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Hearing that a small group of mountaineers have signed up for a - wait for it - one week door-to-door ascent of Mt Everest - I was keen to find out a little more! On digging a little deeper, it turns out that these 3 men will first endure several weeks at home sleeping and training in hypoxic tents. Then, just before they depart for Nepal they'll also spend 30 minutes breathing a "one off" mixture of oxygen and xenon. At Base Camp they'll be greeted by a team of Sherpas who will guide them up and down the mountain, supplying them with supplemental oxygen to help them along their way. In this post Monica Piris tells us what she thinks of xenon and the chances of climbing Everest within a week. Having spent more time on the mountain than any other health care provider, she's well worth listening to...

I’ve been a doctor for commercial expeditions to high altitude since 2007 so I suppose it’s reasonable to say that I’m familiar with that world. Last weekend the Financial Times published an article about the mountain guide, Lukas Furtenbach’s intention to have this year’s Everest expedition clients inhale xenon prior to their departure, in the hope that it will help enable them to successfully climb the mountain in just a week. It’s fair to say that this announcement has created some ripples in the small world of 8000m peak professionals and enthusiasts!

It goes without saying that there is very little scientific evidence to support the efficacy of this intervention, (as is the case with most of high altitude medicine!) yet, Furtenbach already has a team of 3 who have signed on the dotted line and are willing to give it a try: a fact that may seem surprising to many, but which doesn’t surprise me at all. For the vast majority of us, the concept of having a spare €130,000 to spend on a holiday is difficult to grasp, yet, I promise you there is a seemingly bottomless reservoir of people for whom it is entirely reasonable: they form the client base for companies like Furtenbach Adventures, and, Alpenglow Expeditions whom I work for.

For many years xenon was thought to have little effect on the human body. However, in recent times it has been shown to stimulate the release of red cells and haemoglobin from the bone marrow. This might just help someone climb Everest...

In my experience, the people with the financial means to climb Mt Everest with the most expensive outfitters, are, in addition to simply being privileged, quite extraordinarily driven, motivated, ambitious, self confident and goal orientated, to name but a few of their traits. They have insight enough to realise that, having never or rarely climbed before, they need significant professional support to be successful, and, they also want the best of everything with the least disruption to their normal life. Paradoxically however, they are often loathe to acknowledge that by enlisting such a comprehensive provision of resources, thereby mitigating a lot of discomfort and as much risk as is possible, they are diminishing the magnitude and purity of their overall goal. Based on my experience of working with this cohort of people, I think this is where the appeal of doing a “first” gains traction. In this case, over and above not wanting to be away from home for more than a week, I wonder if some of their readiness to try the xenon experiment is because it is new and exciting, but also partly due to the possibility of being the “fastest ever”.

During the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, a number of Russion athletes admitted to using xenon to increase red cell production. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) acted quickly and banned the gas. But did it really make any difference?

I try never to judge why people choose to climb Mt Everest. We all have very different reasons for choosing to climb or spend time in the mountains and we are undoubtedly moulded by the opportunities we have had to experience it; so asking why someone would choose to do it this way is a question that has as many different answers as people doing it, and there is no right answer. As a community of mountaineers, we have a tendency to collectively judge how people are choosing to climb these mountains, and therein lies the most difficult part of this debate. The speed of an ascent of Everest from BC to BC round trip by a solo climber with no bottled oxygen, seems to us more impressive than the speed with which Furtenbach’s clients will potentially do their round trip from London to London; but perhaps to them that’s not the case, or perhaps we’re comparing apples with pears, or perhaps it doesn’t matter as in 2025 everyone chooses their own benchmarks and bestows an arbitrary value on each one. If, as a community, we can somehow agree on adhering to the tenets of being respectful of how people choose to do things so long as it doesn’t degrade the experience of others, minimising our environmental footprint and maximising collaboration with the local communities that call these mountains their homes, I think we’d be making some progress towards shaping how we would like mountaineering to evolve.

Since Sochi scientific evidence has begun to emerge showing that xenon has in fact a very limited effect on red cell production. Of particular concern to high altitude mountaineers, is one study that showed the concentration of red cells and haemoglobin actually fell with xenon use - largely as a result of fluid retention*

In any case, whilst I genuinely doubt that inhalation of xenon will have anything to do with it, I do think this group has a good chance of success which will be the result of impeccable logistics, maximal resources, the personalities of those involved and, most importantly, the unprecedented amounts of bottled oxygen that they will be using from BC to the top and back. And, as this expensive Everest-Xenon experiment has been broadcast into the economically fertile waters of the Financial Times’ readership, I daresay many more volunteers will be caught in the net that has been cast, meaning that there will be more observational data available in the future!

*One of the authors was recently quoted as saying,

"It is important to note that xenon is used as a general anaesthetic and depending on the dose used, can ... cause unconsciousness and respiratory arrest. We went through months of FDA approvals and dose-response evaluations to find a dose that was reasonably equivalent to what the Russians were doping with but wouldn’t cause general anesthesia. We had a number of volunteers with adverse reactions. We had all our inhalations monitored by a cardiac anesthetist who monitored level of consciousness carefully and was prepared to provide airway support if needed.

Perhaps most importantly, the teams proposing to use it are also giving their clients high rates of oxygen during high altitude ascents – which of course reduces the effective altitude of the climb!  You don’t need xenon if you are using 6-8 L/min of supplemental oxygen..."

Thanks Monica!

If this is your sort of thing why not take a look at other posts on the blog.

Better still, why not join the British Mountain Medicine Society! More information can be found here.

For more on the University of Central Lancashire's Diploma in Mountain Medicine take a look at this.