[Image: Instagram / Kentoncool]
A British mountain guide has just flipped gravity the bird again.
Kenton Cool, 51, from southwest England, bagged his 19th Mount Everest summit on Sunday, smashing his own record for the most ascents of the world’s highest peak by a non-Sherpa.
“Cool” by name and apparently by nature, he scaled the 8,849-metre beast with several fellow climbers, and according to Iswari Paudel of Himalayan Guides Nepal – the outfit behind the mission – he was “doing well and on his way down from the summit”, per AP News. Casual. Just another stroll above the death zone.
The man’s basically on a first-name basis with the mountain at this point. He first conquered Everest in 2004 and has been back almost every year since, like it’s some annual work retreat.
That said, even legends get benched: in 2014, the season was cancelled after a tragic avalanche killed 16 Sherpa guides. The following year, an earthquake-triggered avalanche took 19 more lives, grounding Cool again. And in 2020? COVID did what even Everest couldn’t, shut him down.
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Right now, hundreds of climbers and their guides are swarming the slopes, chasing that summit photo before the monsoon crashes the party at the end of the month. It’s a seasonal window of madness, and Cool just slid through it once more.
Worth noting: only Nepali Sherpas have climbed Everest more times than this guy. At the top of the leaderboard is Kami Rita, who’s notched 30 summits so far and, yep, is back on the mountain this week.
If Everest were a club, Rita would be the bouncer and Cool the VIP guest who knows how to work the room.
[Source: AP News]
