Jerzy Kukuczka; and modern record-setters such as Nirmal Purja and Kristin Harila. Greatness in climbing rewards bold firsts, technical difficulty, and sound judgment at extreme altitude.

Everest has killed more than 300 climbers since 1922, and yet the mountain has never been short of volunteers. What separates the names below from the thousands who have tried is not just that they reached a summit. It is what they were willing to risk to get there, and how they got back down.

The standard for greatness in mountaineering

There is no federation that hands out rankings in this sport. Climbers earn their reputation through a mix of achievements that the wider climbing community weighs against one another:

• First ascents of major peaks or difficult new routes
• Completing all 14 eight-thousanders (peaks above 8000 m)
• Climbing without supplemental oxygen at extreme altitude
• Alpinism in the hardest conditions: winter, solo, or fast-and-light style
• Longevity, safety record, and lasting influence on the sport

Raw summit counts matter, but the manner of the climb matters just as much. A new route opened in winter without oxygen carries more weight than a guided ascent on fixed ropes.

The icons of the sport

Edmund Hillary (New Zealand) and Tenzing Norgay (Nepal) hold mountaineering’s most famous date: 29 May 1953, the first verified ascent of Everest. Hillary spent much of the rest of his life building schools and hospitals for Sherpa communities in the Khumbu region. Norgay founded a mountaineering institute and became, for a generation of Nepali climbers, proof of what was possible.

Reinhold Messner (Italy) is the name every serious debate about “greatest ever” starts with. In 1986 he became the first person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders, and he did every one of them without bottled oxygen, including Everest in 1978 (the first oxygen-free ascent) and again solo in 1980. He argued, successfully, that alpine style was the more honest way to climb a mountain, and that argument reshaped the sport.

Jerzy Kukuczka (Poland) finished the same 14 peaks a year after Messner, in 1987, but the manner mattered as much as the order. Kukuczka opened new routes on ten of them and climbed several in winter, when temperatures and storms turn routine climbs lethal. Plenty of climbers who rank Messner first still call Kukuczka’s list the harder one. He died on Lhotse’s South Face in 1989.

George Mallory (UK) disappeared on Everest in 1924, high enough on the mountain that nobody has ever ruled out that he reached the top before he died. His body was found in 1999; his camera never was. The uncertainty is now part of the mountain’s mythology, along with his answer when asked why he wanted to climb it: “Because it’s there.”

Junko Tabei (Japan) summited Everest in 1975, the first woman to do so, then went on to complete the Seven Summits, the first woman to manage that too. She had learned to climb at a time when Japanese mountaineering clubs mostly did not accept female members, so she started her own.

Alex Honnold (USA) free-soloed El Capitan’s Freerider route in 2017, roped to nothing, a climb documented in “Free Solo,” which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. His discipline is rock climbing rather than high-altitude mountaineering, but few feats in any branch of the sport carry the same margin between success and death.

Nirmal Purja (Nepal) compressed a project that used to take mountaineers the better part of a decade into under seven months. His 2019 sprint through all 14 eight-thousanders, chronicled in the Netflix film “14 Peaks,” rewrote assumptions about acclimatization, logistics, and how fast the human body can be pushed at altitude.

Key achievements at a glance

Mountaineer	Nationality	Notable achievement	Year
Hillary and Norgay	NZ / Nepal	First ascent of Everest	1953
Reinhold Messner	Italy	All 14 eight-thousanders, oxygen-free	1986
Jerzy Kukuczka	Poland	All 14 eight-thousanders, mostly new routes	1987
Junko Tabei	Japan	First woman to summit Everest	1975
Alex Honnold	USA	Free solo of El Capitan’s Freerider	2017
Nirmal Purja	Nepal	All 14 eight-thousanders in under 7 months	2019

Alpine style versus expedition style

Expedition style means fixed ropes, multiple camps, supplemental oxygen, and large support teams working in relay. Alpine style strips that down to one push, minimal gear, and no fixed lines. Messner spent his career arguing that alpine style was the purer form of the sport. Climbers such as Ueli Steck and Marc-André Leclerc built their reputations proving it could work on terrain that expedition teams needed weeks to prepare — and both died pursuing it, a reminder of how thin the margins are.

The Sherpa contribution

No account of mountaineering greatness holds together without the Sherpa community. For more than a century, Sherpa climbers have fixed the ropes, carried the loads, and made the routes safe enough for the expeditions that get the headlines. Ang Rita Sherpa, who died in 2020, was the first to reach Everest’s summit ten times without oxygen. Today the community holds the sport’s most durable records, from most ascents of Everest to the fastest 14-peak campaigns.

Mountaineering’s record-setters in 2024-2026

The modern era belongs largely to Nepali guides. On 17 May 2026, Kami Rita Sherpa reached the summit of Everest for the 32nd time at age 56, extending the record for most ascents he has held since 2018. His closest rival, Pasang Dawa Sherpa, stands on 31.

The same morning, Lhakpa Sherpa summited Everest for an 11th time — the most by any woman — a record she had already been building through the Netflix documentary “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa.” On the 8000-metre speed front, the 2023 record of Kristin Harila and Tenjen “Lama” Sherpa, who climbed all 14 eight-thousanders in 92 days, still stood as of mid-2026. Tenjen was killed in an avalanche on Shishapangma in October 2023, a stark reminder that the sport’s greatest achievements are won at genuine risk.

The verdict

There is no single greatest mountaineer, because the sport measures greatness on several axes at once — the historic first, the technical route, the oxygen-free ascent, the speed campaign, the sheer number of returns. Messner remains the consensus pick for reshaping what climbing could be, while Hillary and Norgay own its most iconic moment. But the record book is being rewritten in real time, and the names carrying it forward in 2026 prove that mountaineering’s frontier keeps moving upward.