This Mountain Climbing Method Cuts Summit Times in Half

When Brooks Entwistle, a partner at Everstone Group in Singapore, climbed the sixth-tallest mountain in the world, the 26,8000-foot-tall Cho Oyu, he didn’t take the typical seven weeks. He took three weeks off and sandwiched the 17-day ascent between a board meeting and a parent-teacher conference.

That timeframe was unheard of in guided high-altitude mountaineering until recently, when Tahoe-based Alpenglow Expeditions began offering its first “rapid ascent” climbs up some of the tallest peaks in the world. In April, the outfitter will guide a group to summit the 29,000-foot Mount Everest in 42 days, nearly half the time of most expeditions. Later this year, Alpenglow will take another group up Argentina’s Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the western hemisphere, in 14 days instead of the usual 20-plus.