She has done it again. Today, Anja Blacha – along with the rope-fixing team of the Nepalese expedition operator Seven Summit Treks (SST) led by Lakpa “Makalu” Sherpa – reached the 8,167-meter-high summit of Dhaulagiri in western Nepal.
According to SST, the 34-year-old German mountaineer was one of a total of 13 people to achieve the first summit success this spring on the seventh highest mountain on earth. Anja once again did without bottled oxygen during the ascent – as did Pakistani Sajid Ali Sadpara and Taiwanese Lu Chung-Han.
Modest and without much fanfare
For Blacha, the most successful German high-altitude mountaineer, it was the twelfth eight-thousander that she has scaled with commercial teams via the normal route. She climbed eleven of them without a breathing mask. Only on her two Everest successes – 2017 via the Tibetan north side and 2021 via the Nepalese south side – did Anja use supplementary oxygen. In April, she had already scaled Annapurna I, which is not far from Dhaulagiri.
She is now only missing Lhotse (8,516 m) in Nepal and Shishapangma (8,027 meters) in Tibet to complete her collection of the 14 highest mountains in the world. Anja therefore has a good chance of becoming the first German woman to scale all 14 eight-thousanders – and in a pleasantly modest way, without much fanfare. So far, from Germany only Ralf Dujmovits has succeeded in reaching the summits of all eight-thousanders.
First summit success of the season also on Kangchenjunga
Today also saw the first summit success of the season on Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain on earth. Together with the five-member rope-fixing team from SST, five foreign climbers also reached the highest point at 8,586 meters, according to the company.
Further summit successes by commercial teams were also reported from Makalu, with an height of 8,485 meters the fifth highest mountain in the world. Lakpa “Makalu” Sherpa had already led the rope-fixing team to the summit on 10 April and then moved on to Dhaulagiri.
