Photo credit: Bartłomiej Bargiel/Red Bull Content Pool
Red Bull athlete Andrzej Bargiel stood at the top of the world’s highest point, 8,849 meters (29,032 feet), where the air is appallingly thin. On September 22, 2025, he took to his skis from the top of Everest all the way down to base camp, depending on the mountain for every breath of air.
It all started a few days earlier in the off-season, when the tourists were long gone and the South Col path was deserted like a ghost town. He’d climbed up from base camp and over the Western Cwm – a massive ice basin that perfectly mirrored the blue sky above. Beneath, the Khumbu Icefall stretched out – a chaos of massive seracs and gigantic crevasses that seem to come to life, as if they’re exhaling and inhaling for real. At Camp II he stopped to take stock of himself, refocus after that oxygen-starved brain of his before getting back to the real grunt work: a 16-hour crawl up to the top on his own in the death zone.
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Up at 8,000 meters, the oxygen levels are pretty much identical to those you’d find at 30,000 feet on a plane. More than 6,000 people have made it to the top since 1953, but less than 200 of them did it without a tank of bottled oxygen. Andrzej managed to join that club then promptly broke it by turning around and skiing the whole way back down. No one else has ever managed to ski up there without oxygen, even with a tank strapped to their back. His brother Bartek was following along from a safe distance, his drone buzzing around like an invisible sherpa.
Photo credit: Bartłomiej Bargiel/Red Bull Content Pool
He launched off the top of the mountain, and the snow sprayed out behind him in great rooster-tails of white. As night started to fall he slid into Camp II, his boots were a lead weight and his body was just about ready to seize up from exhaustion. On the 23rd, he locked in for another day. Bartek’s drone – still buzzing away out in the distance – was his only guide as he navigated the treacherous serac fields where one wrong move could send him tumbling into the void.
Photo credit: Bartłomiej Bargiel/Red Bull Content Pool
Bartłomiej Pawlikowski got the whole thing on camera from a pretty low angle & captured the full-on vertigo. He’s a Tatra born photographer & has the scars to prove it, having crawled through caves and shot from mountain camps before – so he knows this kind of terrain like the back of his hand. His photos show Bargiel in mid stride on a ridge just about wide enough to balance on a tightrope, the clouds boiling up beneath him like a proper stormy sea.
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