The Triple 7 Summits

The three highest peaks on all seven continents — twenty-one summits — and the mountain I set out to make my own.

Most people know the Seven Summits — the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. Fewer know that behind each of those famous peaks stands a second, and a third. My quest was to climb the three highest mountains on every continent — twenty-one peaks in all — and, in doing so, to become the first Briton ever to complete them. To this day only one person in history has: the Austrian mountain guide Christian Stangl, in 2013. No Briton has. This is where that idea came from, how far it went, and why it's on hold.

The definitive Triple 7 Summits list is maintained by Eberhard Jurgalski at 8000ers.com. The only recognised completion to date is Christian Stangl's (2008–2013), for which he holds Guinness World Records.

The seed was planted in 2008, on a trip to climb Africa's three highest peaks with two friends — Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya and the Rwenzoris' Margherita Peak. Somewhere on that journey the idea took shape: not just the seven famous summits, but the three highest on every continent. It was audacious, largely untravelled ground, and exactly the kind of enormous goal I've always used to pull myself forward. (That first trip is the story "Kilts2Kenya".)

But the dream only became a realistic plan because of how I'd learned to travel. In 2006 I organised my own expedition to Khan Tengri using nothing but a local Kyrgyz agent — no expensive Western operator — and discovered I could reach a serious 7,000-metre peak under my own steam, at a fraction of the usual cost. Africa in 2008 supplied the second piece: it was my first multi-peak expedition, and stringing three summits together on one trip showed me the model that made twenty-one peaks conceivable. Climbing several of a continent's highest mountains in a single expedition is far more efficient on both cost and time — and, crucially, you arrive at the second and third peaks already acclimatised from the first. Do that continent by continent, with local agents rather than big commercial operators, and a preposterous-sounding goal starts to look like a series of achievable trips.

Over the years that followed, the mountains taught me at least as much as they gave me. I learned to turn back — on Mont Blanc, and on Khan Tengri in the Tien Shan — and came to understand that the humble call is usually the tough one. I froze six fingers on Denali, and went back to climb Mont Blanc solo. In 2017 I turned around at 7,900 metres on Everest, short of the summit — a retreat a storm proved right within twelve hours. And at 06:15 on 18 May 2018, thirty-three hours after leaving my tent, I stood on the summit of Everest. (The full accounts are "The Retreat" and "33 Hours on Everest".)

Each expedition was a chapter in the same larger project — Khan Tengri, Denali, Elbrus, Aconcagua, Carstensz Pyramid, a near-solo journey into the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and the high, dry giants of the Andes among them — endurance, judgement, and the long apprenticeship of learning what the big mountains ask of you.

Twenty-one peaks, seven continents, completed only once in history. That was the mountain I set out to make my own.