A Chinese mountain climber recently sparked controversy after reportedly refusing to pay the $10,000 resue fee of the sherpa who found her unconscious on Mount Everest.

On May 18, while making the climb up Mount Everest, Chinese mountain climber Fan Jiangtao stumbled upon an unconscious woman in her 50s. An experienced mountain climber herself, the woman had reportedly reached the summit and was on her way back to base camp when she started experiencing health problems. Fan and the sherpa decided to abandon their goal of conquering Everest in order to take Luo back to the base camp safely. During their descent, they met Xie Ruxiang, a Hunan Provincial Mountain Climbing Association member, who also abandoned his climb in order to help. His sherpa, however, was reluctant to join them, but they needed the extra hands so Xie promised him a fee of $10,000, to which the man agreed. No one asked the person being rescued, though…

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A popular Japanese tailor and adventurer recently went viral on social media after climbing Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Malaysia, in a three-piece suit and stylish leather suit.

One of the last things you would expect to see at the top of the 4,095-meter Mount Kinabalu is a Japanese fellow wearing a pristine three-piece suit, classy leather suit, and an office ID tag around his neck and carrying a messenger bag. And yet that was exactly the unusual sight that mountaineers at the top of Malaysia’s highest peak were treated to this week as Nobutaka Sada, a Japanese tailor and adventurer, posed for photos and videos to post on his popular social media accounts. Sada owns his own bespoke suit label and he often pulls this kind of stunt to promote his brand.

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A 75-year-old retired attorney from Chicago recently became the oldest American to ever conquest Everest, the world’s tallest mountain top. The craziest thing is that he had only started mountaineering 7 years prior.

Arthur Muir, a married father of three and grandfather of six, had been fascinated with mountain climbing ever since his father gave him a book about the Himalayas when he was a child, and that fascination only grew when  Barry Bishop, a legendary climber and conqueror of Everest, visited his high-school in 1964. However, he never followed his dream of picking up mountaineering until a friend convinced him to do so, seven years ago, but once he did, he couldn’t stop.

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Popular Q&A online platform AskFM recently launched its own cryptocurrency, ASKT, and decided to celebrate by hosting an original giveaway. Instead of simply giving away some tokens to randomly selected winners, they buried a crypto-wallet with 500,000 tokens in it on Mount Everest and challenged anyone brave enough to go find it.

The Dublin-based start-up is similar to Quora or Yahoo Answers, and is currently the world’s largest questions and answers platform in the world. But as part of its rebranding as AskFM 2.0, the company also launched it’s own cryptocurrency token, which it plans to use to reward users for quality content. In an effort to raise awareness about its new crypto, called ASKT, AskFM came up with a controversial publicity stunt that involves challenging brave people to climb Mount Everest and look for a cryptocurrency ledger with $50,000 in tokens buried somewhere on the summit. It’s ‘finders, keepers’.

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69-year-old Xia Boyu recently became the oldest double amputee to conquer Mount Everest. That alone is an amazing achievement, but even more impressive is the fact that he did it on his fifth attempt, the first of which had caused him the loss of both his feet as a result of severe frostbite.

Xia Boyu’s first tried to reach the top of Mount Everest in 1975, as part of an expedition backed by the Chinese Government. With only 250 meters to go from reaching the summit, the team was pinned down by bad weather which didn’t let up for two days and three nights. The long wait took its toll on the climbers, and to make sure that everyone made it back alive, the team decided to turn back and fulfil their dream another time. During the descent, Xia gave his sleeping bag to one of his colleagues who was in a worse shape than him. Unfortunately, this selfless act would cause him to lose both his feet to frostbite.

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At 1,345 meters above sea level, Ben Nevis is definitely not the World’s most difficult mountain to climb. But things get considerably trickier if instead of hiking shoes you put on a pair of 5-inch high heels, especially if you’re a guy. But one English teenager recently proved that it’s not impossible.

Ben Conway, a 19-year-old art student from London, recently took up the challenge of hiking up to the top of the highest mountain in the UK in high-heel shoes, as a way to stand out in an application for a scholarship for the School of Communication Arts in Brixton. Applicants were asked to “make something passionate about something that they are passionate about,” and since Ben loves drag culture and has been scouting for 13 years, he decided that marrying the two hobbies was a good idea.

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Alex Honnold, a 31-year-old mountain climber from Northern California, recently became the first person ever to climb the 3,000-foot high El Capitan granite wall in Yosemite National Park, without any ropes or other safety equipment.

Hannold pulled-off the historic, death-defying “free solo” climb on Saturday, June 4th, reaching the top of El Capitan in just 3 hours and 56 minutes. All he used as gear was a bag of chalk powder to improve his grip on the slippery granite. To make his job a little easier, the young climber climbed the wall several times before, using ropes, and marked every toe and finger-hold he would use during his free climb, with chalk. Even so, the challenge was monumental, and his success prompted Alpinist Magazine to write “This is indisputably the greatest free solo of all time.”

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Most mountaineers wouldn’t venture out on an expedition without the proper gear and attire, but a group of Bolivian women have shocked the world by climbing some of South America’s highest mountains – all while wearing their traditional attire of colorful, layered skirts. Dressed in ‘cholita paceñas’ outfits complete with Andean ‘aguayo’ shawls and knitted cardigans, they look like typical grannies albeit on a serious mission.

These women, belonging to the indigenous Aymara people of the Andes, would normally stay at home while their husbands worked as mountain guides in the worst of conditions. They would cook at base camps or work as porters, never actually scaling the treacherous peaks themselves. But all that changed a couple of years ago, when Lydia Huayllas, wife of a mountain guide, wanted to know what it felt like to scale the steep, glacial slopes of the 19,974-foot Huayna Potosi mountain.

“What do you do up there, how does it feel?” she asked her husband, Eulalio Gonzalez. In response, he told her to find out for herself. So she did just that.

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The Solvay Hut may be quite humble in its construction, but the view it offers its residents is priceless. This tiny hut is perched right on the narrow north-eastern ridge of Matterhorn, in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland. It is the highest mountain hut in the region, at over 13,000 foot above ground level.

The emergency refuge is owned by the Swiss Alpine club, and is intended to provide food and shelter to mountaineers, hikers and climbers. At about 1,500 foot below the summit and two-thirds up the mountain, it provides respite to many Matterhorn climbers and rewards them with the breathtaking view of all the Monte Rosa summits. It is only meant to be used during emergencies, but climbers do stop there to rest and click photographs.

The hut, which can accommodate about 10 people, is not a recent construction. It was actually built way back in 1915 and took only five days to complete. All the building materials were brought up to Hornli Hut, just 2,500 foot below, with the help of animals. A small temp cable car was used to haul up the materials from there. It was rebuilt in 1966 and an emergency telephone was installed in 1976.

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American rock climber Alex Honnold has had an incredibly good (and miraculously lucky) start to 2014. He managed to climb El Sendero Luminoso, a 1,500 foot wall, without the use of any safety gear.

Alex is being dubbed a ‘real-life Spiderman’, but I wouldn’t agree with that moniker because even Spiderman spun a web and used it to swing across walls. But Alex uses just his bare hands and fingers to climb.

He recently ascended a 1,500 foot limestone big-wall route called El Sendero Luminoso in Mexico. While most parties generally take two days to complete the climb, Alex completed it in just three hours, by clinging to tiny crevices all the way up. “I would stop at the occasional good foothold and shake it out, but for the most part I kept a very steady pace,” he said.

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