7summits.com has relaunched with free guidebooks to all 8 summits, a gear list for every mountain, a live record of the 811 people who have climbed them and the companies that guide each peak side by side. Everything is free to read, in English, Dutch, Spanish and German.
Free guidebooks to all 8 summits, a gear list for every mountain, a live record of the 811 people who have climbed them, and the companies that guide each peak side by side, in English, Dutch, Spanish and German.
Amsterdam, 28 October 2026. 7summits.com, online since 2000, has relaunched, rebuilt from the ground up as the reference for the highest mountain on every continent. Route guides, gear lists, the record of everyone who has finished, the companies that guide each peak, and the books and films about them now sit together on one site, free to read for everyone.
The site is written and built by Harry Kikstra, who completed both versions of the 7 summits by 2008, guided on six of them and wrote the Rucksack Readers guidebooks to Aconcagua, Denali and Everest.
For climbers
Each of the 8 summits has its own guidebook: Everest, Aconcagua, Denali, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, Vinson, Carstensz Pyramid and Kosciuszko. Together they cover permits and costs, planning, and every route stage by stage, with topographic maps showing the camps and elevation profiles. The pages on permits and access are checked every month.
Every mountain has a gear list written for it, and a personal gear shed beside it: tick what you already own, and each peak shows what is still to get. To choose who to climb with, the operator directory puts the companies that guide each peak side by side, with their trips read off their own websites.
A free account adds "My 7 summits", where climbers keep track of the peaks they have done and the ones they plan. Membership adds planning tools: Expedition (€ 70 a year, or € 7 a month) brings the guides as PDF and EPUB ebooks, every route as a GPX file, an offline pack for a phone out of signal and a side-by-side comparison of up to 7 operators. Summit Circle (€ 177 a year) includes an hour of one-to-one planning with Harry himself.
For finishers
The finisher record holds 811 climbers: 467 on the Kosciuszko list (Bass), 571 on the Carstensz Pyramid list (Messner) and 260 who completed both, from 82 countries, 188 of them women. Every climber has a page with their summits, dates and sources, and the lists can be filtered by country, sex, list and age, with leaderboards beside them.
Finishers apply for free, and a person checks every application against its evidence. A verified finisher can add a badge to their own website that links to their record and updates itself.
For expedition companies
The operator directory lists 129 companies, with 496 trips read off their own websites and compared side by side for each peak. Every company is listed for free and ordered by the same columns. A company can claim its listing to write its own description, add photos and prices per peak, and receive enquiries from climbers through the listing. Plans start at € 290 a year, and the first 7 Founding Partners pay half in their first year, until 9 December 2026.
For journalists and site owners
Press and media has the numbers, which update with every approved climber, a fact sheet, short and long bios, logos, peak artwork, screenshots and the finisher badge, all free to use. Site owners can show the four live counts on their own pages with a small widget for WordPress, Joomla or any HTML page, each number a link to its list. See it right here:
And more
- A library of 1,058 books, films and documentaries about the 7 summits
- Statistics measured from the finishers' own ascent dates, such as the real summit season on each peak
- A forum with a room for every peak, 103 FAQs and a climbing glossary of 258 terms in four languages
- Weekly news from the 7 summits
About 7summits.com
7summits.com is an independent reference for the 7 summits: route guides to all 8 peaks, the record of everyone known to have finished them, a directory of the companies that guide them, a library, news and a forum, in English, Dutch, Spanish and German. It has been online since 2000 and is owned, written and built by Harry Kikstra, a Dutch climber, photographer and writer based in Amsterdam. He completed the Carstensz Pyramid list in 2006 and the Kosciuszko list in 2008, climbed Everest from Tibet in 2005 and wrote the Rucksack Readers guidebooks to Aconcagua, Denali and Everest.
Press contact: Harry Kikstra, through 7summits.com/contact. Facts, pictures and files, free to use: 7summits.com/press.