They used Xenon to climb Everest in days – is it the future of mountaineering?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Why? Because he’s launching a business that sells Xenon-assisted Everest tours: https://www.furtenbachadventures.com/
These stories are never about uncovering an underground world of Xenon performance enhancement or discussing the science (which is much less optimistic about Xenon’s benefits). They’re always lazily relaying the PR information that Lukas Furtenbach gives them.
So while it’s true that Xenon appears to have some possible performance enhancing properties, all of these news pieces about how climbers are using Xenon always come back to this one same guy who is, coincidentally, trying really hard to sell people on expensive Xenon-assisted Everest tours.
Meth. It's meth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinephrine_autoinjector
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/co...
The only evidence is the claims from the person selling the expensive five-figure Everest packages. It’s the very definition of a conflict of interest.
They also use multiple treatments, not just Xenon. The hikers sleep in hypobaric chambers. Another comment said they used supplemental oxygen but were hiding details about how much.
There is no evidence or even head-to-head testing here. It’s all claims that come from one person, who is also trying to sell the treatment.
If something normally takes two weeks and some guy claims his novel method gets you up there in one, it’s at least easy to verify whether his novel method actually does do it.
All kinds of fancy "research" and "reasons" it will work, and the marks\\\\customers put in a financial and emotional investment in it working, so expect it to work.
Seems just about how placebos work best
Also, and quite interestingly, xenon isn't the only element that does this. Cobalt does something very similar: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6157393/
Athletic use is probably more common than people think. And I'd be absolutely shocked if Xe gas weren't already being used in racehorses. (You wouldn't believe the state of chemical warfare in that sport.)
There's also potential military use -- especially in combat divers. They're very limited by the amount of breathing gas they can carry. Anything to meaningfully cut oxygen use could be a game changer.
Now that the GWOT is over, the peacetime military has been cracking down on steroid use.
Unless you're doing completely stupid doses it can be managed safely, and it's not like the soldiers are not already doing something inherently risky.
It spikes HIF-1α → EPO for a day or two, but meta-analyses still doesn't show a real performance bump, let alone safety at 8 km. Feels less like innovation and more like mountaineering’s own carbon-plate shoes, except the failure mode here is cerebral edema, not a slow marathon time.
I wish all of these news articles would discuss the actual studies instead of lazily parroting the claims of the one guy who is trying to sell expensive Xenon-assisted Everest hikes.
These articles are always PR pieces for Lukas Furtenbach’s expensive Everest tours. Every single time I see the words “Xenon” and “Everest” in a headline, his name is in the article as the source.
They do, if you read them.
> While some doctors have used the gas in the past to “precondition” patients to low oxygen levels — for example, before major heart surgery — the practice hasn’t really caught on because “it hasn’t been as protective as one would hope,” he said.
> Mike Shattock, a professor of cellular cardiology at King’s College London, said “xenon probably does very little and there is virtually no reputable scientific evidence that it makes any difference.”
> Some research has shown that xenon can quickly acclimatize people to high altitudes, even as some experts say the benefits, if any, are negligible and the side effects of its use remain unclear.
I did read the article, which is how I knew Lukas Furtenbach was involved. Please don’t accuse people of not reading the article when they’re specifically talking about content of the article.
Anyway, my point was that if these articles wanted to be serious about the science, they’d lead with the studies and science.
Instead, they tack on weasel words (literally “some experts say” and “some research” as in your quotes ) in an attempt to make it feel like a both-sides style journalism while leaving Furtenbach’s claims as the headline and the main story.
A lack of evidence doesn't mean it doesn't work. It depends on what you mean by 'evidence.'
Take one or two reports.
A scientist would say, 'that's an anecdote.'
A lawyer would day, 'I can send you to jail with those two reports.'
Back during the 2000 dot-com boom crash I met a guy who got into a top business school in part by writing about the challenges of climbing Everest. He confessed drunkenly at a party to me that he'd never even left the USA...
And then you wonder why so many young people flirt with communism or want to see the capitalist system burn to the ground. What's the point of ethics and hard work if those who just lie their way into much better opportunities will out-earn you by orders of magnitude? Granted, it's a bit more complicated than that, often those people also have connections, but the feeling still stands.
Not sure if meritocracy has been on a decline, or that we're now just more aware of it due to the internet.
As an Indian, let me tell you, to accept something is wrong, and then just being fine about it, and just adjust your life to bad situations is how the fall of societies starts.
Eventually everything becomes fine and acceptable, and you learn over time to adjust yourself to everything, like every bad thing ever.
Certainly there are people who succeed in business by doing what you say, but it’s not how most success happens.
When two people make a deal, voluntarily, at least rationally (unless it is charity) both expect to be better off.
The magic of the businessman is to connive his way into getting the largest slice of the 'better off'. He generally can't legally make a deal without generating value, but if he can capture it to the point the customer is only one iota better off he is a good businessman and no one has been defrauded.
In a properly functioning market, the limiting factor is competition. A business can't capture 99% of the "better off" because the guy down the street will undercut it by only capturing 98% and all the customers will go there. A customer likewise can't capture 99% because the business will decide it's not worthwhile and sell to customers who capture less. Somewhere in the middle is found equilibrium.
Bag-holding is different, it means there's some sort of trickery and the other side doesn't actually benefit from the transaction. And this does happen, but it's not the norm. Again, go take a look at your local shops. Which ones are engaging in this?
I'm not anti-capitalist, I just acknowledge this as a fundamental part of the human process. It might even be the case the businessman's incentive don't fully align with the stockholder/owner's incentive, in many case the businessman can profit at the expense of the company by capturing higher commission with side-effects that the company won't understand.
A clever businessman will get the better end of that, while still leaving his customer better off than if he hadn't transacted at all, as many witness at the car dealership.
There's a lot of narrow-sightedness in this zero-sum model of transactions.
That is not how the current US administration seems to see (foreign) trade. :)
Unethical people tend to get themselves better opportunities regardless of how society is organized.
That's not why, particularly. They do so for various reasons:
- they compare the reality of capitalism with a nonexistent nirvana, rather than the reality of the alternatives. They haven't run the real counterfactual
- they gravitate to any philosophy that they're familiar with instinctively: most students are young, and they conceptualise "fairness" in terms of a loving parental figure with resources meting things out to them, and they think of the government in a similar way
- they believe countries they have heard are nice to live in, normally Scandinavian countries, aren't capitalist
- they don't know the realities of real non-capitalist countries such as the USSR or pre-capitalist China, or present-day Venezuela (not truly non-capitalist, but the central planning around their oil is their main problem), or East Germany, or Cuba
- they have gone to university, the only place where bad ideas can survive and be propogated out into the world
Let's not leave out think-tanks and orgs like the WEF that seem to exist only to launder the opinions of billionaires. And mainstream news publications like the New York Times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
While I don't disagree with many of your points, we shouldn't kid ourselves that we live in the best of all possible worlds for most working or middle class people.
Yet theres a difference between hitching a horse to a wagon to move things vs joining a bestiality cult that worships horses.
A university is hardly the only place for terrible ideas to thrive, just look at silicon valley culture and this orange site.
Well, that is a similar place. If you have plenty of money sloshing about coming from some commercial process you probably disagree with, whether you're a SV day-in-the-life-of employee or a social sciences professor, you probably can have plenty of ideas that are never disproven because you're so insulated.
I walked away from a full time job making $180K a year for 2 hours a day because the consulting company renting out my time wanted me to put 8 hours. I felt like I was helping them somehow fleece the client, even though the client probably had over a trillion dollars under management. In retrospect I was very foolish.
In the free market you have to learn sales, to do well. And most sales techniques are about making people realize they may need something (called “building the gap”) and then offering your solution. But your solution usually isn’t any good unless you raise money first.
In my case, I was too honest to overpromise to investors, or create fake volume for tokens, etc. So most investors walked, and it took years for me to build the products. Now I have them. But I am far behind those who overpromise and raise money fast, or create appearances of momentum, and act as if — they fake it til they make it. (Doesn’t need to be all the way as bad as Elizabeth Holmes.)
I have discovered a lot of ethical hacks over the years involving group dynamics, but in the meantime I had taken on hundreds of thousands in debt and repaid it. All for what… because I was too honest to stretch the truth too much.
If I was willing to do it, though, people downstream of me would have been much happier. And people diwnstream of you include your employees and your family and friends. It is a dog eat dog world out there… I have learned that total honesty has a price — you cannot overpromise to people downstream of you, either, otherwise they’ll be left holding the bag. It is better to overpromise to people upstream of you if you have people relying on you. It’s just not a perfect system.
I would have much rather been in a society which has UBI, free association and everyone has some discretionary income and isn’t always just trying to survive. Much more honest. And they wouldn’t even have to fake stuff to stay on disability or qualify for means tested stuff.
Yes I do want those assholes burned at the stake.
Similar story happens in many other areas. People are being squeezed from their money on all fronts. North American IT persons are rare exception of an ordinary person who can still make the ends meet and still have some healthy chunk left to enjoy life.
This is just exhibit 8345346 that this type of "free market" doesn't result in lower prices for consumers, but this grift has been going on for a long time now. Free market now means private investors are free to take over entire markets and monopolize them and bribe/lobby the government regulatory agencies to look the other way at best, or enact regulations that act as moats to defend their position against competitors at worst.
The current state of Canada (stagnating wages, exploding CoL) is what's coming everywhere in the west. The US seems to be most resilient to this, probably due to its status as the world reserve currency and a larger, more competitive economy.
I think it's worth asking if you have a free market at the point there's consolidation and it approaches monopoly/oligopoly territory.
A free market would be me with a sign in the corner, offering to perform surgery on your dog, with my engineering degree printed on a piece of paper and anesthetics I manufactured in my basement.
North America has severely limited the number of veterinarians and regulated the care, the monopolistic elements are likely largely a result of government intervention.
I wonder if the shorter time at altitude also reduced the chances of slower-to-develop high-altitude cerebral edema and pulmonary edema (HACE, HAPE). Some climbers have been sleeping in camp in small tubular pressurized tents to reduce daily apparent density altitude.
I met a startup founder in my local community who would always bring up his ambitions to climb Everest. He made sure everyone knew and made it part of his personality.
Except, he was very out of shape and undeniably overweight. He was not doing any type of training or fitness activity. Everyone could see with their own eyes that this man was not on any path toward climbing Everest in any way.
Yet people around him always brought up his Everest ambitions like it was an amazing fact about him. I always wondered if it was some sort of litmus test to see who could be convinced to deny reality and follow what he said.
It kind of makes sense. A lot of business success is about being able to bullshit convincingly.
> In an interview, Mr. Carns said that his expedition had been in touch with the ministry, and clarified with the department that it had not taken the gas on the mountain.
The book “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer is an amazing firsthand account of the 1996 Everest disaster. The book does a great job helping you really understand how far your body is pushed in the death zone, and how you truly have nothing left to do anything other than get one foot in front of the other in a race against time. Just sitting down to “rest” was a likely death sentence and how people had to walk past because stopping to try and help would have likely meant sitting down next to them to die.
But as a recreational climber, why bother with xenon? Just inject EPO.
Well, from the article:
> The men wore masks hooked up to ventilators as an anesthesiologist slowly introduced higher levels of xenon into their systems.
The doctor named in the article seems to be[0] the head of the Department of Anesthesiology at Limburg hospital.
You almost certainly safer using whatever PED you can get your hands on if you’re trying to climb Everest.
Because if you can inject EPO then you don't need xenon. With EPO you can generate as many red blood cells your body can handle.
The point remains though, this is recreation so why not just hire Dr Ferrari and take cera or epo
As a recreational anything I'd say avoid wrecking your body to make some arbitrary numbers nobody will ever care about go up (or down)
I thought nowadays the sherpas practically carry you up there so it's of low risk to you.
Both wikipedia [1] and an expedition company [2] seem to put the deaths per year as <10 with it being dominated by people from Nepal who are presumably the sherpas doing all the work.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_died_climbi...
[2]: https://www.climbing-kilimanjaro.com/mount-everest-deaths/
4% chance of death sounds very high to me.
The people dieing are by far the sherpas which you aren't one of.
Not according to this graph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_died_climbi...
Most recreational activities don't come with an existing risk of death: PEDs likely reduce this relative risk in many riskier physical endeavors.
Use Xenon gas to climb Everest in a week? (12 points, 27 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43837865
Climbers using xenon gas to climb Everest (107 points, 4 months ago, 145 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705180
Okay, but then be consistent and also ban bottled oxygen and the services of Sherpas.
> […] and that it would hurt the country’s tourism industry and the Sherpas who help climbers by reducing their time on the mountain.
Ah, okay, there's the real reason. "Climbing ethics" my ass.
Often inexperienced people with too much money are putting themselves, their sherpas and other climbers are risk by doing so.
Using bottled oxygen already made this substantially easier. But this Xenon is on a whole new level. I went looking for the cost and found [1]:
> After a week, the Brits could be back at their desks at home. They still pay an introductory price of an undisclosed amount. In future, such a short trip to Everest will cost around 150,000 euros.
From my understanding, that's 50-100,000 more than usual. The whole thing just reeks of Oceangate.
And for what? To take a selfie at the top and to brag to you're equally vacous and wealthy friends? It would be more ethical to stay home and just Photoshop yourself into a photo. ChatGPT can probably do it for you.
Nepal is a very poor country. Being a sherpa is one of the few (locally) high paying jobs there are. Sherpas risk their lives for this. At least on K2 or Annapurna you're more likely to find experiernced and technically capable mountaineers who won't endanger your life for a selfie.
Everest is not a technically difficult climb, as far as I understand it. The death zone and general conditions make it a challenge. Negate those with Xenon and it's just a really expensive walk.
[1]: https://abenteuer-berg.de/en/with-xenon-to-mount-everest-and...
I've climbed some mountains, and while I don't know if I would be capable of doing Everest, I do know that I wouldn't want to (unless I could do it like Goran Kropp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göran_Kropp). I guess I could brag if I doped myself, took a helicopter past the Khumbu Icefall, and had servants carrying my stuff the whole way to the summit, but I could never be proud of myself for doing that.
The team used supplemental oxygen on the climb, with the starting altitude and flow rate not being reported [1]. This is speculative, but if they were using more oxygen than typical and starting at a lower altitude, that's a massive advantage.
Further, Andrew Ushakov traveled from NYC to the summit in just under 4 days this year without the use of xenon (but also with supplemental oxygen with unknown starting altitude and flow rate). He used a hypoxic tent to prepare as well, and depending on the accuracy of the reporting may have even spent less time doing that than the xenon team did [1].
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/18/nx-s1-5398553/a-new-company-i...
[1] https://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2025/05/21/everest-2025-fas...
They will do this math eventually and then they will require xenon prep.
Yeah this is not your average mountain climber group, "normal" people could not do this just by xenon gas alone
I know people that made it to Kilimanjaro as pretty average middle class urbanites with no substantial climbing background, but that's probably at the edge of what's possible.
Kilimanjaro is an arduous hike. No technical knowledge or equipment is required. The main challenge on the mountain is altitude, which is countered by time spent acclimatising.
https://nepalmonitor.com/2025/03/19/nepal-overtourism-everes...
Climb as much as you like but clean up the waste you create.
What about the Nepalese people?
They want to do something other than clean up the tourists' mess or even their bodies.
What about other climbers and their staff who get endangered.
Do you also care for allowing people driving drunk?
I suspect you are un-conflicted in the sense that you aren't simultaneously compelled to climb Everest but are holding back due to the environment impact. Staying home or going to the movies might be fine for you but not necessarily everyone else. If you do travel / do other things you probably don't worry about the environment impact much - because you are doing "valid" stuff that you happen to like.
Personally? I think it's a pretty cool achievement and is _the_ mountain to climb for a reason. I'm with the other commenter here. Chase your passions.
https://nepalmonitor.com/2025/03/19/nepal-overtourism-everes...
Is this the case in mountaineering circles, or are K2 and Annapurna the peaks to be respected?
Many of the neighbouring countries -- including Nepal, India, Tibet, Bangladesh -- are effectively open-air garbage dumps, where rivers and fields and cities are just awash with discards and garbage. In environmentally critical places where it massively impedes with the life of millions.
In a relative sense I just do not care about some infinitesimal amount of discarded air canisters on a lifeless rock at 10,000 feet. It seems like misdirected envy when people suddenly super care about that. In an ideal world they would leave only footprints, but in the grand scheme of things it just does not matter. Cue another "OMG look at these air canisters some rich guys left at 15,000 feet!" articles.
It's a bit like how the anti-AI cadre have taken to suddenly being incredibly concerned about the energy usage of AI. Despite everything else, it's AI that's going to heat the planet. They never cared about data centre power usage when it was serving their big tiddy goth anime GIFs, but if it's AI suddenly they lament this outrage.
Ive never done mountaineering but I become fascinated by these stories of people on the mountain and sometimes wonder if I could do it. I definately never will, theres lots of other things id rather invest my time in but I can definately see the allure and why people become obsessed with doing it.
Anyways, after all that I have zero desire to ever go near Everest or any other risky mountain climb.
Some special forces guys, record summit Everest time… let me guess, one is an SAS sniper with numerous recorded kills in Iraq or Afghanistan… but clearly he can’t talk much about it, he just needs you to know it… maybe some mi5 action in there… this is tailor made for a “bro-tube” channel.
I used it in my Laser MSc has part of the mix for a CO2 laser (marks how long ago that was). CO2 for the optic properties, and Xe to reduce the electron temperature.
So the Xe in this case triggers a response in the human body, but people aren't quite sure why. Quite strange considering Xe is an inert gas.
Climbing Everest costs $50-100K though. If you can reduce the time each 'climber' spends on the mountain, its probably cost effective.
Xenon isn't inert; it can form chemical compounds like xenon difluoride. In the body it's probably dissolving into cell membranes or other fatty components.
For applications like in the article you want very long-lived or ideally stable Xe isotopes, which do exist.
Another fission product that might be worth recovering is rhodium, although not being a gas the process would be more involved.
But it has been, for a long time. Base camps, oxygen masks, advanced gear, etc all make climbing easier.
Similarly, should lifting 200 kg be made easier? It has been made easy, you can use a forklift and barely move your finger to do so. But this is not seen as an accomplishment; if you want to be considered a strong weightlifter, you have to lift an old-school barbell.
The biggest problem, as I can imagine, is not the dilution of the achievement, but the intensity of the stream if the climbers. Mt Everest is already full of climbers who follow each other at a short distance. Doubling this stream might ruin the experience altogether, or there would be large lines and inevitably large fees to jump them.
It’s like bragging about sailing around the world when in reality you did a cruise
I thought that mountain was mainly climbed by CEO's that let sherpa's carry their stuff?
That's why naked cavemen are the only ones to climb the mountain without being called cheaters!
Vitamin B₁₂ deficiency …… at levels moderately lower than normal, a range of symptoms such as feeling tired, weak, lightheadedness, headaches, dizziness, rapid breathing, rapid heartbeat, cold hands and feet, low-grade fevers, tremor, cold intolerance, easy bruising and bleeding, pale skin, low blood pressure, sore tongue, upset stomach, loss of appetite, weight loss, constipation, diarrhea, severe joint pain, feeling abnormal sensations including numbness or tingling (pins and needles) to the fingers and toes, and tinnitus, may be experienced.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrous_oxide#Safety
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12_deficiency#Signs,_...
But it also makes me wonder if we’re turning what used to be a deeply human and challenging journey into just another experiment in efficiency.
Not sure if that counts as progress. Curious how others see it.
I think that ship has sailed already. Now the focus should probably be on safety, economic benefit, and sustainability/minimizing environmental impact.
Maybe it's always been an experiment in efficiency? Early Everest expeditions consisted of large support teams, setting records for sleeping at altitude, and inventing new breathing apparatus. Or maybe the challenge and the journey are over now?
Foreigner climbs Everest in three days: "against climbing ethics"
Got it.
The foreigner huffed some gas and slept in a high-tech tube a week before the climb.
I'll leave to the reader to decide which one deserves respect and admiration.
The mountains have been scaled. All of them. We've been there, website seen what's to be seen. It's done, it's over. Just leave these grandiose wonders alone rather than destroying the natural beauty in the name of an ego boost.
Destroying a natural wonder in the name of impressing your buddies doesn't fall under that.
That's it. Go out unto the world and do with that as you will
Going skydiving, auto racing, sailing, working out... All pointless if I'm understanding this logic.
The idea that such a subjective criteria should be used is more offensive than the hubris.
The US national parks are a great example of how that works.
They should install a cable car or furnicular and let people go straight to the top any time of year. Tax it and give the money to the locals. Put a nice restaurant up there too. That would be cleaner and more practical than what we have now.
I doubt your Tesla example is true, but the summit news sound like stupid jokes at this point
Thousands upon thousands of people have done the Three Peaks (a famous walking route in the UK), but I'd still like to do it, and would feel a sense of satisfaction at succeeding.
That isn't true now. But it might be in a few years, if Tesla's genius CEO continues to alienate his customers.
Genuine technological innovation in adaptation to low oxygen. Nay-sayers say it does nothing. Guys climb Everest in a week using said innovation. You can't argue with results, so they switch to:
"Himal Gautam, the director of Nepal’s tourism department, which is responsible for regulating expeditions on the nation’s mountains, said in an interview that using the gas was “against climbing ethics,” and that it would hurt the country’s tourism industry and the Sherpas who help climbers by reducing their time on the mountain."
and
"From a medical point of view, off-label use without a scientific basis and with unknown health risks must be rejected"
So it simultaneously does nothing and is unethical, and it doesn't matter whether it works anyway, because even if it did, it'd be against made-up "medical" rules.
I've never seen a stronger case for telling very serious people to go fuck themselves.