Innovation or dangerous: Xenon gas use to scale Mount Everest faster stirs debate
A new high-altitude climbing strategy is making headlines and stirring serious controversy in the mountaineering world.
Last week, four British climbers reached the summit of Mount Everest less than five days after leaving London. The group's organizer, mountain guide Lukas Furtenbach, told The Associated Press that they had inhaled xenon gas during a pre-expedition treatment in Germany.
The gas, along with training in hypoxic tents and use of supplemental oxygen, allowed them to bypass the usual multi-week acclimatization process required for most climbers attempting the 29,000-foot peak.
"This showed that it can work," Furtenbach told The NY Times, adding that his company plans to offer two-week Everest expeditions beginning next year. "This can be the future of commercially guided mountaineering."
But others say it could put lives at risk and damage the mountain's future.
Chris Dare, a Canadian climber who summited Everest in 2019, told CBC News that this kind of shortcut could worsen already dangerous overcrowding conditions. "Making the mountain easier to summit will likely attract more climbers," he said, "exacerbating the already serious overcrowding problem." That year, 11 people died during the spring climbing season.
Dare also raised concerns about safety and scientific uncertainty around xenon, saying "it just seems very, very risky at this onset, right at the beginning." He warned that climbers using gas-assisted techniques might overestimate their preparedness and suffer from altitude sickness or worse. "You're not training the traditional way of being on the mountain for a month and a half, two months to acclimatize in the natural environment," he explained.
Xenon is a rare, odorless gas with medical applications, including use as an anesthetic and to diagnose lung conditions. Some researchers believe it can boost red blood cell production and oxygen-carrying capacity, mimicking high-altitude acclimatization. But experts remain skeptical of its use for mountaineering.
"There's no science to say that this works at high altitudes for climbers, and there's no science to say that it doesn't," Dr. Peter Hackett, a high-altitude researcher at the University of Colorado, told CBC News. "It's worth studying, but not because it could help people bag a summit faster."
Hackett emphasized that Furtenbach's team also used hypoxic tents and supplemental oxygen, both well-known acclimatization aids, making it misleading to credit xenon alone for the team's rapid ascent.
Dr. Rob Casserley, a British climber and physician who has summited Everest eight times, said he worries about the psychological risks of skipping the usual adaptation period. "You start putting in people who've just come cold turkey out of their normal environment," he told CBC News. "It will put them at great psychological risk of having some kind of meltdown."
The Nepalese government is now investigating the climb, Himal Gautam, director of Nepal's tourism department, told The New York Times. "Using xenon is against climbing ethics."
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