View of Mt. Everest and Himalaya mountain range taken by the Expedition Two crew from the International Space Station ISS Alpha. (NASA)
At last, the four exhausted British men were able to exhale and begin to take stock of their accomplishment as they awaited their flight from Kathmandu, where they’d just climbed Mount Everest.
Door to door from their homes in England, the entire trip will have taken just under seven days.
Al Carns, Garth Miller, Kevin Godlington and Anthony “Staz” Stazicker, Special Forces veterans who left London on the afternoon of May 16, reached the 29,032-foot summit Wednesday morning (Nepal time) along with five sherpas and a cameraman, cutting short the usual climbing time from weeks to days after acclimatizing for months at home by sleeping in hypoxic tents. They also received an unusual treatment of xenon gas, doing the climb under the direction of Lukas Furtenbach, who has been using different methods over the years to shorten the time spent on Everest.
It added up to a whirlwind 50 hours of climbing to the top of the world and back to base camp. Because of weather, they made a quick departure via helicopter to the airport, where they spoke about their trip via phone early Thursday morning as they munched on pizza and awaited a flight to Qatar, the first leg of their trip home. They expected to land in London at “half-past 6 Friday morning” London time, well inside the seven-day “door-to-door” goal that had stirred the climbing community.
“Back now in Kathmandu, we’ve still not processed what we’ve just experienced,” Godlington said. “It’s a bit like soldiering. Often you find yourself in very kinetic environments and it takes a while to process because things are moving so quickly.”
Elation and a bit of amazement were audible in the voices of all four men, whose itinerary called for two days of travel, three days up the mountain and two days down. There was an avalanche on the first day of climbing, followed by ferocious winds kicked up by what Furtenbach described as the “meandering of the jet stream” around the mountain. The winds threatened to force the men to turn around, but they got through, with only Godlington vomiting and experiencing diarrhea from water he drank at the topmost camp.
“The guys just rallied around and put in rescue techniques to be able to get me down the mountain very quickly,” he said. “The team ethos of having a team of operators that have such incredible skills, but also leave no man behind, get it done, let’s move quickly. Garth noticed my oxygen had run out. And Staz was putting rope systems in place to make sure I got down the hill quickly.
It wasn’t that I’d become a liability yet, but it was mitigating the chance that I could become one. Those are the things that make these sorts of seven day things possible because everybody’s constantly awake and alert. You’re only getting three hours sleep a day and it’s very cold, very windy, very bleak, and your body’s degrading.”
That’s where the role of xenon will be assessed. Furtenbach has used it several times since German physician Michael Fries approached him with the possibility that it could be neuroprotective, and the mission of the four men represents the culmination of a dream, one that, Furtenbach said, “went better than expected.” The four had inhaled the gas May 5, with its protective properties expected to peak around the time of their summit push.
“Immediately after taking the xenon, I didn’t have noticeable physiological changes, so there’s nothing really there to report. We’re very fatigued, but when we were on the mountain there were no headaches so it seems as if the neuroprotective properties and everything else must have been working,” Stazicker said. “We felt great from that respect because over a long time at altitude your body just degrades so maybe we can attribute some of that to xenon.”
Carns, who brought to the summit a flag he carried on multiple military tours in Afghanistan, likened the experience to climbing “30 100-story buildings” over three days. The men approached the task with military-style precision and attitude, using it to raise money for veterans and their families even as the use of xenon proved controversial in the climbing community.
“When you sort of challenge the status quo, it does become something that people immediately start to defend against,” Godlington said. “For us, the use of the xenon gas has always been about the only two things that kill you in the mountain physiologically: a pulmonary edema or a cerebral edema.”
Cerebral edema especially can happen in Everest’s “death zone” above roughly 26,000 feet. Xenon, Fries found, can offer protection. Fatalities occur every year on the mountain and climbers, including the four men, passed the sobering sight of corpses whose removal is too difficult at the highest levels. There was a perception with xenon that the four used it “fundamentally to cheat,” Godlington said, “and it’s never been about that.”
The four men now are headed to reunions with their wives and children and a resumption of their lives - after a bit of a vacation with their kids on school holiday. Carns joked their next assignment would be “seven beaches in seven days,” but they hope their story continues to raise money for veterans and their families.
“The key thing to remember out of all of this is we’re only halfway there, so we’ve achieved the mission of going from London to the top of Everest and back to London in seven days,” Miller said, “and now we have to achieve the fundraising target of a million pounds for veterans and armed forces charities.”
As he awaits medical results on whether xenon will be a significant game changer for speed climbing, Furtenbach took stock of where climbing stands now. The seven-day expedition is a record for climbers who did not acclimatize in the Himalayas, according to the BBC, but the fastest ascent belongs to Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, who climbed from base camp to the summit in 10 hours 56 minutes after acclimatizing on Everest in 2003. Furtenbach estimates that it took the four men four days and about 18 hours to go up and back.
“Climbing Everest is never just about reaching the summit. It’s about pushing human boundaries safely, responsibly, and with integrity,” he wrote on Instagram. “The 7-Day Mission Everest was never a stunt … it was a meticulously planned scientific and medical expedition designed to explore the future of high-altitude mountaineering. … We had continuous SpO2 [oxygen saturation] monitoring, 24/7 emergency care, altitude simulation for pre-acclimatization, and a dedicated safety team. Every step was calculated, every risk mitigated. Our goal? To improve mountain safety for everyone, not to glorify speed.”
He cautioned other climbers that the “seven-day mission was … a controlled test, not a template to follow blindly,” adding that “speed means nothing if safety is sacrificed. Let’s push boundaries — but never at the cost of lives.”
