Erwin Schneider (1906-1987) was born in Joachimstal (Jachymow), a mining town in West Bohemia, now known as the Czech Republic. He went to a school in Idria (Idrija), Slovenia and completed his education at Salzburg. From 1924-35, Schneider studied mining at the Technical University of Charlottenburg in Berlin. While studying there, he joined the Academic Alpine Association.

Schneider was an active mountain climber, known as the “Seven-thousand King,” for ascending 5 of 11 seven-thousand-foot peaks. In 1928 he set on the Alai-Pamir expedition (ascending the Pik Lenin, at 7,439 m, the highest mountain of the Soviet Union); in 1930, the International Himalaya Expedition; in 1930, the Kangchenjunga Expedition and 1932, the expedition to the Cordillera Blanca in Peru. The Kangchenjunga expedition did not succeed in reaching the 8,598 m high summit. From Darjeeling, he passed the Khang La towards Pangpema, the main camp north of the glacier. In July 1930, with his colleague H. Hoerlin, he climbed four peaks above 7,000 metres, among them the Jongsang Peak (7,483 m), the 57th highest peak in the world, on the borders of Nepal, India and China. For a year, they held the record for scaling the highest point up to that time. In early 1934 Schneider joined the German Nanga Parbat expedition, which made it up to 7,900 m before disaster struck and bad weather created havoc with their plans. Ten members of the expedition died. Richard Finsterwalder, however, created a map to the scale of 1:50,000.

Besides being a mountaineer, Schneider was also a “legendary map-maker,” as Nepali Times puts it. In 1936 Schneider joined another expedition to Peru and prepared his first map, Cordillera Huayhuash, based on a terrestrial photogrammetric survey. In 1937 he signed up at the Technical University of Hanover and in the following year in Berlin, where the first Institute of Photogrammetry was installed. In 1939 his ten toes were so severely frostbitten that they had to be amputated to the metatarsal bone. After the war, he worked as a freelancer in Lech/Arlberg, providing services for developing hydroelectric plants and creating maps for the cartographic section of the Alpine Association.

In 1955 Schneider returned to Nepal with the International Himalaya Expedition, led by Norman G. Dyrhenfurth. Schneider was the lead cartographer in the project, and the photogrammetric survey led to the creation of the famous Mount Everest Map, scale 1: 25,000, sponsored by the German Research Foundation and the German and Austrian Alpine Associations, published in 1957. In 1960, Walter Hellmich, Richard Finsterwalder and Erwin Schneider planned a map covering the entire Everest group from Cho Oyu to Makalu as part of an interdisciplinary research project in its initial phase (1960/1961) was supported by the German Research Foundation and private sponsors. In 1962 Schneider persuaded the Fritz Thyssen Foundation to support the “Forschungsunternehmen Himalaya Nepal” for ten years. Maps at the scale of 1:50,000 covered the Khumbu Himal (1965), Tamba Koshi-Likhu Khola (1968), Dudh Kosi and Shorong/Hinku (1974), Lapchi Kang (1974) and Rolwaling (1974, second edition 1992). In 1968 Schneider extended his work to Langtang (completed in 1990, 1:50,000).

Ever since his maps have been known as “Schneider maps,” and the name “Schneider” has become a trade mark. Likewise, as Kunda Dixit, former chief editor of Nepali Times, writes: “His photographs from the 1950s now form a valuable visual archive for before-and-after images to record the effects of climate warming.”

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