Günter Dyhrenfurth
Swiss mountaineer, geologist and Himalayan explorer (1886-1975)
Günter Oskar Dyhrenfurth (12 November 1886 – 14 April 1975) was a German-born, German and Swiss mountaineer, geologist and Himalayan explorer. He won a gold medal in alpinism at the 1936 Summer Olympics, the third and final time the award was offered.
Biography
He led the International Himalaya Expedition (IHE) 1930 to Kangchenjunga, and another one, IHE 1934, to the Baltoro region in the Karakorams, especially to explore the Gasherbrum-Group. This expedition made the first ascent of Sia Kangri and some of its sub-peaks and provided detailed information about the accessibility of the 8000ers Gasherbrum I and II. The first ascent of Gasherbrum I in 1958 was accomplished via the route proposed by Dyhrenfurth following the so-called IHE-spur and the SE-ridge.
Dyhrenfurth was "an influential alpinist and chronicler of early Himalayan mountaineering". In the 1930s, he began to compile tables of High Asian mountains and ,with Anders Bolinder, he kept records of all major mountaineering expeditions to the Himalaya, these were published annually in the Swiss journal Die Alpen, and later in the Berge der Welt (Mountain World) year-books, published by the Swiss Foundation of Alpine Research.
He died on 14 April 1975 in Ringgenberg, Switzerland.
His son Norman G. Dyhrenfurth was also a mountaineer and became an important expedition leader and film maker.
Selected bibliography
Dyhrenfurth, Günter (1931). Himalaya.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q70604. VIAF identifies the subject as 3254190. The Library of Congress control number is no98109927. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1886, 1975, 1936 and 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Günter Dyhrenfurth” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.