First Without Oxygen I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits. Reinhold Messner, Everest Climbing Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, was a challenge that eluded scores of great mountaineers until 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay first reached its summit. Over the next three decades, more firsts followed, including the ...