Anyone who regularly reads my blog knows that I have a very distanced relationship with supposed “records” in mountaineering. I make an exception for Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, because she is a true pioneer of women’s mountaineering. For more than a decade, she has been campaigning for women in her home country of Nepal to be given the opportunity to climb mountains and earn a living there. On 9 October, Dawa Yangzum summited the 8,027-meter-high Shishapangma in Tibet, becoming the first woman from Nepal to have saled all 14 eight-thousanders.
First Asian woman with an international mountain guide certificate
The Sherpani, who grew up with three brothers and two sisters in a small mountain village in the Rolwaling Valley, had already set milestones before. In 2014, she reached the summit of K2 with her compatriots Maya Sherpa and Pasang Lhamu Sherpa Akita. They were the first women from Nepal to scale the second highest mountain on earth. In 2017, Dawa Yangzum became the first woman in Asia to receive an international mountain guide certificate and has been working regularly as a mountain guide ever since, among others on Mount Everest.
Since 2020, she has been offering climbing courses for young Nepalese women in the Khumbu region. She herself has lived in Boulder in the USA for years and works for the expedition operator Alpine Ascents International. The 34-year-old Nepalese answered my questions.
Dawa Yangzum, first of all, congratulations on completing your collection of eight-thousanders. Would you highlight one of the 14 ascents in particular?
Mick Fowler (l.) and Viktor Saunders on the summit of Yawash Sar
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 K2 as the crow flies – is the highest peak in the Khunjerab massif, not far from Pakistan’s border with China.
Two years ago, in fall 2022, a five-member British team cut their teeth on Yawash Sar – also known as the “Matterhorn of Khunjerab” due to its beautiful shape. In a total of three summit attempts via the southern flank of the mountain, the climbers had reached a maximum altitude of around 6,000 meters. The rock was too brittle, the technical difficulties too great, they said.
Complex wall, good conditions
Fowler and Saunders succeeded in climbing the Northwest Face. “The face was complex and we were fortunate to find good climbing conditions,” said Fowler. Before they got on, they studied the wall very carefully with binoculars so as not to end up in impasses, said Mick. In total, it took them seven days to climb up and down to the summit and back to their base camp.
Northwest Face of the 6,258-meter-high Yawash Sar
“A notable feature of the climb was a lack of good bivouac sites and at one point, we endured an excruciatingly uncomfortable hanging bivouac in strong winds,” said Mick. He spoke of “one of the best ascents that we have done together. It was absolutely brilliant!”
Three decades on separate paths
Fowler and Saunders had already climbed together in the Karakoram in the 1980s. In 1987, they caused a sensation when they mastered the 2,200-meter-high “Golden Pillar”, the Northwest Pillar of Spantik (7,027 m) for the first time. After that, the two went their separate ways as mountaineers for almost three decades.
Victor Saunders on the ascent
Saunders worked mainly as a mountain guide and expedition leader. He climbed the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on all continents. Between 2004 and 2013, Victor reached the summit of Mount Everest six times (with bottled oxygen). He stood on the eight-thousander Cho Oyu four times, once of which (in 1997) without a breathing mask. Fowler formed a powerful team with Paul Ramsden for a long time. Three times – in 2003, 2013 and 2016 – the duo was honored with the Piolet d’Or, the “Oscar of mountaineering”, for spectacular first ascents on six-thousanders.
Now he has made an astonishing comeback as an alpinist alongside Saunders. I got in touch with the two of them. Victor Saunders is still leading a trekking tour in Bhutan until the end of the month. So only Mick Fowler was able to answer my questions.
Mick, first of all congratulations on your great first ascent of Yawash Sar in Pakistan. Can you reveal the secret of why a 68-year-old (you) and a 74-year-old (Victor) are still able to achieve such impressive feats on the mountain?
Mick Fowler at the highest point
There is no secret. We are lucky to be reasonably healthy for our age but I think the main ingredients for success are motivation and willpower. And a basic level of ability of course. We spend a lot of time choosing a suitable objective and looking forward to it. All that anticipation helps motivate us and we are both the sort of people who will do our very best to succeed on something when we have set our heart on it. I suppose having climbed objectives like this for over 40 years also helps. We tend to know have a good idea of our ability and readily agree on when to push on or retreat.
How much fun did you have on your first ascent, how much torment?
Mostly lots of fun. We were lucky in that the conditions above the bergshrund were excellent and gave really enjoyable climbing. I found wading up the glacier to the bergschrund something of a torment but Victor seems to like that sort of thing. We did have a sitting/hanging bivouac which was amongst the most uncomfortable we have ever had.
View from the hanging bivouac
But then with the benefit of hindsight it’s possible to view such an experience in a better light and derive some warped retrospective pleasure from it. We laugh now about our antics to try and alleviate the discomfort that night!
Have you set yourselves an age limit for your extreme tours?
No. We will carry on doing our best to choose and climb appropriate objectives for as long as we are able.
Mick, you’ve been climbing with a colostomy bag since your bowel cancer. How does this hinder you – especially on steep walls in freezing temperatures?
The main problem I have is that the surgeons removed most of the fat from my buttocks to fill the hole where my anus was. That means I have virtually no padding in my buttocks which makes sitting bivouacs excruciatingly uncomfortable. The colostomy bag itself is not a problem when all is going well. But my harness does go right across my stoma and poo squidging accidents inevitably occur when there is lots of output and it’s not possible to change the bag for any reason – usually for reasons of bad weather or sustained difficulties. There is also the hassle factor of having to carry lots of colostomy bags as I really don’t want to run out. And the adhesive doesn’t work so well in really cold temperatures which can cause problems.
There is a lot of talk about the increasingly poor climbing style on the world’s highest mountains – cue: fixed ropes to the summit on commercial expeditions. What is your position on this?
Mick and Viktor’s route
I don’t really have a strong opinion on them. If people want to get to the top that way then that’s up to them. It’s just a pity that such expeditions clog up certain routes with ropes and worse. It all looks very unpleasant and dangerous to me. And I can’t see how anyone can possibly call it climbing. But then it’s great that we are all different.
After the eight-thousander is before the eight-thousander. This year, this also applies to Anja Blacha, who has now climbed nine of the 14 highest mountains in the world. This makes the 34-year-old the German woman with the most eight-thousander summit successes.
Now no other woman from Germany has stood on eight-thousanders more often than Anja Blacha. The mountaineer, who celebrates her 34th birthday on 18 June, achieved a last-minute summit success on the 8,586-meter-high Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, at the end of the spring season on the eight-thousanders in Nepal. She had already scaled the 8,485-meter-high Makalu, the fifth-highest of all mountains, on 12 May. On both mountains, Anja climbed on the normal routes, with teams from the commercial expedition operator Seven Summit Treks (SST) and did without bottled oxygen herself.
These were her seventh and eighth eight-thousanders after Mount Everest (in 2017 and 2021), Broad Peak, K2 (both in 2019), Nanga Parbat, Gasherbrum I and II (these three in 2023). Only on Everest did she use a breathing mask on her ascents. This means that the German mountaineer now has one more eight-thousander summit success to her name than Alix von Melle, who has summited seven eight-thousanders to date. Anja Blacha answered my questions after her return from Kangchenjunga.
Congratulations, Anja. You scaled Makalu and now Kangchenjunga at the end of the spring season without bottled oxygen. With eight eight-thousanders to your name, you can now call yourself the most successful German female high-altitude mountaineer. How does that feel?
Norrdine Nouar has scaled his second eight-thousander without bottled oxygen. Last Sunday (14 April), the 36-year-old German mountaineer stood on the 8,091-meter-high summit of Annapurna I in western Nepal. In spring 2023, Nouar had already scaled the 8,516-meter-high Lhotse. Norrdine did not join any large teams on either occasion, but went it alone – on the normal routes, which were secured with fixed ropes by the commercial teams.
Nouar was a late bloomer when it came to mountaineering. Neither his family nor his friends were drawn to the mountains. He is the son of a native Algerian who came to the former GDR as a guest worker and met his future German wife there. Norrine grew up in the southern German state of Franconia, studied International Technology Management and spent his free time playing computer games rather than going out into nature.
So why did the mountain fever take hold of him at some point? “Ever since I can remember, I have been driven by an insatiable curiosity, a thirst for adventure and the constant urge to take on a new challenge,” Norrdine writes on his website. “I couldn’t help but opt for an uncertain adventure. So I went to the mountains, albeit late.” He reached his first summit at the age of 23. He later climbed four-thousand-metre peaks in the Alps, in the High Atlas in Morocco and also high mountains in the Caucasus and other mountain regions around the world. Nouar has stood on the summits of Mont Blanc, Elbrus and Kilimanjaro, among others. He lives in the municipality of Oberstaufen in the Bavarion region of Allgäu.
After his summit success on Annapurna, Norrdine, currently in Kathmandu, answered my questions.
Norrdine, congratulations on your summit success on Annapurna I. What was going through your mind on the summit?
As if there were no other problems on Mount Everest. For weeks, social media has been discussing a new signboard that the regional administration of the Khumbu region put up at the entrance to Everest Base Camp before the start of this year’s climbing season – directly in front of the boulder marked with paint that has served as a photo motif in recent years. There’s no accounting for taste – on both counts. The new sign shows Everest and in front of it Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who were the first people to scale the highest mountain on earth in 1953. Only one member of that expedition team is still alive: Kanchha Sherpa, now 91 years old.
I spoke to his grandson Tenzing Chogyal Sherpa – not about the new sign at Everest Base Camp, but about the consequences of climate change for the Everest region. The winter of 2023/2024 – like the previous one – was exceptionally warm and dry. Tenzing is a glaciologist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and works on the cryosphere, in simple terms everything to do with snow, ice and permafrost on Earth. The research of the 31-year-old scientist from Nepal focuses on the glaciers and glacial lakes in the mountainous regions of Asia.
When Thomas Huber talks about freedom in the mountains, his eyes light up. “Mountains are so much more than just a name, an ascent or a record,” the older of the two Huber brothers tells me. “Mountains give you the opportunity to find something very special. Within yourself. Your inner freedom.” Thomas is now 57 years old. After losing his hunting dog Cerro, who was run over last winter, he decided to give up expeditions this year. Instead, he concentrated on training his new dog Torre – and returning to his mountaineering roots: extreme climbing.
Ascent and descent route by Paul Ramsden and Tim Miller on Surma-Sarovar in western Nepal
Paul Ramsden and Tim Miller have done it again: the two Brits managed another first ascent of a six-thousander in Nepal this fall – in alpine style (without bottled oxygen, without Sherpa support, without fixed ropes and without fixed high camps) and on a difficult route. Paul and Tim climbed the North Face of Surma-Sarovar in the far west of the country. The 6,574-meter-high mountain is located in the Salimor Khola Valley in the Gurans Himal, close to Nepal’s border with Tibet and India. “Possibly the most remote location I have ever been to, and we managed to climb a great route,” Paul wrote to me after his return from Nepal. He and Miller have thus achieved yet another feat of alpinism.
I had actually sent Paul some questions three weeks ago on the occasion of the Piolets d’Or award ceremony in Briancon on 15 November. Paul’s wife then informed me that he and Tim were still in Nepal. Ramsden and Miller will receive the “Oscar of Mountaineering” – as reported – for their first ascent of the 6,563-meter-high Jugal Spire in Nepal last year. Paul is the first mountaineer to be awarded the prestigious prize for the fifth time. Here are the answers from the 54-year-old top climber from Yorkshire in northern England.
Congratulations, Paul, on the fifth Piolet d’Or of your mountaineering career. What does the award mean to you?
