Located among the forests where eagles fly overhead, Jabal Sawda has long been one of Saudi Arabia's best places for mountaineers. At 2,999m, Jabal Sawda had been considered the kingdom's highest peak until twin mountaineers, Matthew and Eric Gilbertson, climbed it in 2018, finding it to be about three meters shy of Jabal Ferwa.
For more than a decade, the twins have traveled to one country after another around the world, rewriting the mountain record books about places across the Middle East and West Africa. So far they have reached the peaks of more than 100 countries and newly identified the highest points in Togo, Guinea- Bissau and Ivory Coast.
Matthew, a research scientist at Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, California, and Eric, an instructor in mechanical engineering at Seattle University, said their work was motivated by a need for accuracy and love for mountaineering. "If we're going to go through all the effort to visit a country and visit the highest mountain, we want to be sure that we have indeed visited the highest mountain," Matthew said. "We consider it assistance to future mountaineers to have an accurate survey done so that they can focus their efforts on getting to whichever peak they want to get to."
The twins' love of mountaineering began when they were children with family trips to the Great Smoky Mountains in the southeastern United States. When they were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology（MIT）, they started climbing as many mountains as possible. In 2012, after achieving their goal of reaching the highest point of each US state, they turned their attention to the rest of the world.