American ultrarunner Tyler Andrews is in the Himalayas for his third attempt at a fastest known time on Mount Everest, and this year he has changed everything that can reasonably be changed. The 35-year-old, who twice tried and twice abandoned the project from the Nepalese south side in 2023 and 2024, is this spring operating from the Tibetan north side via a permit arranged through Asian Trekking and the Chinese-Tibetan Mountaineering Association. The target is unchanged: Kilian Jornet's 2017 round-trip time of 26 hours from Base Camp to summit and back, without supplemental oxygen and without fixed-rope assistance outside the standard route.
Andrews arrived at north-side Base Camp earlier this month and is now working through the first of two planned acclimatisation rotations. In his public updates, he has described the move from the south side as driven primarily by snow and avalanche risk. The Khumbu Icefall, which all south-side climbers must navigate repeatedly, has become increasingly unstable over the last several seasons, and his 2024 attempt ended when a serac collapse closed the route during his summit push. The north side has no direct equivalent; the approach above Advanced Base Camp is comparatively gentler, the weather is colder and windier, and the line to the summit from the North Col is one of the most established high-altitude routes in the world.
The athletic profile of the attempt is, if anything, sharper on the north side than on the south. Andrews will be running at altitudes that have essentially no equivalent in ultramarathon racing — sustained effort above 7,500 metres in temperatures that are routinely below minus twenty degrees Celsius, with wind chill lower still. His training block, which has included a sub-23-hour FKT on Chimborazo and a two-week live-high-train-high cycle in the high Andes, is calibrated around a single push of roughly twenty-six to thirty hours. Support on the mountain will come from a two-person sherpa team following at a fixed interval, with Andrews self-navigating and carrying all of his own clothing, food and hydration above Camp 2.
The wider context is the shifting tone of Everest speed climbing. Jornet's 2017 performance, already arguably the most impressive single day in mountaineering history, has stood for nearly a decade in part because so few athletes have combined ultrarunning volume with the climbing experience and altitude exposure that the project requires. Andrews is one of the very few who fit that brief; he currently holds more than ninety FKTs across South America, Nepal and Africa, most of them unsupported or self-supported, and has spoken candidly about the accumulated risk of high-altitude attempts at this scale. A film crew from the Utah-based production house Pendulum is documenting the expedition, with Andrews's own written dispatches from camp providing a near-real-time account on his Substack.
Summit windows in the early May weather pattern usually open for two to five days at a time, and the expedition's forecasting team has said the first realistic attempt date will fall between 5 and 12 May if the stratospheric jet continues to lift on schedule. If that window holds, and if Andrews has cleared both planned rotations by then, the push itself could begin from Base Camp inside a fortnight. Given the number of previous attempts that have ended short of the summit — his own included, twice — a finished run at the FKT is the outcome his team is treating as the realistic ceiling. An actual record, in conditions that have defeated better-resourced expeditions for nine straight seasons, would rewrite the top of the sport.