Karl Egloff

Karl Egloff is a Swiss-Ecuadorian athlete, mountaineer, cyclist and mountain guide, born on 16 March 1981 in Ecuador to a Swiss father and an Ecuadorian mother. He began assisting his father's mountain guiding business at fifteen, studied business administration in Zurich, served in the Swiss Army and raced mountain bikes with the Ecuador national team for two years before returning to guiding. From 2012 he focused on speed ascents of high mountains, setting a record on Cotopaxi that December and later breaking Kilian Jornet's records on Kilimanjaro in 2014 and Aconcagua in 2015. In June 2019 he beat Jornet's Denali time by a single minute with a round trip of 11 hours 44 minutes, and in May 2022 he made a speed ascent of Makalu. In 2025 he abandoned an attempt to climb Everest from base camp and back in under 24 hours without supplemental oxygen.