The only rapper to climb Mount Everest
The singer and rapper Mike Posner has quite a few distinctions to his name.
The Detroit native has picked up a Grammy nomination, for one thing, after his 2015 track ‘I Took a Pill in Ibiza’ was remixed by Seeb and became a megahit. Beyond that, plenty of his other songs have charted, while he’s also produced hits for other artists and released a book of poetry, too. But arguably Posner’s standout achievement has nothing to do with music or writing at all. It’s rather that, in 2021, he literally climbed Mount Everest.
Posner, who is a bona fide adventurer away from his music career, attempted the gruelling journey up Everest for the sake of charity. He was raising money for an organisation called the Detroit Justice Center, which seeks to change the justice system for the better within Posner’s home city and otherwise aims to support local communities in need. He certainly helped the group with his efforts, outdoing his $250,000 fundraising target by successfully raising a touch more than $266,000.
Unfortunately, this achievement was somewhat soured when it came to the climb itself. The trek began in May 2021, while the COVID pandemic was still ripping through populations around the world. The US State Department had, around this time, issued a warning about a significant COVID outbreak in Nepal, but Posner ultimately ignored the advice and travelled to the country anyway. This attracted quite a bit of ill-feeling.
When footage began to circulate of Posner performing inside a tent on base camp, within which people did not appear to be wearing masks, he was fiercely criticised by some. This session was subsequently described by Outsider magazine as “a major super-spreader event.”
There is no question that Posner’s flaunting of COVID advice marred his Everest achievement, but the fact remains that he did, in the end, make it to the mountain’s summit. Accompanied by a team of doctors and Sherpas, he made it to the top in the early hours of June 1. In a video he later posted to Instagram, the ecstatic musician could be heard shouting, “On the top of the world!”
He later elaborated on Instagram about how much the experience had taken out of him. “This was hard,” he noted. “I’m exhausted beyond any point of exhaustion I could’ve conceived of before.”
Climbing Mount Everest, and, crucially, making it back down again, is surely Posner’s most impressive feat of adventure, but it is far from his only one. In 2019 he spent six months walking across America, during which time he was bitten by a rattlesnake, and earlier this year, beginning in July, he began trekking along the Continental Divide Trail, a route between Canada and Mexico stretching across 3,100 miles. It will be a long journey, and he is, at the time of writing, presently on the move. He is documenting his travels on his Instagram account.