55-year-old Kami Rita Sherpa breaks his own record: climbing Mount Everest 31 times

Kami Rita Sherpa has broken his own record for climbing to the summit of Mount Everest, reaching the peak for the 31st time on Tuesday. Now 55, Kami Rita first climbed to the top of the world’s highest mountain in 1994, when he was 24 years old.

Kami Rita has climbed Everest nearly every year since the 1990s, sometimes completing two climbs in one climbing season. In 2019, for instance, he reached the summit twice in one week.

Climbing for miles and miles above sea level

A legendary climber, Kami Rita has trekked to many of the world’s highest peaks. But considering only his Everest summits all together, he has climbed nearly 90,000 feet above sea level on the famous peak: 89,992 feet, using the latest assessment of Everest’s height.

That’s about 17 miles above sea level — equivalent to Earth’s stratosphere.

Will anyone catch Kami Rita?

Right now, the closest competitor to Kami Rita’s Guinness World Record for most ascents of Everest is Pasang Dawa Sherpa, a fellow Nepali guide who recently reached the top of Everest for the 29th time. Known as Pa Dawa, he completed his first Everest summit four years after Kami Rita first reached the height — but has finished the climb twice in a single season multiple times.

A new feat was recorded this season, when Tashi Gyalzen Sherpa, 29, reached the summit of Everest four times in just 15 days, as The Himalayan Times reports. He has now reached the peak eight times.

Another emerging rival is Nima Rinji Sherpa, who last year became the youngest person to summit the highest 14 peaks in the world, at 18 years old. Nima Rinji recently wrote on Instagram about his ambitions to fill what he called “a lot of space left in the mountaineering history books,” mentioning projects such as climbing an 8,000-meter peak in winter without a fixed rope, supplementary oxygen and other aids.

Record is broken during an uncertain climbing season

Kami Rita reached Everest’s summit around 4 a.m. local time on Tuesday, while leading a team for Seven Summit Treks, according to the expedition agency.

“He is not just a national climbing hero, but a global symbol of Everest itself,” the agency said as it announced the feat. “Wishing him a safe descent back to base camp, and looking forward to welcoming him in Kathmandu.”

New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepali Sherpa Tenzing Norgay were the first climbing team to summit Everest, known in Nepali as Sagarmatha. They completed their climb in May 1953.

But in recent years, Everest has sometimes seen high-altitude traffic jams as hundreds of mountaineers attempt to reach the summit on a compressed schedule after concerns such as extreme winds shortened the climbing season.

As The Kathmandu Post reported in mid-May, “Nepal’s Department of Tourism has issued permits to 456 foreign climbers, just shy of the record 479 granted in 2023. When factoring in Nepali guides, often assigned at a one-to-one ratio, more than 1,000 people may try to reach the top.”