Everest,
Aconcagua, Denali (McKinley), Kibo and Vinson are undisputed.
With Puncak Jaya (Carstensz) one cannot deny the nearness to the
so-called Australian continent, there is even a shelf
connection. Besides, New Guinea is even much nearer to Australia than New Zealand, which in the opinion of many geographers belongs to the same continent like Australia, that's why the name "Oceania" was created long ago. And even Cook in New Zealand is higher than Kosciuszko. For "Australasia" or better "Oceania" Puncak Jaya
should be completely undisputed.
The "Kosciuszko-version" was
actually only the idea of the American Dick Bass. From the
orographical and also from the mountaineering point of view,
unfortunately, it should be disqualified as one of the " Seven
Summits ".
Elbrus is orographically more connected to the
Asian mountains than to Europe. Basically Europe is
"only" a big peninsula of Eurasia, but if one
separates mountains and land only by water and the deepest
points and saddles, one has a definite border from the Black Sea
to the White Sea, and the ruler of this subcontinent (in
principle the same classification as North America!) is of
course Mont Blanc. The old "border" connecting the
Urals and the Caucasus is orographically not acceptable.
From this (AC 7 >4511 m) and higher
altitude classes are the seven most dominant mountains (the real
"Seven Summits") Everest, Aconcagua, Denali, Kibo,
Vinson, Puncak Jaya and Mont Blanc. It would be interesting to
compile a third table with those seven mountains. Reinhold
Messner, Anna Czerwińska and many others ascended also Mont
Blanc. AdventureStats would like to ask every 7-Summiteer,
whether he also had climbed Mont Blanc or not, to compile a third
version. Nevertheless the listing of the completers and the statistics of the now-traditional versions will continue.
To offer another challenge for collectors we
suggest the following 15 most dominant mountains of the earth.
(note : Elbrus is included, but NOT Kosciuszko).
The first woman
on Everest, Junko Tabei from Japan, has already ascended 11 of
those :
