Andrew Dawson, 34, reached the summit of Everest on 18 May 2026, completing the 7 summits 16 years after his first climb on Kilimanjaro. The Aylmer Express reports he climbed the Messner list, taking in Carstensz Pyramid, and funded most of the expeditions himself. He was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis in 2019 and compressed the remaining peaks into a few years.
Andrew Dawson reached the summit of Everest on 18 May 2026, roughly 12 hours after leaving high camp. It was the 48th day of his expedition and the last of his 7 summits. His family marked the completion at their home in Aylmer, Ontario, in late spring. The story was reported by the Aylmer Express.
Dawson was born and raised in Mississauga, studied at Queen's University in Kingston, and has lived in Amsterdam for around seven years. He is 34. The first of the seven came in 2010, when the Dawson family travelled to Kilimanjaro. He was 18, and the summit at 5,895 m19,341 ft was not meant to start anything.
A 16-year span, most of it in the last nine
There was a long gap after Kilimanjaro. University in Kingston offered nothing to climb, and the climbing restarted only after a move to Calgary, where weekend hiking with friends led to Aconcagua. He summited the 6,961 m22,838 ft peak in December 2017.
That second summit is where the full list came into view. Dawson decided to climb the other six first and leave Everest as an open question, citing the risk, the expense and the commercialization of the mountain. He chose the Messner version of the 7 summits, which uses Carstensz Pyramid in place of Kosciuszko.
Shortly after his third summit he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a form of inflammatory arthritis affecting the spine. He says a doctor told him he would be in a wheelchair by 40. The effect on the plan was to compress it: what he had imagined as a lifetime project became about nine years, from 2017 to 2026.
Elbrus and Denali
Elbrus, 5,642 m18,510 ft, came in August 2019. From that climb onward his expeditions involved rope teams, crampons and ice axes rather than walking routes. The descent produced one of the few genuinely frightening moments of the whole project.
The snow was softening under strong sun. A member of his rope team put one leg into a hole up to the hip, pulled himself out, and joked that he would tell everyone he had fallen into a crevasse. Ten minutes later the same climber went into a real one. Dawson describes it as a proper hole about 100 feet deep, with ice breaking away around the man as he reached out. Everyone on that rope was tied to the outcome.
Denali followed in May 2022, shortly before his 30th birthday. He rates it among the hardest of the seven: remote, cold, and run on the load-carrying system where climbers haul their own gear high, then descend to sleep lower. The summit day itself was clear. A separate memory from the same trip is watching another team carry out a full rescue of their lead guide during a snowstorm, from a distance, while his own team moved to get out of the weather.
Carstensz, then Antarctica
Carstensz Pyramid, also called Puncak Jaya, came in October 2024, the first year it was open again after a long closure. The route is a jagged limestone ridge at 4,884 m16,024 ft, and Dawson calls it a very different mountain from the others on the list.
Vinson followed in January 2026 at 4,892 m16,050 ft, eight metres higher than Carstensz and a very different proposition in cost and logistics. Up to that point Dawson had paid for the climbs out of savings and work bonuses. After losing his job at Unilever he put a large part of the severance into the Antarctica trip. He has been plain about the trade: no car, no house, no large wedding, with the money going to mountains instead.
Everest
The summit day on Everest took about 12 hours from camp. Dawson and his team spent 15 to 30 minutes on top, long enough to sit down, take photographs and drink some water, before weather pushed them into the descent. His own description of the summit is a fever dream, something that happened very fast after 16 years of approach.
Most of the Everest expedition was self-funded, with additional support through a GoFundMe campaign backed by friends and family.
The return was harder to describe than the climbing. Dawson calls it complete reverse culture shock, a stretch where ordinary conversation felt impossible because nobody around him had any reference for where he had just been. He was back home in Amsterdam on 28 May, ten days after standing on the summit.
This story is part of This week on the 7 summits: 19–25 October 2026, the week's news in brief.
Header photograph: Everest North Face toward Base Camp Tibet Luca Galuzzi 2006.jpg by Luca Galuzzi ( Lucag ), CC BY-SA 2.5 (licence), via Wikimedia Commons.