German high-altitude mountaineer Anja Blacha has scaled the 8,163-meter-high Manaslu in western Nepal. According to Nepal’s largest expedition operator, Seven Summit Treks, the 34-year-old reached the summit on Monday morning local time – without bottled oxygen.
It was Anja’s ninth eight-thousander summit success – all of them with teams from commercial operators. She achieved eight of them without a breathing mask. She only used bottled oxygen on her two ascents of Mount Everest – in 2017 via the Tibetan north side and in 2021 via the Nepalese south side of the mountain.
Third eight-thousander success this year
Last spring, Blacha summited the 8,485-meter-high Makalu and the 8,586-meter-high Kangchenjunga. No other German woman has scaled more eight-thousanders than her. Anja could therefore justifiably call herself the “most successful female German high-altitude mountaineer”. However, she is not a “loudspeaker”, but rather someone who is modest and follows through with her projects without making a fuss. “I’m not looking to compete with other German female high-altitude climbers, and success can be measured by so many different factors, especially in the mountains,” Anja wrote to me after her success on Kangchenjunga. “So a comparative ‘most successful’ has no real meaning for me.”
Blacha completed her collection of the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on all continents, back in 2017. In 2019, she was the first German woman to reach the summit of K2, the second highest mountain on earth. At the turn of the year 2019/2020, she hiked 1381 kilometers on skis – solo and unsupported – from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole.
