Climbing Trivia
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47 free Climbing trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free climbing trivia questions with answers. From the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786 to Adam Ondra's 9c in a Norwegian cave, this quiz covers climbing in all its forms. Forty-two questions take in the mountaineering milestones (Hillary and Tenzing, Mallory's disappearance, Messner without oxygen, Junko Tabei, the 1996 Everest disaster, K2 in winter, the Eiger's Mordwand and the Seven Summits) and the rock side too: Warren Harding's 47 days on the Nose, Lynn Hill freeing it, Honnold's rope-free El Capitan, the Dawn Wall, John Gill inventing modern bouldering, the V-scale and YDS, and sport climbing's Olympic debut in Tokyo. Easy questions ask which mountain is highest and who first stood on top; the hard ones want the Nose speed record to the second, the grade of Silence and how many died on the Eiger's north face. Suits climbers, hikers and anyone who has watched Free Solo through their fingers. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the mountains, routes and climbers involved, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who made the first documented ascent of Mount Everest in 1953?
Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary
Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary's success was sent to The Times in code, as 'Snow conditions bad', and the news broke on the morning of Elizabeth II's coronation.
Q 02A 2020 joint survey fixed Everest's height at 8,848.86 m, ending a dispute between Nepal and which country?
China
China had long counted only the rock, nearly four metres lower than Nepal's figure, which included the snow cap; the two announced 8,848.86 metres together in December 2020.
Q 03Which name does Nepal use for Everest, shared with the national park around the mountain?
Sagarmatha
Sagarmatha is the Nepali name and Chomolungma the Tibetan one; in the 1850s the British said they could find no local name for the peak, and named it after one of their own instead.
Q 04Mount Everest was named after Sir George Everest, who held what job?
Surveyor General of India
Surveyor General of India until 1843, George Everest had retired to England before his old office measured Peak XV; it was named for him anyway, in 1865.
Q 05Which climber, who vanished on Everest in 1924, is credited with the reply 'Because it's there'?
George Mallory
George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were last glimpsed by a teammate through a break in the mist, still climbing; nobody knows whether they reached the top before they died.
Q 06Which lost item might prove Everest was climbed in 1924?
Camera
A camera, a pocket Kodak lent by a teammate, went up with the two climbers lost that year; it was not with the body found in 1999, so its undeveloped film is still the prize of every search.
Q 07Who first climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen, in 1978?
Messner and Habeler
Messner and Habeler did what many doctors and climbers had called impossible, and two years later Reinhold Messner went back and climbed Everest alone, again without bottled oxygen.
Q 08What do climbers call altitudes above about 8,000 metres?
The death zone
The death zone begins where the air holds too little oxygen to sustain life for long: the body can no longer adapt, so every hour spent there leaves a climber weaker.
Q 09Who became the first woman to summit Everest, on 16 May 1975?
Junko Tabei
Junko Tabei was knocked unconscious when an avalanche buried her tent, and Sherpa guides had to dig her out; twelve days later the Japanese climber stood on the summit.
Q 10Which guide radioed a farewell to his pregnant wife from Everest in 1996?
Rob Hall
Rob Hall, a New Zealander, told her 'Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don't worry too much' and died soon after, one of eight climbers killed by the storm.
Q 11Which journalist on assignment for Outside magazine survived the 1996 Everest disaster and wrote Into Thin Air?
Jon Krakauer
Jon Krakauer had joined a guided team to report on the commercialisation of Everest; the magazine story he filed afterwards grew into a number-one bestseller.
Q 12Where on Everest did one avalanche kill 16 Sherpas in 2014?
The Khumbu Icefall
The Khumbu Icefall is so unstable that paying clients cross it as few times as they can, while Sherpas carrying tents, food and oxygen pass through again and again.
Q 13K2, the world's second-highest mountain, stands in which range?
The Karakoram
Q 21The Eiger's north face has earned what German nickname because of the number of deaths on it?
Mordwand
Mordwand, 'murder wall', is a one-letter twist on Nordwand, German for north wall; the name took hold in the 1930s, when the first serious attempts on the face ended in deaths.
Q 22Eiger north-face pioneer Heinrich Harrer later wrote which memoir?
Seven Years in Tibet
Seven Years in Tibet tells how Harrer escaped a British prisoner-of-war camp in India, walked over the Himalayas to Lhasa and ended up tutoring the young Dalai Lama.
Q 23Which Texas businessman became the first person to climb the Seven Summits, finishing on Everest in 1985?
Richard Bass
The Karakoram is the K in K2: a British officer sketching the range from a distance in 1856 numbered its peaks K1, K2 and so on, and this one's label stuck.
Q 14After nearly dying on K2 in 1953, American climber George Bell gave the peak which lasting nickname?
The Savage Mountain
The Savage Mountain 'tries to kill you', Bell said: on the retreat he slipped and dragged five teammates off with him, and one man's ice-axe belay held all six.
Q 15Climbers from which country made the first ascent of K2 in 1954?
Italy
Italy's Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli went up the Abruzzi Ridge, a route already named for the Italian duke whose expedition had pioneered it in 1909.
Q 16K2 became the last eight-thousander climbed in winter in January 2021, by a team from which country?
Nepal
Nepal's ten climbers, drawn from three separate expeditions, stopped ten metres below the top so they could step onto the summit together, singing the national anthem.
Q 17Netflix's 14 Peaks follows which climber's 2019 bid to summit all 14 eight-thousanders in under seven months?
Nirmal Purja
Nirmal Purja, a former Gurkha, finished in about six months when the record stood at almost eight years, and on Everest he took the photo of the summit queue that went around the world.
Q 18Which was the first 8,000-metre peak ever climbed, in 1950?
Annapurna I
Annapurna I cost its summit pair dearly: Maurice Herzog lost his gloves near the top and, after a night in a crevasse, his fingers and toes to frostbite, while Louis Lachenal lost his toes.
Q 19The 1786 first ascent of which Alpine peak is traditionally seen as the start of modern mountaineering?
Mont Blanc
Mont Blanc had carried a prize since 1760, when a Geneva scientist offered money to whoever found a way up; a local doctor and his porter claimed it 26 years later.
Q 20Edward Whymper's party made the first ascent of which peak in 1865, losing four men on the way down?
The Matterhorn
The Matterhorn party was roped together when one man slipped and dragged three more off; the rope broke, which saved Whymper and two guides and left them accused of having cut it.
Richard Bass, an oil heir, climbed six of the seven with Frank Wells, a Hollywood executive who never got up Everest and went on to run Disney; Bass made it on his fourth try, aged 55.
Q 24The stricter Seven Summits list drops which Australian peak for New Guinea's Carstensz Pyramid?
Mount Kosciuszko
Mount Kosciuszko is an easy hike, so the Canadian Pat Morrow chose the harder list, saying he was 'a climber first and a collector second'.
Q 25El Capitan's 3,000-foot face in Yosemite is a single wall of which rock?
Granite
Granite about 100 million years old makes up nearly all of El Capitan; glaciers later ground out the valley beside it and left the wall standing some 3,000 feet clear.
Q 26Whose team made the first ascent of El Capitan's Nose in 1958, a siege begun the year before?
Warren Harding
Warren Harding's team worked up and down fixed ropes for more than a year; two years later his rival Royal Robbins repeated the route in a single seven-day push.
Q 27Who made the first free ascent of El Capitan's Nose in 1993, then repeated it in a day the next year?
Lynn Hill
Lynn Hill spent four days freeing a route whose upper pitches had blocked every earlier effort, then came back in 1994 and free climbed all of it in a single 23-hour push.
Q 28Alex Honnold and which partner made the first sub-two-hour ascent of El Capitan's Nose in 2018?
Tommy Caldwell
Tommy Caldwell and Honnold clocked 1:58:07 on about their tenth run up the route in a few weeks; Caldwell climbs with nine fingers, having sawn off most of an index finger in 2001.
Q 29Which El Capitan route did Alex Honnold climb without a rope on 3 June 2017?
Freerider
Freerider runs some 2,900 feet up the wall; Honnold set off with no rope, climbed it in 3 hours 56 minutes and was on top in time for breakfast.
Q 30Free Solo won which award at the 91st Academy Awards?
Best Documentary Feature
Best Documentary Feature went to directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who had wrestled with whether to film at all, knowing Honnold could fall to his death while they were filming.