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 34-year-old German, it was the tenth of the 14 eight-thousanders, the ninth without bottled oxygen. “I know my body well enough by now to know how it reacts to altitude and that it can usually cope with it. So why not do without this aid if I can?,” Blacha wrote to me at the end of September after her summit success on Manaslu.
Only on her two ascents of Mount Everest – 2017 from the Tibetan north side, 2021 from the Nepalese south side – did she use a breathing mask. Apart from her and Ngima Dorchi, only a seven-person team from the Austrian expedition operator Furtenbach Adventures was at the highest point of Cho Oyu on Saturday, according to Blacha, most of the others were aiming for today, 7 October, as the summit day. The rope-fixing team had reached the summit last Friday.
Only one eight-thousander allowed in Tibet per season
In addition to Everest and Cho Oyu, Anja Blacha now has Broad Peak (in 2019), K2 (in 2019), Nanga Parbat (in 2023), Gasherbrum I (in 2023), Gasherbrum II (in 2023), Makalu (in 2024), Kangchenjunga (in 2024) and Manaslu (in 2024) in her eight-thousander account. Blacha is still missing Lhotse, Dhaulagiri and Annapurna in Nepal as well as Shishapangma in Tibet to complete her collection of the world’s 14 highest mountains. She had already stood on the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on all continents, in 2017 – at the age of 26. At the turn of 2019/2020, she hiked 1,381 kilometers from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole on skis – solo and unsupported.
When I asked whether she would be attempting also the 8,027-meter-high Shishapangma near Cho Oyu this fall season, Anja replied that she wouldn’t be allowed to, “as Tibet has only allowed one ascent (with Sherpa, oxygen, …) per season since last fall.” She is therefore on her way back to the Tibetan capital Lhasa and then on to Kathmandu.
