About

This site is a read-only web interface for the Himalayan Database, the archive of expeditions to the major peaks of the Nepal Himalaya originally compiled by Elizabeth Hawley.

What's in the database

The data covers four main entities:

• Peaks — around 470 peaks with name, height, location, sub-range, and first-ascent details.
• Expeditions — over 12,000 expedition records with route, dates, outcome, oxygen use, and members.
• Members — over 80,000 member records (climbers and hired staff) with demographics, summit success, injuries, and deaths.
• References — published sources and citations linked to expeditions.

How this site is built

The underlying data is published as a set of DBF files by the Himalayan Database team. An ETL pipeline imports those files into PostgreSQL on each refresh, and this site queries them directly — no edits, no derived facts. Statistical reports are aggregations computed live from the same tables.

Most data pages support ?format=txt to return a plain-text Markdown rendering, which is what /llms.txt documents for LLM crawlers.

Caveats

• The same person appears as a separate row for each expedition they joined — member records are not normalised. Climber profile pages match on first name, last name, and year of birth, which is not perfect.
• Some fields (year of birth, summit dates) are partial or missing. Missing values display as a dash.
• Disputed summits are included with a flag rather than excluded; see the disputed expeditions report.

Credits

All data © the Himalayan Database. This interface is an independent project and is not affiliated with the Himalayan Database team.

Release notes

April 2026

• Charts on nine reports — year-over-year line charts (expeditions, summits, deaths, oxygen use), monthly summit calendar, horizontal bars for causes of death / termination reasons / nationalities, and a scatter plot of deaths-per-summit vs popularity for the most dangerous peaks.
• Five new chart-driven reports: summiter age distribution, seasonal split of summits, hired vs member mortality, nationalities per year, and route popularity by decade on the most-attempted peaks.
• This About page, with what the data is, how the site is built, and the caveats worth knowing.
• Eight new statistical reports: oxygen use by year, expedition size by decade, causes of death, survival rates by decade, youngest and oldest summiters, multi-8000m summiters, summit calendar, and termination reasons.
• Reports index reorganised into themed sections (activity & trends, mortality & risk, people, ascents).
• Most prolific members report.
• Advanced expedition search with filters across peak, year, season, nationality, outcome, and more.
• Plain-text output: append ?format=txt to most data pages for a Markdown rendering. /llms.txt indexes the URL patterns for LLM crawlers.
• SportsEvent JSON-LD on expedition pages so search engines can model them as events.
• Updated AI crawler policy in robots.txt.

March 2026

• Site-wide search for climbers and peaks with fuzzy name matching.
• Climber profile pages (/climber/{first}/{last}/{yob}) listing every recorded expedition for a person.
• Peak route pages (/peak/{peakid}/route/{route}) listing every expedition on a given route.
• Statistical reports: deaths per peak, deaths per year, summits per year, expeditions per year, busiest peaks by year, most dangerous peaks, disputed expeditions, first ascents, 8000m peak comparison, database summary, commercial vs non-commercial expeditions, summits by nationality, hired staff statistics, gender breakdown.
• Sitemap split into smaller per-section files (peaks, expeditions, climbers, routes, pages) with change frequency and priority hints.
• Page-level response cache for faster repeat hits.
• SEO pass: canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, JSON-LD structured data (BreadcrumbList, Place, Person, WebSite) on every page.
• Mobile improvements — horizontal table scrolling, navbar fixes.
• Privacy policy and copyright notices in the footer.
• Request logging via Google Cloud Logging.

February 2026

• Initial release: peak list, peak detail pages, expedition detail pages, robots.txt, sitemap, and a banner crediting the Himalayan Database as the data source.