Everest Put Him on Oxygen Before He Climbed a Single Meter | 2026 Everest Season Begins (Horribly)

"I'm not doing too good at Everest Base Camp, " says a reclining Ryan Mitchell behind an oxygen mask covering his face. 

Ryan Mitchell is on oxygen at Base Camp with an SPO2 of 35. And the Icefall Doctors have stopped cold in their tracks. A serac the size of a building is blocking the only route up the mountain. And 3,500 people are waiting at the foot of Everest with nowhere to go.

The 2026 Everest season hasn't really started yet — but Tyler Andrews and Karl Egloff — gunning for the fastest no-oxygen ascent in history, the growing army of no-O2 no-Sherpa alpinists, and the looming regulatory changes that could make this one of the last seasons this style of climbing is even legal.

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RESOURCES FOR MORE RESEARCH

Everest at 19! YouTube Influencer Ryan Mitchell's Path to the Top
https://youtu.be/w1mJsdeE81Q

Everest 2026 - Without These HUGE Changes We're Screwed
https://youtu.be/NKKMUvesAmE

Can Anyone Save Everest? 2026 Is The Biggest Test Yet
https://youtu.be/676yCestIKg

Everest 2026: More Dangerous Than Ever — But Now There Are Drones
https://youtu.be/Jqh3UA_ml1Y

Ryan Mitchell's Instagram post - SEND HIM SOME LOVE:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DXJ2yKVEXlL/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 1:01

Not doing too good at Everest Base Camp, so we're on oxygen now. His SPO2 had dropped to 35, not 70, not 50, 35. That's a reading that the human body cannot sustain. Ryan Mitchell was lying in his tent in base camp when he made this post and reported that he got ape, high-altitude pulmonary edema, and caught a chest infection and is now okay in base camp, but his plans to climb Everest without bottled oxygen may be put on hold this year for a better time.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

My SPO uh came in at 35, so I was put on oxygen. We flew from Kamadu to Gorak Shep a few days ago and had a GI bug and then got to Everest base camp. It just didn't feel good. And last night was coughing up some some bad things. So we're on oxygen now. Um we'll see how this goes and if uh if we can be on the mend and it'll actually resolve this. Oh hello Doug. Justin is taking care of me very well. Anyways, that's the update for now.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Ironic, he had not climbed even a single meter on the mountain because the ice fall doctors are stopped cold in the ice fall because of a giant Sarak that they fear could collapse and take one of their lives. We are now at about the 12-year anniversary almost to the day when a giant Sarak fell off the West shoulder and took the lives of 16 souls. I'll get into that a little bit more later, but for now, let's get back to Ryan Mitchell, our friend, a friend of Everest Mystery and of Alan Arnett's, and also reported on widely in the Everest realm, young man who first climbed Everest as a teenager and now is back with Justin Sackett, his guide, both endeavoring to climb Everest without bottled oxygen. And now this is all before the 2026 season has even begun, as hundreds of climbers are now making their way to Everest Base Camp, which is certainly going to be a bustling mecca of activity over the next month or so. Justin Sackett mentioned earlier, he reported on one of his posts that there are 3,500 people currently living on the glacier at Everest Base Camp.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

The size of Everest Base Camp is actually insane. There's over 3,000 people in this camp.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

Absolute massive amounts of people, but the energy he says feels electric, but it's possible that there's also a bit of desperation in the air. Another thing that is taking place, Tyler Andrews, the speedrunner from the United States, he's landed in Nepal and he's spent a year living in hypoxic tents, training at altitude. He endeavors to become the fastest ever to get from base camp to the summit without bottled oxygen. He's been training with the discipline of a monk, and he is on Mount Everest this year with that one goal in mind. Last year not working out at all how he had hoped. And he isn't alone. There's also Carl Egloff, the Swiss Ecuadorian speed runner, mountain runner, who endeavors to become the fastest ever to go from base camp to the summit and back down the mountain. While their goals, Tyler Andrews and Carl Egloff's, are very different in some respects, there is no doubt there's some tension between them. So I suppose you could say quite literally, this isn't a race against time, it's a race against each other. Eggloff recently admitted to the Swiss press that in 2025 that having a competitor like Andrews in his line of sight changed the game for him on the mountain. It got into his head, it broke into his rhythm. Things did not go well at all for either of them. They aborted their attempts on two different occasions right before the mountain closed last year. And now this year, there is reportedly a film crew documenting every single move of these climbers. This is published and not anything that isn't supposed to be known. The mountain has certainly become a forum for famous climbers worldwide. Kristen Harala is there endeavoring to climb the mountain along with Lotse and Nupse without bottled oxygen. Now it's been reported that the north side in Tibet, China is closed this year, so all the other climbers are making their way onto the south side. And for any climber endeavoring to climb the mountain in Nepal, they have to make their way through the Kumbu ice fall. There's just no other way. In 2014, we saw just how dangerous and tragic that ice fall, how unpredictable it can be. Sixteen souls lost their lives there when a massive chunk of ice broke off the west shoulder, absolutely devastating. I was in base camp that day and watched as bodies were long lined back into base camp, being counted, essentially three of those men who lost their lives up there were never found. The Kumbu ice fall is like a perpetual, slowly moving river of ice, and those motions make it very, very dangerous. As a chunk of ice moves down over an edge, eventually the weight of that ice is going to cause it to break off and tumble downhill. And now, normally by this time, April 14, 15, 16, the ladders and the ropes are set all the way up to camp one. However, this year the ice fall doctors have stopped gold in their tracks. There is a massive sarak, a tower of ice, essentially, that is slightly uphill from where they're doing their work. When they saw that, they realized that it was too dangerous to continue moving forward. So the plan is to either find a completely different way through the massive jumble of ice or wait until that sarak tumbles over. Either means a great delay on the mountain. Waiting for it to tumble over, it could be weeks. And if that happens, there will indeed be desperation in base camp for people who have put their money down and do not want to be stopped in going after their dream of standing on the summit of Mount Everest. And in all of that waiting, other than just the desperation, the fidgetiness, and people starting to make bad decisions, doing desperate things to get themselves to the top. Sometimes that comes with setbacks. Ryan Mitchell, who we showed you earlier, he endeavored to avoid all the crowds and stayed down lower in Kathmandu after living at about 18,000 feet in altitude to try to acclimatize. Got on a helicopter, took that helicopter back up to Goric Shep, which is very close to Everest Space Camp, just a few hours' walk away. And at that time, that rapid return triggered a crisis. Within hours of arriving, his lungs began to fill with fluid, hape, high altitude pulmonary edema, and his SPO2 plummeted to 35. Now, many of you are probably saying, what the heck is SPO2? SPO2 is peripheral capillary oxygen saturation, a measure of how much oxygen your blood is carrying compared to its maximum capacity, usually expressed as a percentage estimated using a pulse oximeter, a little device you put on your finger. 35 is really, really low. It would be optimum to have something in 95 to 100. My gut is that 35 reading might have been incorrect. It's easy to get it wrong. Maybe Ryan's fingers were cold and therefore they decided to hold out. But in any other normal situation, uh SPO2 reading of 35 would require someone to be put in a hospital, or maybe they'd already be blue and unconscious at that point in time. It's important to say Ryan and Justin, they know what they're doing, they're very smart, they're not going to make a dumb call, we hope. And they're, I'm sure they're getting a lot of advice from people that is unsolicited. I am quite sure that Ryan's most important goal in here is to survive. And so we'll find out in the next 24 hours. I'll be sure to post uh some shorts or some updates whenever I can. Undoubtedly, Alan Arnett, who has been Ryan's Everest coach over the last several years, will probably have the inside scoop on this. And so I'll reach out to Alan and maybe we'll get him on the episode real soon as well. The Sarak that has stopped the ice fall doctors, absolutely understandable. No one would urge them to go on, especially if they don't feel safe. These are some of the bravest, most courageous climbers on the mountain. Their decision is obviously the best decision to not take unnecessary risks. Many of us and my friends have spent time at the homes of families who have lost a loved one, lost the main breadwinner. Everest is just not worth dying for. And so at this period of time, we can only hope that the mountain at least opens its gates a little bit so that people can get through and have an enjoyable time on the mountain. In the last several weeks, I've talked a lot about the future of Mount Everest, and one thing I didn't talk too much about really was the melting of the glacier. Things are changing in a different way up there earlier in the season. And so, even in my last three videos, I talked a lot about drone technology and how that's assisting the icefall doctors. So make sure that you check out in the description below several of these videos if you want to binge watch. Also wanted to call to your attention, take a look at Everest Mystery.com. Got some great merchandise in there, hats and hoodies and silk shirts, really, really cool stuff, some great t-shirts with an ohm, and then also the truth is out there. And in the meantime, most importantly, do a good deed. Don't ask for anything in return and make the world a better place one tiny step at a time. Peace be with you.