What Are the Seven Summits—and Who Climbed Them First?

Also known as Puncak Jaya, Carstensz Pyramid rises out of the rainforest on the Indonesian side of the island of New Guinea. Although near the equator, small (and steadily shrinking) glaciers can be seen from its steep, limestone faces. It was the second-to-last of the Seven Summits to be scaled; a team that included Austrian explorer and author Heinrich Harrer, who wrote Seven Years in Tibet, finally reached the top in 1962.

Getting to Carstensz Pyramid is half the battle. Visitors used to arrive via a muddy, multiday hike, Hamill says, but that route is now perceived as too dangerous because of intratribal conflict, as well as conflict between the tribes, ethnic Indonesians and tourists. “No one really treks anymore,” Hamill says. “Everybody takes the helicopter from [the city of] Timika.”

Carstensz Pyramid is alone among the Seven Summits in requiring rock climbing skills. “Right out of base camp you start climbing, and it’s a vertical rock ascent the whole way, never super difficult because there are fixed ropes, but very exposed,” Hamill says. He adds that gloves are a necessity because the rock is so sharp and that storms roll in most afternoons. One section requires traversing a wobbly cable bridge over a seemingly bottomless chasm.

The mountain is geographically within Oceania. But because Indonesia is considered part of Asia politically, many Seven Summiters also choose to tackle the highest peak in mainland Australia: Mount Kosciuszko. At 7,310 feet high, Mount Kosciuszko—named for a Polish hero of the American Revolution—is a relative stroll in the park compared to the other Seven Summits, though it does get snow in winter.

Named for U.S. Representative Carl Vinson, a prominent supporter of Antarctic exploration, Vinson Massif—with Mount Vinson at its apex—lies within Antarctica’s Ellsworth Mountains. It is so remote that it wasn’t discovered until 1958 by U.S. Navy aircraft. Eight years later, a team led by U.S. lawyer and mountaineer Nicholas Clinch became the first to stand on the summit.

Unsurprisingly, the weather on Vinson Massif is downright frigid. Even in the Antarctic summer, when most ascents occur, the temperature can dip to minus 40 degrees without the wind chill, Hamill says. Climbers arrive by plane and carry their food and gear on sleds. Fixed lines grace the steeper parts, Hamill says, but overall it’s not particularly technical. “It’s a very desolate, serene environment,” Hamill says. “Often you can’t tell what’s the glacier and what’s the sky because it all blends together.”

As of 2025, no deaths had been recorded on Vinson, a far cry from Mount Everest and even much smaller mountains such as Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Some intrepid adventurers combine an ascent of Vinson with a ski trip to the South Pole.

A dormant, twin-coned volcano that last erupted around A.D. 50, Mount Elbrus resides in the Caucasus Range of southern Russia, near the border with Georgia. The lower eastern summit was first ascended in 1829 by a Russian army team, and the higher western summit was first ascended in 1874 by a British and Swiss team with a local Balkar guide. In recent times, most mountaineers take a cable car up to a ski resort at around 12,500 feet and trek from there with crampons and ice axes in tow. “It’s a beautiful climb in a beautiful part of the world,” Hamill says.

However, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the country has been largely closed off to Westerners, and Mount Elbrus is no exception. “No one’s really going there right now,” Martin says. As an alternative, some Seven Summiters head to Mont Blanc in the Alps, on the France-Italy border, which, at over 15,700 feet, is the highest peak in Western Europe.

Another dormant volcano, Mount Kilimanjaro is the world’s highest solitary peak (not connected to a larger mountain range). Located in Tanzania, near the Kenyan border, it looms over the African plains below.

In 1889, Hans Meyer of Germany and Ludwig Purtscheller of Austria—aided by local Chagga guides—made the first recorded ascent to the summit. Although around 90 percent of its ice has melted since then, the top of Kilimanjaro remains glaciated, a fact that astounded the first European visitors.

On the easier routes up Kilimanjaro, it’s a relatively simple hike, with no technical skills required. Plus, “you have all these porters helping you, so you barely carry anything up the mountain,” Martin says. Nonetheless, climbers must be careful to properly acclimatize. Some have even died of altitude sickness. “I think that’s the biggest issue, people underestimating it and trying to run up there too quickly,” Hamill says.

The most highly visited of the Seven Summits, tens of thousands of people climb Kilimanjaro every year. Many of them combine a trip to the “Roof of Africa” with a safari to see the area’s plentiful wildlife.

Also known as Mount McKinley, Denali (meaning “The High One” or “The Great One” in Indigenous Athabascan languages) has one of the highest base-to-summit vertical rises of any mountain in the world, even more so than Kilimanjaro or Everest. Located within Denali National Park and Preserve, in the Alaska Range in the south-central portion of the state, it towers over the surrounding tundra and forests. Hudson Stuck, a missionary and mountaineer, led the first successful ascent of the peak in 1913.

Along with Everest, Denali is considered to be the hardest of the Seven Summits. The roughly 1,000 climbers who attempt it each year face freezing temperatures, high winds and the threat of avalanches and crevasses. Moreover, with no porters or pack animals allowed, everyone must carry about 140 pounds of food, equipment and gear, explains Martin, who has twice summited Denali. “We pull sleds, and we do the mountain in stages,” he says, adding that the sleds “can get pretty unruly going downhill.”

Everything, including human waste, must be packed in and out. Climbers must also dig out their campsites, melt snow for water, clean snow off their tents at all hours and forego anything approximating a shower. “There’s a lot of self-management on Denali,” Martin says. “Everyone works really hard to get up that mountain and back down.”

Located in Argentina, near the border with Chile, Aconcagua is the highest peak in the Andes—and hence the highest peak in the Western and Southern hemispheres. It was first scaled in 1897 by Matthias Zurbriggen of Switzerland. The most popular route, up a dirt-scree slope, is considered nontechnical. Nonetheless, “if you’re susceptible to high altitude then you can get into a lot of trouble,” Hamill says.

Aconcagua is also infamous for high winds, frequent storms and extreme cold near the summit and for big temperature swings lower down. Sometimes, but not always, there’s enough snow to require crampons, Hamill says. Of the nearly 30,000 climbers who attempted Aconcagua from 2013 to 2024, 21 are known to have died.

Many other Andes mountains are likewise enormous. In fact, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador all have peaks higher than Denali.

The king of them all, Mount Everest in the Himalayas is the highest point above sea level on planet Earth. British schoolteacher George Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine may have reached the summit as early as 1924, but they died on the attempt. In 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa, became the first humans to indisputably set foot atop the “Mother Goddess of the World,” as it’s called in Tibetan.

Hamill says he has a “love-hate relationship” with Everest, which straddles the border of Nepal and Tibet. On the one hand, the mountain is littered with corpses—particularly in the so-called “death zone” above 26,000 feet—as well as loads of trash, including empty oxygen bottles, human excrement and plastic food packaging. There’s also “a lot of personal ego and lack of humility that people get caught up in with a goal as big as Everest,” Hamill says. On the other hand, he says that “it’s a pretty incredible place” and that he meets “amazing people” each time he goes. The Sherpa, for example, are typically kind, generous and welcoming, with “an incredible work ethic,” Hamill says.

Everest is surrounded by other sky-high peaks that would dwarf even the highest mountains anywhere else. In the Himalayas and nearby Karakoram Range, 14 peaks exceed 8,000 meters, or 26,247 feet. More than 100 additional peaks in and around the Himalayas exceed 7,000 meters, or 22,966 feet. All of these are higher than Aconcagua.