Marek Holecek gave himself an early present for his 50th birthday on 5 November. The Czech top mountaineer, together with 34-year-old Slovakian Ondrej Huserka, climbed the extremely challenging 2,200-meter-high East Face of the 7,227-meter-high Langtang Lirung for the first time. Holecek let it be known via satellite phone that it took them a total of…
They climb and climb and just keep going. The two British mountaineers Victor Saunders, 74, and Mick Fowler, 68, don’t care about their advanced age or health restrictions. This fall, they made the first ascent of the 6,258-meter-high Yawash Sar in the Karakoram. The remote mountain in the Karakoram – around 130 kilometers northeast of…
“I lifted up the sock and there’s a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched into it. We were all literally running in circles dropping F-bombs.” This is how the US climber and filmmaker Jimmy Chin described to the magazine “National Geographic” the moment when he and his team discovered remains of Andrew Irvine on…
Another top alpinist has been lost forever in the mountains. Mike Gardner fell to his death last Monday on the still unclimbed 7,468-meter-high Jannu East (also known as Kumbhakarna East) in eastern Nepal. Mike was only 32 years old. Together with his friend and rope partner Sam Hennessey, the mountain guide from the US state…
Today the list of people who have stood on all 14 eight-thousanders has virtually exploded – it has grown by 15 names. The reason was a successful summit day of commercial expeditions on the 8,027-meter-high Shishapagma in Tibet. According to the largest Nepalese operator Seven Summit Treks, 29 team members reached the summit of the…
At first it was an apprehension, now it is a sad certainty: five Russian climbers with whom radio contact was lost on Sunday on the eight-thousander Dhaulagiri in western Nepal are dead. According to the newspaper “The Himalayan Times”, the crew of a rescue helicopter discovered the bodies of the five missing mountaineers at an…
Now she’s in double figures. Last Saturday (5 October), Anja Blacha and Ngima Dorchi Sherpa scaled the 8,188-meter-high Cho Oyu via the Tibetan north side, her fourth eight-thousander this year – “Ngima with, me without a breathing mask,” as Anja writes to me. “It was a bit windy, but otherwise the conditions were great.” For…
The first summit successes of the fall season on the eight-thousanders in Tibet are now perfect. The expedition operator Imagine Nepal announced that an eleven-member team led by Mingma Gyalje Sherpa reached the summit of Shishapangma at 8,027 meters today. Five team members had completed their eight-thousand-meter collection, it said: the Nepalese Mingma Gyalje Sherpa…
It has never been repeated to this day. That says it all about the “White Limbo” route through the North Face of Mount Everest, which the Australians Tim Macartney-Snape and Greg Mortimer used to reach the summit at 8,849 meters on 3 October 1984 – 40 years ago today. They were climbing without bottled oxygen….
