Hristo Prodanov

Hristo Prodanov (1943 to 1984) was a Bulgarian mountaineer, the first Bulgarian to climb Mount Everest, which he reached on 20 April 1984 by the difficult West Ridge, alone and without oxygen. He was the first person to climb Everest in April and the thirteenth to climb it without bottled oxygen. He reached the summit at 18:15 local time, then got lost on the descent overnight and reported the next afternoon that he had lost his gloves; his body was never found. A metallurgical engineer who began work in 1976, he made his first 7,000 metre ascent on Lenin Peak in 1967 and in 1981 was the first Bulgarian to climb Lhotse without supplementary oxygen.