Mountains have drawn kings, gold miners, schoolteachers, scientists and pilots, and the documented stories are often stranger than the legends. Here are the peaks behind the names, climbers the headlines missed, expeditions that went right and wrong, and the gear that changed what was possible, from a 5,300-year-old shoe to an ice axe that stopped a fall on K2. Where a claim is still disputed, the story says so.
Every tile in a Mountains and Mountaineering game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Peaks
nine stories
1The summit that sits closest to the stars
On the tile: Chimborazo
Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, but its summit is not the point on Earth farthest from the planet's center. That distinction belongs to Chimborazo, a volcano in Ecuador just one degree south of the Equator. Earth's constant rotation makes it bulge slightly at the Equator. Chimborazo's summit is just over 6,260 meters above sea level, far lower than Everest's, yet because it sits on that bulge, it is more than 2 kilometers farther from Earth's center. NOAA calls it the closest point on Earth to the stars.
Most great peaks carry names, but the world's second-highest mountain is best known by a surveyor's shorthand. In 1856 Thomas Montgomerie, then a lieutenant with the Survey of India, sighted it from Mount Haramukh, about 130 miles to the south. He gave it the symbol K2 because it was the second peak measured in the Karakoram Range. The mountain has other names, including Chogori, Qogir and Mount Godwin Austen, the last for H. H. Godwin Austen, a 19th-century English geographer. Yet the survey symbol is the name that stuck.
In September 1908, American climber Annie Smith Peck reached the lower, north summit of Huascarán in Peru. Nobody knew the mountain's true height, and newspaper estimates ran from 23,000 to 26,000 feet. Peck suggested about 24,000, which would beat Fanny Bullock Workman's women's altitude record of about 23,260 feet, set on Pinnacle Peak in 1906. Workman would not lose her record to an estimate. In 1909 she hired French surveyors to triangulate Huascarán, and they put Peck's summit at 21,812 feet. Workman's record stood until 1934.
Custom barred women from the upper slopes of Mount Fuji, a sacred mountain, and guards and checkpoints enforced the ban. Fuji devotees built fujizuka, small climbable replicas of the mountain, where women, among others, could make the ascent symbolically. In late October 1832, a 24-year-old pilgrim named Tatsu Takayama climbed the real one, her hair cut short and dressed in men's clothes, led through thick snow by a 68-year-old Fuji-ko priest. She became the first woman known to reach the summit. Japan's government lifted the ban on women at sacred mountains in 1872.
5Mainland Australia's summit, named for a hero of Saratoga
On the tile: Kosciuszko1840
In March 1840, Polish-born explorer Paul Strzelecki stood on a peak in the Australian Alps when his instruments showed a higher summit several kilometers away. His companion, grazier James Macarthur, went back to camp. Strzelecki went on alone and returned after dark, bruised from falls. He named the peak for his countryman Tadeusz Kościuszko, who had devised the defenses that helped defeat the British at Saratoga in 1777 and designed the fortifications at West Point. For more than a century people debated whether Strzelecki had really climbed neighboring Mount Townsend instead. Consensus now sides with him.
When Army explorer Zebulon Pike first spotted the Colorado peak in November 1806, its distance fooled him, and more than once he set out expecting to climb it that day. Instead, after four days of hard travel, Pike and three companions turned back, beaten by severe winter weather and lacking the clothing and equipment for it. The mountain took his name anyway. His field notebook, seized when Spanish authorities detained his party in 1807, was missing for more than a century. In the summer of 2026, 220 years after his attempt, it finally reached the summit, on display at the Pikes Peak Summit Visitor Center.
Mont Blanc has no fixed height. Its bare granite summit would stand about 4,792 meters above sea level, but a thick cap of ice and snow on top rises and falls with the weather, above all with the wind that sculpts it. Since 2001, surveyors from France's Haute-Savoie department have measured it regularly, usually every two years. They found 4,810.90 meters in 2007. In September 2023 a team of 22 measured 4,805.59 meters, 2.22 meters lower than in 2021. Chief surveyor Jean des Garets cautioned that it could well be much taller in two years.
8The weatherman who climbed Ben Nevis almost daily
On the tile: Ben Nevis1881
Before anyone would pay for a weather observatory on Ben Nevis, Britain's highest mountain, Clement Wragge showed it could work. Through the summer and early fall of 1881 he climbed it nearly every day, through storms and rain, a round trip of about 14 miles, to take summit readings, and again in 1882 with two assistants. His effort helped raise the money, and the observatory opened on October 17, 1883. Observers recorded the weather every hour, day and night. In winter, snow could bury the building until the roof tower was the only way in or out. It closed in 1904 for lack of money, not lack of work.
9A railway up a mountain, and a charter to the moon
On the tile: Mt. Washington1869
After a near-fatal hike to the summit of New Hampshire's Mount Washington, retired Chicago businessman Sylvester Marsh set out to build a railway up it. The state granted him a charter in 1859, and legend has it that lawmakers added permission to extend the line to the moon. The Civil War delayed work until 1866, and on July 3, 1869, the first train reached the top of the world's first mountain-climbing cog railway. A toothed wheel under the engine meshes with teeth on a center rail. On the steepest stretch, Jacob's Ladder, the grade reaches 37.4 percent.
1First on North America's summit, then a Coney Island legend
On the tile: Walter Harper1913
On June 7, 1913, Walter Harper became the first person to stand on the summit of North America's highest peak, known as Denali or Mount McKinley, ahead of Harry Karstens, Hudson Stuck and Robert Tatum. Harper, 20, was the son of a Koyukon Athabascan mother and spoke her language fluently. The next year the New York Times reported that at Coney Island he swung a 20-pound hammer so hard that he broke the strength-testing machine, then apologized. He died at 25 in the 1918 sinking of the Princess Sophia, on his way to train as a medical missionary.
In July 1871, six years after the Matterhorn's first ascent, Lucy Walker of Liverpool became the first woman to reach its summit. She was 35, climbed with her father, and wore a long flannel skirt, as a Victorian lady was expected to. It was also a race. Walker had heard that the American climber Meta Brevoort planned an attempt from Zermatt, so she quickly assembled her own party. Brevoort reached Zermatt a day after Walker's ascent and could only congratulate her in person. The English magazine Punch celebrated Walker's climb with a poem.
Annie Smith Peck taught Latin at Purdue University before she became a mountaineer. The sight of the Matterhorn on a trip in 1885 got her interested in climbing, and her own ascent of it in 1895 made her famous. She supported herself by lecturing, and in 1902 she helped found the American Alpine Club. In 1911, when she was past 60, she climbed Mount Coropuna in Peru and raised a "Votes for Women" pennant at the top. Her last climb, New Hampshire's Mount Madison, came when she was 82.
Tenzing Norgay was born Namgyal Wangdi, and even his birthplace is uncertain. He said it was Nepal's Khumbu region, near Everest, though some sources name Tibet. As a teenager he ran away to Darjeeling, India. His first expedition came in 1935, when Eric Shipton chose him, with no mountain experience, as a porter for an Everest reconnaissance. In the years that followed he took part in more Everest expeditions than any other climber. In 1952 he was sirdar, the organizer of porters, on both Swiss attempts. In 1953 he and Edmund Hillary reached the top.
Before Everest made him famous, Edmund Hillary kept bees. In 1938 he and his brother joined their father's beekeeping business in New Zealand. In 1960, while leading an expedition in the Everest region, he asked the Sherpa sirdar Urkien what he would most like for his children and his people. Urkien asked for a school in his village, Khumjung. In June 1961 Hillary built a two-room aluminum classroom building there, the first school in the Khumbu region. About 25 more schools followed, along with two hospitals, a dozen health clinics and an airstrip at Lukla.
Elizabeth Hawley, a former Fortune magazine researcher from Chicago, first visited Kathmandu in 1959. In her words, "I didn't plan to stay. I just didn't leave." Reporting for Reuters, she began covering expeditions, and from 1963 she met them before and after their climbs, often tracking down their leaders in her blue Volkswagen Beetle. Some joked that her interview was an expedition's "second summit." Her records of more than 20,000 ascents became the Himalayan Database, published by the American Alpine Club in 2004. Yet, she said, "I've never climbed a mountain."
The Nose of El Capitan was first climbed in 1958, after 47 days of climbing. Free climbing it, moving up with only hands and feet on the rock and using ropes just to catch falls, seemed out of reach. One crux was the Great Roof, about 2,000 feet up, a pitch no one had yet been able to free climb. Lynn Hill figured small fingers might be an advantage there, and she freed it. In September 1993, with Brooke Sandahl, she made the first free ascent of the whole route. A year later she free climbed it in 23 hours.
In 1873 the English travel writer Isabella Bird, who had a spinal condition and found that travel helped her health, set out to climb Colorado's 14,259-foot Longs Peak. Fewer than a handful of women had reached its top by then. Her guide was James Nugent, known as "Rocky Mountain Jim," a notorious desperado she grew especially fond of. The climb was no stroll. By her own account, Nugent dragged her up "like a bale of goods, by sheer force of muscle." She told the story in A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains.
In 1869, geologist Josiah Whitney's Yosemite guidebook called Half Dome probably the one prominent point there that "never has been, and never will be, trodden by human foot." George Anderson, a former sailor from Montrose, Scotland, proved him wrong. He drilled a hole in the granite, drove in a wooden pin and an iron eyebolt, stood on it and drilled the next. On October 12, 1875, he reached the top, then fixed a rope so visitors could follow. Snow tore the rope out in the winter of 1884, and the Sierra Club installed steel cables in 1919.
1A king's order, ladders and a peak called Inaccessible
On the tile: Mont Aiguille1492
King Charles VIII of France saw Mont Aiguille, then called Mont Inaccessible, where legend said angels guarded the cliffs. He ordered his chamberlain and military engineer, Antoine de Ville, to climb it. On June 26, 1492, de Ville and a small team, including the king's ladder-man, reached the top with ladders and ropes. Instead of angels they found a flowery meadow and chamois. They stayed several days, had Mass said in a hut they built and set up three crosses. Two more parties used their ladders that week, then no one is known to have climbed it until 1834.
2The reward for climbing Mont Blanc took 26 years to claim
On the tile: Saussure prize1786
On his first visit to Chamonix in 1760, a young Geneva scientist, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, looked up at Mont Blanc and resolved that he would climb it or be responsible for its being climbed. He offered prize money for the first ascent. It went unclaimed for more than 25 years. In 1786 a Chamonix doctor, Michel-Gabriel Paccard, and his porter, Jacques Balmat, reached the summit, and Paccard let Balmat collect the whole prize. A year later de Saussure made the climb himself. Britannica traces the birth of mountaineering as a modern sport to his challenge.
In April 1910, four Alaska gold miners with no technical climbing experience set out to climb North America's highest peak, known as Denali or Mount McKinley, partly to disprove Frederick Cook's claim to have reached its top in 1906. Organizer Tom Lloyd came home saying all four had reached both summits, and within weeks the climb was largely dismissed as a hoax. In fact, Billy Taylor and Pete Anderson had hauled a 14-foot spruce pole up the North Peak, about 850 feet lower than the true summit, and planted it near the top. Hudson Stuck's 1913 party saw it.
4A boot, a sock and a 100-year-old Everest mystery
On the tile: Sandy Irvine1924
On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and 22-year-old Sandy Irvine, the expedition's oxygen officer, set off for the summit of Everest. A teammate glimpsed them that afternoon near a rock step called the Second Step before clouds closed in. Whether they reached the top, 29 years before Hillary and Tenzing, is still unknown. Mallory's body was found in 1999. In September 2024, a National Geographic team led by Jimmy Chin spotted an old hobnailed boot melting out of the Central Rongbuk Glacier. Inside were a foot and a sock with a red label stitched A.C. IRVINE.
5Everest's big news, hidden in a report of bad snow
On the tile: Jan Morris1953
The Times of London had exclusive rights to the 1953 British Everest expedition, and its correspondent, James Morris, later the writer Jan Morris, feared rivals would steal the news. So the paper used code words. On May 30, after learning that Hillary and Tenzing had reached the top, Morris hurried down to base camp and wrote a message about bad snow conditions and an abandoned camp. A runner carried it to a radio at Namche, and diplomats in Kathmandu relayed it. The Times printed the scoop on June 2, 1953, the day Queen Elizabeth II was crowned.
6The porter who spent a night in the open high on K2
On the tile: Amir Mehdi1954
In July 1954, 24-year-old Walter Bonatti and Amir Mehdi, a Hunza porter, carried oxygen sets up K2 for Italy's summit pair, Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli. The pair had moved the final camp, and darkness caught Bonatti and Mehdi at about 26,500 feet with no tent or sleeping bags. They survived the night in the open, through a blizzard. The next day the summit pair used the oxygen to make the first ascent. Mehdi lost all his toes and never returned to the mountains. The official account played down their ordeal until the Italian Alpine Club recognized their essential role in 2007.
7The first ascent that stopped just short of the top
On the tile: Kangchenjunga1955
Joe Brown and George Band made the first ascent of Kangchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain, on May 25, 1955, but they did not step onto its very top. They had promised the Chogyal of Sikkim, where the mountain is held sacred, to stop short. Their last obstacle was a 20-foot crack that Band's diary called the hardest part of the climb. Above it, the highest snow rose about five feet over the rocks where they stood, and they kept their distance. Britannica says the expedition stopped within a few yards of the summit out of deference to the Sikkimese.
8The T-shirts that helped pay for a climb up Annapurna
On the tile: Annapurna1978
Arlene Blum's 1978 American Women's Himalayan Expedition needed $80,000 to attempt Annapurna I, the first 8,000-meter peak ever climbed. The team ordered a few dozen T-shirts with the slogan "A Woman's Place is on Top," and ended up selling about $60,000 worth. On October 15, Vera Komarkova and Irene Miller reached the summit with Mingma Tsering Sherpa and Chewang Rinzing Sherpa, and the team became the first women and the first Americans to climb Annapurna. Triumph turned to grief when the second summit team, Vera Watson and Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz, died on the mountain.
Twenty years before Hillary and Tenzing reached the top of Everest, two planes flew over it. The Houston Mount Everest Expedition, paid for by Lady Houston, a wealthy widow and onetime chorus girl, flew from its base at Purnea, India, on April 3, 1933. Lord Clydesdale piloted the Houston-Westland with Col. Stewart Blacker as observer and photographer, and David McIntyre flew a Westland Wallace. The Times held exclusive rights to the pictures. The film of the flight, Wings Over Mt. Everest, won the 1936 Academy Award for Short Subject (Novelty), although it mixed real footage with staged scenes.
In 1935, Milan mountaineer Vitale Bramani lost six companions on Punta Rasica when a sudden change in the weather trapped them and they froze to death. He blamed the disaster partly on footwear. Climbers then changed from hobnailed boots into thin felt-soled shoes for steep rock, and those shoes turned slippery when frozen. His answer was a sole of rubber lugs, with the grip of climbing shoes and the toughness of studded boots. In 1937 he and Ettore Castiglioni climbed the northwest face of Piz Badile on one of the first samples. The tread was called Carrarmato, Italian for tank, and Vibram was built from his own name.
In 1953 an American team on K2 was lowering Art Gilkey, stricken with blood clots, down a steep slope in a storm. George Bell slipped, and tangled ropes pulled four more climbers and Gilkey off their feet. Pete Schoening had jammed his ice axe behind a boulder and wrapped the rope around his body. The new nylon rope shrank to half its diameter but held, and so did the axe's hickory shaft. Gilkey was lost soon afterward, but the rest survived. In 2006, 28 of their descendants gathered as the Children of the Belay. The axe is displayed in Golden, Colorado.
3The ten-point crampon a blacksmith almost refused
On the tile: Crampons1909
In 1909 a scruffy, bearded English railway engineer, Oscar Eckenstein, walked into Henri Grivel's blacksmith shop in Courmayeur, Italy, with a drawing of a ten-point crampon. Grivel hesitated but forged it. Crampons let climbers walk up ice instead of cutting steps with an ice axe, and Britain's Alpine Club coolly regarded them as a kind of cheating. In 1929 Henri's son Laurent added two points jutting forward from the toe so climbers could face steep ice head-on. The Grivel family says the design opened routes such as the north face of the Eiger.
4The climbing rope from a maker of laces and bookmarks
On the tile: Kernmantle1953
Early climbers trusted hemp ropes, which could rot from the inside, stiffen in the cold and barely stretch. A better rope came from a cord and braid factory founded in 1863 in Isny, Germany, whose core business had been laces, braided bookmarks and fishing lines. There, in 1953, Carl Benk of Edelmann and Ridder, now EDELRID, developed the first kernmantle rope for mountaineering. Its braided sheath protects the core inside from cold, moisture and sharp edges. A dynamic rope that softened the jolt of a fall followed in 1964.
5The piton maker who told climbers to stop using pitons
On the tile: Chouinard1972
In 1957 Yvon Chouinard taught himself blacksmithing and began forging pitons of tough chrome-molybdenum steel, selling them from the back of his car. By 1970 Chouinard Equipment was the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States, but hammering pitons in and out of the same cracks was scarring the rock. In 1972 he and his partner Tom Frost opened their catalog by urging climbers to give up pitons for aluminum chocks, wedged in by hand. "Mountains are finite," they wrote, "and despite their massive appearance, they are fragile." Within a few months, chocks were selling faster than they could be made.
On September 19, 1991, German hikers Erika and Helmut Simon found a body in melting ice at 3,210 meters in the Alps, near the border of Italy and Austria. At first he was taken for a climbing accident victim. In fact the man, now called Ötzi, had died while crossing that pass more than 5,300 years ago. His right shoe was still on his foot. Inside, a net of linden bast held dry grass for warmth; the upper was deerskin, and the leather sole had its fur facing in. Replicas proved warm and comfortable on long walks, but not in the wet.
7The balloon-cloth coat the Everest team laughed at
On the tile: Finch's coat1922
On the 1922 British Everest expedition, Australian-born chemist George Finch turned up in a bright green coat made to his order from hot-air-balloon fabric and stuffed with eiderdown. The English climbers, dressed in wool and tweed, sneered. The expedition photographer, John Noel, was impressed, writing that not a particle of wind could get through it. Higher on the mountain Finch noted in his journal that everybody now envied his "eiderdown coat, and it is no longer laughed at." Wearing it and breathing bottled oxygen, he climbed above 8,300 meters, higher than anyone had climbed before.
8The rope that broke on the Matterhorn's first descent
On the tile: Matterhorn1865
On July 14, 1865, on his eighth attempt, Edward Whymper finally reached the top of the Matterhorn, by a Swiss ridge that had been thought too dangerous to try. His party numbered seven. On the way down, one man slipped and pulled three others after him. The rope linking them to Whymper and his two guides broke. The four fell to their deaths, and the break saved the other three. It remains one of the best-known accidents in mountaineering. The broken rope itself survives, on display at the Matterhorn Museum in Zermatt.
Climbing chalk came from the gym. Around 1954 John Gill, an amateur gymnast who would become known as the godfather of bouldering, took a gymnastics course at Georgia Tech and began trying chalk on boulders and cliffs in Georgia. A year or so later, in the Tetons, he bought a block of "medicinal quality, anti-constipation" chalk at the Jackson Drug Store and introduced it to visiting climbers from around the world. Before Gill, French climbers at Fontainebleau had used rosin, a tree sap, to make their hands and shoes sticky.