He Summited Everest and Lhotse — Twice Each — in Ten Days. No One Had Ever Done That.

Between 17 and 26 May 2026, one climber stood on top of two of the world's five highest mountains four separate times. Not four different climbers — one person, climbing Everest, then Lhotse, then Lhotse again, then Everest again, all inside a single ten-day window most trekkers would spend just walking to base camp.

To understand why this is unusual, you need to know what ‘not descending below Camp 4’ actually means. Camp 4, the South Col, sits at roughly 7,900m — inside what climbers call the death zone, where the body is slowly dying regardless of skill or preparation, and where a single night is normally close to the limit before descent. Luori's team kept him operating in and around that altitude for the better part of ten days, ferrying between two 8,000m summits without the multi-day recovery drop to Base Camp that almost every other climber on the mountain takes between attempts. It is, in effect, running back-to-back marathons at an altitude where most people can barely hold a conversation.

Luori is not a Sherpa guide, but his climb still depended entirely on the same rope-fixing and route-prep chain that Sherpa teams rebuild every spring after the Khumbu Icefall reforms over winter — the ropes his team clipped into were fixed by icefall doctors just weeks earlier, and the ladders across the crevasses reset by hand after the previous season's route was buried in snow. Fast, repeated 8,000m climbing is possible today largely because that fixing and logistics chain has become dramatically faster and more reliable than it was even a decade ago.

The feat happened during what several outlets already call one of the biggest Everest seasons on record — 2026 saw summit numbers on the Nepal side alone climb past 950, part of a spring that also included 274 climbers reaching the top in a single day. Luori's climb didn't grab the same headlines as the crowding stories, but among mountaineers it's the kind of result that quietly resets what's considered physiologically possible above 8,000m.

What this means for trekkers

Records like this one are also a reminder of how much has changed on the mountain since the era most people still picture when they hear ‘Everest expedition.’ Supplemental oxygen, daily-maintained fixed ropes and rotating Sherpa support teams now make a Camp-4-to-Camp-4 turnaround possible in a way that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. None of that makes the death zone safer in absolute terms — it just means the ceiling on what a well-supported, exceptionally fit climber can attempt keeps rising each season.

Source: The Kathmandu Post.

Cover photo: Sumita Roy Dutta via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).