Ace mountaineer Skalzang Rigzin scaled Everest on May 23 without supplemental oxygen. This marks the second confirmed no-oxygen summit on Everest this season. At a time when hundreds of oxygen summits are being conducted at the Everest on a daily basis, Rigzin’s effort has been acclaimed as supercritical.
Rigzin, 42, hails from Tia village in Ladakh and is the president of the Mountain Guide Association of Ladakh. He has been guiding climbers and himself has been scaling summits for nearly 30 years in the Indian and Bhutan ranges of the Himalayas.
Earlier in 2022, he had scaled Annapurna the 10th highest peak and Lhotse the fourth highest mountain on earth without supplemental oxygen within 16 days from peak to peak.
He had also scaled and led a few critical expeditions like the Indo-French joint expedition of Peak Rimo IV; the Indo-British joint expedition for Arganglas; the Indo-Japanese joint expedition of Mt Padmanabha, Nun and Kun in Ladakh and a large number of virgin peaks and more than 6000 other summits. He has been the recipient of the Jagdish Nanavati Garud Medal from The Himalayan Club in 2017.