George Ingle Finch And The Mount Everest Expedition of 1922: Breaching The 8000-m Barrier

Abstract

Rodway, George W. George Ingle Finch and the Mount Everest expedition of 1922: breaching the 8000-m barrier. High Alt. Med. Biol. 8:68–76, 2007.—Alpinist and scientist George Ingle Finch was invited on the 1921 British Mount Everest Reconnaissance, but events conspired to keep him away from Everest until the 1922 British expedition to the mountain. Very little is known in the English-speaking world about the 1925 German language book Der Kampf um den Everest, written by Finch and covering the Everest attempts of the 1920s, as it was never published in English. Additionally, very little has been published from Finch's personal diaries of the 1922 Everest climb. The object of this work is to utilize translated sections of Der Kampf um den Everest and passages from Finch's 1922 Everest diaries to create some sense of George Finch's personal perspective of the 1922 Everest attempt. This historic climb was the first mountaineering expedition to breach the 8000-m barrier when two separate parties, one climbing with supplementary oxygen and the other without, established new terrestrial altitude records.