Andrew Lock

"Some people are driven by the desire for unusual bragging rights. Others seek to prove to themselves what kind of stuff they are made of. Still others – and I suspect Lock may fit in this category – get tremendous satisfaction from coping well with a huge challenge".

Lock retired from personal high-altitude climbing after his 2012 Everest experience, however, a final "oxygenless" ascent of Everest (his third Everest ascent), remains a potential project. He continues to guide commercial expeditions to Mt Everest and other peaks in the Himalaya and around the world, specialising in small teams with high logistical support.

In May 2011, Lock attempted Everest for the third time, but his first without supplementary oxygen (to complete the rarer Reinhold Messner feat of climbing all 14 eight-thousanders without oxygen). His solo climb of Everest's North Ridge was unsuccessful due to high winds and blizzard conditions. Lock made a second attempt to summit Everest solo, via the North side, without supplementary oxygen in May 2012, but abandoned the climb 300 metres from the summit due to self diagnosed early symptoms of Cerebral Oedema. [This was incorrectly reported as High altitude pulmonary oedema].

In 2009 Lock was awarded the Australian Geographic Society's Adventurer of the Year award. On 13 June 2011, Lock was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to mountaineering.

In 2004, he was a climber and cinematographer for the acclaimed Discovery Channel six-part miniseries, Discovery Channel-Ultimate Survival: Everest, which has been broadcast many times in North America. On that expedition, Lock had to rescue three members of other teams coming down from the summit, giving up his own oxygen along the way.

While Lock has climbed with partners that he did not particularly enjoy, or get on with, his unhappy experience when climbing with U.K. mountaineer Alan Hinkes (who claims to have climbed all 14 eight-thousanders, although one is disputed), on Nanga Parbat in 1998, is recounted in his book, Summit 8000.

His first 8,000-metre summit was of K2, which he climbed in 1993 with a small team that included legendary Himalayan climber Anatoli Boukreev, who later died in 1997 on Annapurna. The "Savage Mountain" lived up to its fearsome reputation when three of his summit partners were killed in separate falls (on the same face), and Lock rescued a Swedish climber.

Lock has climbed with several leading high-altitude Himalayan mountaineers, including Anatoli Boukreev (K2 in 1993), Göran Kropp (Broad Peak in 1994), Doug Scott and Wojciech Kurtyka (Nanga Parbat Mazeno Ridge in 1995), and Iván Vallejo & Iñaki Ochoa de Olza (Annapurna 2007). After Ecuadorian Iván Vallejo, Lock is the second, and still the only other, Southern Hemisphere climber to complete all 14 eight-thousanders.

Andrew James Lock OAM (born 26 December 1961) is an Australian high-altitude mountaineer. He became the first, and still remains the only, Australian to climb all 14 "eight-thousanders" (the peaks over 8,000-metres above sea level) on 2 October 2009, and is the 18th person to ever complete this feat. He climbed 13 of the 14 without using bottled oxygen, only using it on Mount Everest, which he has summited twice. He retired from eight-thousander climbing in 2012.