1999 Juanito Oiarzabal Annapurna I 14th Summit Expedition

Spain / Basque Country🏔️ 7 Peaks

Juanito Oiarzabal

Juan Eusebio Oiarzabal Urteaga was born on March 30, 1956, in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Álava, in the Basque Country of northern Spain. He began rock climbing in the Pyrenees and Picos de Europa before making his Himalayan debut in 1985 on Cho Oyu (8,188m). Possessing extraordinary physiological resilience and an outspoken, passionate temperament, Oiarzabal became the driving force behind the Basque mountaineering explosion of the 1990s. Between 1985 and 1999, Oiarzabal scaled all fourteen of the world's 8,000-meter peaks without once using supplemental bottled oxygen. On April 29, 1999, he stood on the summit of Annapurna I (8,091m), completing the 14 Eight-Thousanders. He became the first Spaniard and only the third climber in history (after Reinhold Messner and Erhard Loretan) to complete the feat without bottled oxygen. He also achieved the rare distinction of summiting the three highest mountains on Earth—Everest, K2, and Kangchenjunga—without supplemental oxygen. Never content to rest on his laurels, Oiarzabal launched his ambitious '2x14' project: becoming the first person to climb all fourteen eight-thousanders twice. By 2012, he had amassed twenty-six individual summits of 8,000-meter peaks—the all-time world record for most summits above 8,000 meters. His career was marked by incredible grit; in 2004, after surviving a catastrophic descent from K2 in which he suffered severe frostbite that necessitated the amputation of all ten toes, Oiarzabal returned to the death zone to continue climbing. He is widely decorated with Spain's Gold Medal of the Royal Order of Sports Merit.