Beyond the summit
One continuous chain, from the highest point on earth to the bottom of a river.
Beyond The Summit 2027
In March 2027, Joe Alexander, founder of Alexander Adventures, sets out on what he’s calling the world’s biggest triathlon. Three disciplines, three very different kinds of danger, linked end to end across Nepal: climb Everest and Lhotse back to back, ride a mountain bike down out of the Khumbu, and paddle Grade 5 white water all the way to the plains.
Most people would consider any one of the three the achievement of a lifetime. The point of BTS27 is doing them as one thing.
Leg one: Everest and Lhotse
Everest stands at 8,849m. Lhotse, its neighbour, at 8,516m the fourth-highest mountain in the world.
The two share a route for most of the way: through the Khumbu Icefall, up the Western Cwm, and onto the Lhotse Face. High on that face the lines part, one turning for the South Col and Everest’s summit ridge, the other continuing up the couloir to Lhotse.
Everything above 8,000m is the death zone, where the body is actively deteriorating no matter how fit you are and no amount of rest restores it. Joe intends to go up there twice, in quick succession, and then, where most expeditions would fly home, keep going.
Leg two: down out of the Khumbu
From Lukla, at 2,860m, the route turns to two wheels: a long descent through the valleys towards the Sun Kosi, on trails built for feet and pack animals rather than bikes.
Steep, loose, narrow, and exposed in the places you’d least want it. The difficulty here isn’t altitude. It’s doing technical riding on legs that have just spent weeks above the snowline and have nothing left to give.
Leg three: the Sun Kosi
The Sun Kosi, the River of Gold, runs around 260km from Dolalghat down to Chatra, and is regularly named among the finest river journeys in the world. Eight days on the water. Grades two through five, building through Harkapur and finishing in the big-volume rapids of the lower canyon.
Fed by the same glacial melt Joe will have spent the spring climbing through, it is the last leg and the one with the least margin for tiredness. Water doesn’t care how far you’ve come.
The man doing it
Joe has spent more than twenty years working in the Himalaya. He has worked on all seven continents and travelled the great majority of the world, and he founded Alexander Adventures to take other people to the places that shaped him.
Nepal is where the company began and where its closest relationships still are: the guides, porters and drivers who became more than just colleagues.
Why it matters
BTS27 is an expedition, but it’s also an argument: that the interesting questions are at the edges of what a person can link together, not just how high they can get.
Everything Joe learns doing it, the training, the logistics, the decision-making at altitude and on water, comes back into the trips Alexander Adventures runs for everyone else.
Get involved
The expedition is open to support from individuals and from companies.
At the lighter end, supporters can put their name to the expedition and follow it from the inside. Further up, there are packages covering expedition gear, kit branding, documentary credits and naming rights, through to lead partnership across the full run of BTS expeditions to 2030.
Everything about the challenge, and every way to back it, is at bts27.com.
Follow it, or be part of it
Tell us whether you want the updates or a place on the base camp expedition. Sponsorship is handled at bts27.com, or on info@bts27.com.
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