Supplementary Oxygen and High Altitude

The use of supplementary oxygen for climbing at high altitude has been debated for many decades. Many climbers feel that its use is unsporting and unfair. However, research has shown that bottled oxygen enables a climber to move faster, stay warmer, and stem some of the appetite loss typically experienced at extreme altitudes. In short, it can make high altitude mountaineering much safer - provided the climber plans well and does not run out of the precious gas prior to return to lower altitudes.

The importance of supplemental oxygen use at extreme altitude, not to mention the ethical debate involved with its use, was realized early in the twentieth century during the very first attempts on Mt Everest. George Ingle Finch, a member of the 1922 British Everest expedition and an advocate of supplementary oxygen for extreme altitude mountaineering, wrote in his 1925 book Der Kampf um den Everest:

Even someone who is well versed in the theory of 'artificial aids' and has worked through its logical aspects will find it difficult to understand this group's [ arguments. The first illogical reasoning is that its members have accepted other aids, which we have gained from scientific research and with which we are able to avoid painful or damaging effects to the human body, especially in the mountain climbing world. No one takes offence at the fact that we wear special garments to combat the cold; no one denies the importance of thermos bottles, which, especially on this mountain, have almost life-saving status; no one opposes the fact that we use stimulants or specifically designed foodstuff, providing both strength and energy; no one takes exception to the use of snow goggles to protect the eyes from the sun's ultraviolet radiation and the extreme cold of the piercing winds; and no one criticized the use of caffeine to invigorate an exhausted climber. In short, if scientific research were to produce oxygen in easily ingestible tablet form, one can be sure that not a soul would oppose its use so violently during the climbing of Mount Everest.

Such a debate continues to rage in the present, and one could argue that the logic condemning supplementary oxygen as 'too artificial' is now even less understandable, since present-day high altitude climbers have advantages in the way of food, clothing, equipment, knowledge, and medications of which the high altitude pioneers could scarcely have dreamt.