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Seven Summits - Facts & Figures of the Seven Summits

Since Dick Bass reached the Everest in 1985 and became the first person to climb the highest peak on the seven continents, a controversy has erupted. In 1986, Patrick Morrow reached the summit of the Elbrus, and claimed that he was the first person to climb the Seven Summits, not Dick Bass. Dick Bass claimed that the Carstenz Pyramid in New Guinea, which he summitted years before, was the summit of the seventh continent known as Australasia or Oceania. This included New Zealand, New Guinea, and certain Pacific Island, along with Australia. If this is true, Carstenz Pyramid would be the summit of the seventh continent, not Kosciuszko.

There are several arguments that plea for the Kosciuszko or the Carstenz Pyramid to be the Seventh Summit:

If one defines the geographic zone that includes Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand and certain Pacific islands, as Australasia or Oceania, then Carstenz Pyramid is certainly the highest peak in Australasia.
If Australia on its own is a continent on itself, then most regard Kosciuszko as the highest peak, but there are other who consider mountain 2745 metres named as the Big Ben on a small stormy island Heard Island, deep in the Southern Ocean as the Seventh Summit.
As Carstenz Pyramid lies in the Western New Guinea, also known as Irian Jaya, it politically does not belong to Australia but to Indonesia. And Indonesia is part of Asia.

We will not take any side in this discussion here. From the above, one should be able to draw their own conclusions, and otherwise, why not do what most people do? Climb all the Eight Summits! In this section, we have listed the figures and facts from all the "Eight Summits".

Elbrus

Europe
5642m / 18,150ft
Kabardino-Balkaria
Caucasus
First Ascent: 1874, Grove, Gardiner, Walker, Sottajev and Knubel.

Kosciuszko

Australia
2228m / 7310ft
New South Wales
Snowy Mountains
First Ascent: 1840, Edmond, Strzelecki.

Carstenz Pyramid

Australasia
4884m / 16,024ft
Irian Jaya
Sudirman Range
First Ascent: 1962, Harrer, Temple, Kippax and Huizenga.

Everest

Asia
8848m / 29,028ft
Tibet/Nepal
Himalaya
First Ascent: 1953, Norgay and Hillary.

Kilimanjaro

Africa
5895m / 19,340ft
Tanzania
First Ascent: 1889, Purtscheller.

Vinson

Antarctica
4897m / 16,023ft
Sentinel Range
First Ascent: 1966, Corbet, Evans, Long and Schoening.

Aconcagua

South America
6960m / 22,834ft
Argentina
Andes
First Ascent: 1897, Zurbriggen.

McKinley

North America
6194m / 20,320ft
Alaska, USA
Alaska Range
First Ascent: 1913, Karstens, Harper, Tatum and Stuck

What you read are just overviews of each of the Seven Summits, or the way we treated it here, the Eight Summits. There are a lot more information available in this site. Feel free to visit them if you wish to know more about the Seven Summits.

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