Calgarian Laval St. Germain summits Everest without air tanks

Laval St. Germain promised his teenage daughter he would climb Mount Everest with a tank of oxygen, just in case.

He didn’t need it.

The climber and sports enthusiast reached the top Monday mid-morning, Nepal time, and climbed back down to safety, to the relief of his wife and children in Calgary.

He is believed to be the first Canadian to successfully climb the globe’s highest peak without the supplementary air that keeps the mind sharp and circulation intact.

“I talked to him last night just as he had come down,” said his wife, Janet St. Germain, on Tuesday.

“He sounded a little slurry. I think it’s because he’s oxygen-deprived.”

In short, she said: “He sounded terrible.”

St. Germain, 41, told his family he didn’t want to rely on air tanks during the final 10-day trek to the top.

“My daughter wasn’t comfortable with it,” she said. “Neither am I, actually.”

Janet admits she doesn’t entirely understand why her husband pushed himself to that extreme.

“He just thinks it’s turned into such a commercial venture,” she said. Sans added air is “the way the mountain is meant to be climbed. It’s back to nature.”

Although a Sherpa did bring an oxygen tank along, he didn’t use it. Janet said she’d be happy to hear the speed of his speaking return to a normal pace. The climber suffered frost bite on the tips of his now blackened fingers, a consequence of the oxygen-deprived environment, which cut circulation at the tips of his limbs.

Fortunately, he won’t lose them, she said.

A father of three children between the ages of 8 and 17, St. Germain left Calgary at the end of March. Typically, climbers will climb up and down lower portions of the mountain several times

acclimatize the thin air

frigid conditions before attempting to reach the summit.

Janet said she began to get worried about

days ago when reports from her husband became

and she knew he was attempting to reach the top.

“I began to keep myself really busy. Since the 15th, every day was really tough because I hadn’t heard from him and I knew he was pushing for the summit. Every day it got tougher,” she said. “I wasn’t mentioning a lot to the kids.”

When she heard from his team that he was making the final climb: “Then I was really holding my breath.” At one point, the radios briefly went dead and “nobody had heard from him.”

He was one of a handful of people in his 20-person team to try for the summit. When he returned, she was relieved and overjoyed.

“My kids have total bragging rights. It was the first thing they put on their Facebook pages,” she said.

Reinhold Messner, from Italy, and Peter Habeler, from Austria, were the first climbers to attempt Everest without oxygen in 1978. At the top of the mountain, the air is so thin that it can barely support a person at rest. The climbers became controversial figures within the medical and mountaineering communities as it was feared they were putting themselves at risk for brain damage.

They conquered the mountain and survived.

In 1994, a Canadian team tried to climb to the top without oxygen. They had to turn back due to extreme fatigue. They reached within 200 metres of the summit.