Conquering the Himalayas: An Analysis of Himalayan Peaks and Expeditions from 1905 to 2019
The Himalayas contain many of the world’s highest peaks, the most famous of which is Everest. Many put climbing these peaks on a personal bucket list, others enjoy the danger and thrill of battling the elements and ‘Conquering’ the Mountain. Whatever the personal reason for climbing peaks in the Himalayas, the Total number of Climbers attempting expeditions has grown drastically from the first recorded attempt to climb a Himalayan peak in 1905 to 2018 when 1,847 climbers attempted a peak.
I will use data from The Himalayan Database to show some of the most interesting information about the Himalayan Peaks and the recorded Expeditions to climb them.
One of the most staggering statistics on about the Himalayas is just how many peaks there are other than Everest (468 total) and the fact that not every peak has been successfully climbed.
The BBC has an article that has some explanation as to why so many of the Himalayan peaks remain unconquered
Many in the 6,000-to-7,000m (19,800ft-to-23,100ft) range in the Himalayas, for example, haven’t been climbed yet simply because people tend to focus on the 8,000m (26,400ft) peaks. In addition, more and more mountains that were once off limits are now reachable, including 104 peaks recently opened in Nepal. It’s probably only a matter of time until those last unclimbed peaks are scaled.
The theory from that article of most people focusing on the taller 8,000+ meter peaks makes some sense because looking at the tallest peak climbed for the first time in a year from the 1950–1970s almost all of the 8,000+ meter peaks were climbed. After 2000 though it appears that some emphasis may have been put on climbing previously unconquered peaks.
To further cement this idea, even as the number of climbers per year has dramatically grown since the early years the percentage of climbers attempting one of the 3 most popular peaks has grown to over 50% of all climbers attempting to climb in the Himalayas. Two of those most popular peaks are over 8,000 meters tall.
With more climbers attempting peaks every year it may be a surprise but success rates rose pretty consistently since the early 1900s. A notable exception is in 2015 when earthquakes caused avalanches and unsafe conditions and an expedition success rate under 25%.
Even with success rates on the rise the biggest reasons for failed expeditions are bad weather and conditions. The rest of the issues seem to stem from the inexperience of the more casual climbers that have flocked to the Himalayas as the total number of climbers per year has grown dramatically.
The US leads all countries for most climbers over from 1909 to 2019 but note this list excludes any climbers hired for an expedition. If those were to be included unsurprisingly Nepal would far and away have the most climbers.
This analysis would not be possible without the work of Alex Cookson who cleaned the data and R for Data Science’s project called Tidy Tuesday which is where I first found the data.
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For the code to reproduce the graphs shown here and more exploratory data analysis see the GitHub repo below
https://github.com/thedataviz/Tidy-Tuesday/tree/master/9-22-2020%20Conquering%20The%20Himilayas
