He Climbed Everest Four Times in 15 Days — Guinness Just Made It Official
Rope-fixing, a solo push, a client summit, then solo again: Nepali guide Tashi Gyalzen Sherpa's four ascents in May 2025 are now the certified record for the most Everest summits in a single season.
On 23 May 2025, a 30-year-old guide from Solukhumbu stood on the summit of Everest for the fourth time in fifteen days. Guinness World Records has now made it official: Tashi Gyalzen Sherpa holds the record for the most Everest summits in a single climbing season — and he set it while also opening the route for everyone else on the mountain.
Key facts
- Tashi Gyalzen Sherpa, 30, of Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality, Solukhumbu, summited Everest four times in 15 days
- Summit dates: 9, 14, 19 and 23 May 2025, each at 8,848.86m on the Nepal (south) side
- His first summit was as part of the rope-fixing team, opening the route for the entire spring season
- Guinness World Records certified the record; the certificate was formally presented in February 2026
- He climbed for 8K Expeditions and trained at the Khumbu Climbing Centre
Four summits, four different jobs
What makes the record unusual isn't just the number — it's that no two of the four climbs were the same trip. Sherpa guides routinely go up Everest more than once in a season, but almost always as part of a single client rotation. Tashi Gyalzen's four ascents were four separate assignments, each with a different purpose, inside little more than two weeks above 8,000m.
His first summit, on 9 May, was as a member of the rope-fixing team — the small crew of Sherpas who climb first each season to anchor the lines that every other client and guide on the mountain will clip into for the next six weeks. That's arguably the hardest of the four: breaking trail through unconsolidated snow, with no fixed rope of their own to speed the climb. Five days later, on 14 May, he went back up solo. On 19 May he summited a third time, guiding a paying client to the top. His fourth summit, on 23 May, was solo again — closing out the season having spent more cumulative time above 8,000m that spring than almost anyone else on the mountain.
Opens the route to the top as part of the rope-fixing team, ahead of the entire spring season.
A second ascent, five days later, climbing alone.
Third summit, this time bringing a paying client safely to 8,848.86m.
Closes out the record — four summits in 15 days, confirmed by Guinness World Records.
How it compares to Everest's other big number
It's worth separating this from Everest's other famous record, because they measure completely different things. Kami Rita Sherpa holds the record for the most Everest summits across an entire career — 31 and counting, first climbed in 1994, extended again on 31 May 2025. Tashi Gyalzen's record is about density: the most summits inside one season. Kami Rita needed three decades to reach his total; Tashi Gyalzen needed fifteen days to set his.
What this means for trekkers
What this means for you
You'll likely never need four summits in fifteen days, but the record is a useful reminder of who actually keeps Everest open each spring: not the well-known client-side names, but guides like Tashi Gyalzen doing rope-fixing, rescue and client work back-to-back before most Western climbers have even left Base Camp. If a record like this makes you want to see the route for yourself without the summit risk, the Everest Base Camp trek follows much of the same Khumbu valley Tashi Gyalzen calls home, and the Three High Passes trek is about as close as a trekker gets to walking in a working Sherpa guide's footsteps.
Guinness has not indicated any pending challenge to the record. For now it stands as the best 'summits per season' mark on the world's highest mountain — set not by a client on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, but by one of the guides who make everyone else's trip possible.
Sources: The Himalayan Times, Guinness World Records.
Cover photo: Lum3n via Pexels (Pexels License).
计划徒步？
我们负责许可证、后勤与向导
NMA 认证的本地向导，价格透明，自 1998 年以来 5,000+ 次徒步。告诉我们你的日期，其余的交给我们。
更多「Records & People」
Records & People
Nepal Just Proposed Renaming Annapurna. Here's Why — and Why It Isn't That Simple
Weeks after Nirmal 'Nimsdai' Purja died on Broad Peak, his home municipality wants to rename the world's deadliest 8,000m peak in his honour — a plan that still needs Kathmandu's sign-off and a French family's blessing.
Records & People
Disney Just Confirmed It's Fixing Its Broken Yeti — Here's the Real 300-Year-Old Relic That Started the Legend
The animatronic Yeti at Disney World has run stuck in place since 2006. The Sherpa monastery guarding the scalp said to have inspired it has kept its own mystery going a lot longer.
Records & People
The World's Deepest Gorge Isn't the Grand Canyon — Trekkers Walk Straight Through the Bottom of It
Between two 8,000-metre peaks in Nepal, the Kali Gandaki river has carved a gorge with over three times the vertical relief of the Grand Canyon — and an ordinary trekking trail runs right along its floor.