Have Mountain, Will Climb Trivia Quiz

Answer: Annapurna I

Annapurna I, long considered to be the most dangerous of the 8000ers to climb, was, somewhat surprisingly, the first one to be summited. It happened on 3 June 1950 and it was a French expedition led by Maurice Herzog that claimed this record by scaling the north face. Annapurna I is the world's tenth highest mountain peaking at 8091m. Technically, Annapurna I has three summits, the previously mentioned Annapurna I (Main), Annapurna I (Central) at 8051m and Annapurna I (East) at a paltry 8010m. It was the Main peak atop which Herzog and his team stood in 1950 and is normally the peak that is considered to be the true summit of Annapurna I. The name comes from the Hindu goddess of food and nourishment with 'anna' being food and 'purna' meaning filled in Sanskrit.

Annapurna I lies in the Annapurna Range, a sub-range of the Himalaya, in north central Nepal. This range also contains 13 peaks over 7000m and another 16 over 6000m. The massif sprawls over some fifty odd kilometres and is bounded by the Marshyangdi River in the north and east, the Pokhara valley to the South and the world's deepest gorge, the Kali Gandak, to the west. Annapurna I is known for its treacherous weather conditions with intense cold, high velocity winds and year round snowfall.

Answer: True

Mont Blanc, the legendary 'White Mountain', is the highest peak in the Alps and the second highest peak in Europe after Mount Elbrus. The first recorded successful ascent of this mountain by Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard on 8 August 1786 is considered to be the birth of modern mountaineering. Mont Blanc, which lends its name to the massif that ranges across France, Italy and Switzerland, has an official height of 4808m, although the actual height can vary depending on the depth of the snowcap which permanently covers its summit. This makes it the 11th highest mountain in the world. Mont Blanc is covered with glaciers and is home to the Alps' second longest glacier, the Mer de Glace.

The ownership of Mont Blanc has been the subject of a long standing dispute between France and Italy as its summit runs along a ridge that is the watershed between valleys located in both France and Italy. This ridge has served as the border between the two countries since a bilateral agreement, the Treaty of Turin, was signed in 1860 that shared ownership between the two countries. In Italy it is known as Monte Bianco.

Answer: Mount Everest

Peak XV was the singularly unimaginative name given to what turned out to be the world's highest mountain by the surveyors participating in the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. Although to be fair, at the time, they didn't realize that Peak XV was going to turn out to be the highest mountain on earth. This fact was only established in 1852 and, because Peak XV had a number of local names, the incumbent Surveyor General of India, Andrew Waugh, decided, so as not to cause offense to any group, to name it after his predecessor, Sir George Everest. And so, in 1865, Peak XV became Mount Everest which still remains its English name. It also known as Chomolungma which means "Mother Goddess of the World" in the local Chinese language and Sagarthma, the "Peak of Heaven" in Nepali and Sanskrit.

Mount Everest stands at a whopping 8848.8m above sea level as measured in 2020 by both Nepali and Chinese authorities. It lies in the Mahalangur Himal, a sub-range of the mighty Himalayas that contains four of the world's six highest peaks. The border between China and Nepal runs across its summit.

After being declared the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest became a siren call for the mountaineering world. However, it took over a century for the first verifiable ascent to be made. On 29 May 1953, the new Zealander, Edmund Hillary, stood together with his Sherpa companion, Tenzing Norgay, on the roof of the world.

Answer: Aconcagua

Cerro Aconcagua holds a number of geographical records. At 6961m, it is the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas. It is the highest peak both in the southern hemisphere and in the Americas. It is the second highest of the Seven Summits, the highest point on each continent, with only Mount Everest topping it. Aconcagua lies in western Argentina, some 15 miles from the border with Chile and 112km north of the city of Mendoza. It forms part of the Principal Cordillera in the Central Andes mountain range. Originally formed by plate tectonics when the Nazca plate moved under the South American plate, Aconcagua was once a strato-volcano, although it has been extinct for a long time. The exact origin of the name is uncertain, but it is widely accepted that it comes from Quechua, the native language of the area, and has been translated as the "Sentinel of Stone".

The mountain is considered to be one of the more accessible peaks for climbing in terms of difficulty when approached from the 'normal route'. This was the route used by Matthias Zurbriggen, a Swiss climber, who made the first verifiable ascent of Aconcagua on 14 January 1897. Although Zurbriggen's ascent is the first recorded one to reach the top, there are traces of Inca civilization and culture near the summit, suggesting that they may have ascended it before records were kept.

Answer: True

According to scientists and geologists, Denali is growing at a rate of approximately 1mm annually. This means that in about two million years, a brief time in geological terms, Denali will be one kilometre higher than its present 6190m, the official height declared after it was measured by GPS in 2015. This growth is due to plate tectonics. This is the process that originally caused the formation of the Alaskan Range of which Denali is a part, as the Pacific plate moves towards and underneath the North American plate at a rate of about 5cm a year and pushes up the land.

Denali, which means the "Tall or High One" in the Native Alaskan language of Koyukon, is the highest point in North America and is the third highest of the Seven Summits after Everest and Aconcagua. It is situated in the Denali National Park some 210 kilometres NNW of Anchorage, Alaska. Denali has two summits with the South Summit being 387m higher than the North Summit. It was this summit that was reached on 7 June 1913 by Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens, Walter Harper and Robert Tatum and which was the first verifiable ascent of the mountain.

Answer: Antarctica

Mount Vinson has been called the "top of the bottom of the world". It is one of the Seven Summits, being the highest peak in Antarctica at 4892m, as measured by a GPS survey in 2004. Together with five neighboring peaks, it forms the Vinson Massif in the Sentinel Range of the Ellesmere Mountains. This massif is about 1200 kilometres from the South Pole and sits overlooking the Ronne Ice Shelf at the base of the Antarctic Peninsula. Although the Ellesmere Mountains were first spotted by Lincoln Ellesmere in 1935, it was not until January 1958 that a US Navy plane from the Byrd Station recorded the peak now known as Mount Vinson. In 1961, the Advisory Committee for Antarctic Names decided to call the peak after a US Congressman from Georgia, Carl G. Vinson, who was a staunch supporter of Antarctic exploration.

In 1966, the American Antarctic Mountaineering Expedition (AAME) led by Nicholas Clinch set forth with the aim of scaling Mount Vinson. This was a success as the first four members of the team reached the summit on 18 December 1966, the height of the Antarctic summer. Over the next two days, the remaining members all stood atop this peak.

Answer: True

The mighty K2, the pyramidal shaped mountain that rises from the base of the Baltoro Glacier, is the highest peak in the Karakoram, a range of mountains that contains four peaks over 8000m and another eighteen over 7500m. At 8849m, K2 is second only to Mount Everest in height by 237m. It sits on the border between China to the north and Pakistan to the south. For such a beautiful and impressive mountain, its name is quite prosaic. K2 comes from 1856 and the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India and it was so named simply because it was the second peak measured in the Karakoram range. Even the local name in the Balti language, "Chogori", simply means "Big Mountain". It has also been known as Mount Godwin-Austen after its first surveyor, Col H. Godwin-Austen, but this name has, in most instances, been replaced.

Nicknamed the "Savage Mountain", K2 is known for its unpredictable weather with frequent violent storms and for the steepness of its slopes. In mountaineering terms, it is considered to be the ultimate challenge. The first ascent of its summit came on 31 July 1954 by the Italian duo of Achille Campagnoni and Lino Lacedelli. It took some sixty-six years for the first winter ascent to be made. This occurred on 16 January 2021 by a twelve man Sherpa team from Nepal.

Answer: Africa

The snow capped peak of Kilimamjaro rising from the plains of Northern Tanzania is one of the iconic sights of Africa. This dormant volcano is, at 5985m, the highest peak in Africa and is also the highest free standing mountain in the world. It is situated in the Kilmanjaro National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, near Tanzania's northern border with Kenya. Kilimanjaro consists of three volcanic cones, Kibu, Mawenzi and Shira. The true summit of Kilimanjaro, Ulhuru Peak, isn't actually a peak, but the highest point on the crater rim of Kibu. Both Mawenzi and Shira are extinct cones, but Kibu is only dormant with the possibility existing that it could still erupt sometime in the future.

It isn't certain where the name Kilimanjaro originated, but it is thought to come from the local Swahili language and mean "Shining Mountain" or "Mountain of Whiteness". The first recorded ascent of Kilimanjaro happened on 6 October 1889 when Hans Meyer, Ludwig Purtcheller and a local guide, Yohani Lauwu, reached the top of Ulhuru Peak. It was also brought the first confirmation that Kibu contained a crater.

Answer: Indonesia

Puncak Jaya, or Carstensz Pryamid as it is also known, lies amid thick jungle in the western half of the island of New Guinea, in the Central Papua province of Indonesia. It is part of the Sundiman Range and, at 4884m, it is the highest peak in the world situated on an island. It was formed when there was a collision between the Australian and Pacific plates. The name Puncak Jaya means "Glorious Peak" in the local language, while the European version of Carstenz Pyramid harks back to 1623 when a Dutch explorer, Jan Carstensz, first laid eyes on its shining glaciers. Puncak Jaya is one of the few equatorial mountains to have glaciers so people thought that poor old Cartsensz was quite addled when he reported his discovery.

Because of its remote location, hostile local inhabitants and political considerations, it took until 13 February 1962 for the first recorded ascent of Puncak Jaya to be made. This was accomplished by the Austrian climber, Heinrich Harrer, and his team. Harrer, probably best known as the author of "Seven Years in Tibet" also wrote a book about the summit expedition and his time in Papua called "I Come from the Stone Age".

Answer: Shishapangma

It is perhaps ironic that Shishapangma, the lowest of the 8000er's at 8027m, was the last of the fourteen to be summited. However, this delay had more to do with its location and regional politics than it did the technical difficulty of the mountain's slopes. Shishapangma is the only of the 8000ers to be located entirely within Tibet. It lies in the Jugal Himal, part of the Western Himalayas range in south central Tibet, some 5 kilometres from the border with Nepal. It is the only 8000er to lie completely in Chinese territory. The access to foreign visitors was heavily restricted or totally forbidden until 1980 when the Chinese government started to allow foreign climbers, although a permit system with strict rules applies.

In the Tibetan language the name Shishapangma means "Crest above the Grassy Plains" or "The God of the Grasslands" depending on the translation. It has two peaks. It consists of the Central Summit, which tops out at 8008m, and the True Summit, which is the main central peak at 8027m. It was this summit that was first ascended on 2 May 1964 by a Chinese team led by Xu Jing.