Climbing
Who says you’re too old to do anything?
On Sunday, May 23, Arthur Muir became the oldest American to climb the world’s highest peak at 29,031 feet, an official from the company that organized the expedition told Reuters.
Seventy-five-years old. The average life expectancy for an American male is 78.5 years. Let that sink in for a moment.
“Arthur Muir is the oldest American at 75 years old to summit Mount Everest,” Garrett Madison, expedition leader at the Madison Mountaineering company told Reuters from Everest’s base camp.
The previous record set by an American was Bill Burke, who summited Everest at the age of 67 in 2009. The oldest person to have ever climbed the peak was Yuichiro Miura, who summited at age 70 in 2003, and then came back and beat his own record in 2013 at 80-years-old.
Wow.
Along with Muir’s achievement, another Everest record was broken a day earlier on Saturday when Hong Kong’s Tsang Yin-Hung, 45, climbed the peak in less than 26 hours, making it the shortest time taken by any woman after starting from the base camp. Most climbers spend several days in different camps on the climb to the summit—but she did it in just over a day.
Reuters reports that Yin-Hung beat the record set by Nepali woman Phunjo Jhangmu Lama in 2017, who climbed Everest in 39 hours and 6 minutes.
