Anja Blacha after her success on Mount Everest: “The summit seemed even more littered to me”

Anja Blacha on the Everest summit ridge
Anja Blacha on the Everest summit ridge

A week ago today, German mountaineer Anja Blacha experienced something on Mount Everest that is now a rarity: she had the summit all to herself – because she was the last summit contender of the spring season to reach the highest point on earth at 8,849 meters and was on her way without a Sherpa companion. One day later, the Icefall Doctors declared the season over and began dismantling the ropes and ladders through the dangerous Khumbu Icefall above Everest Base Camp. This deprived Anja of the chance to attempt the neighboring 8,516-meter-high Lhotse without bottled oxygen.

So be it, Blacha can be pleased to be the first German mountaineer and only the eleventh woman in the world to have stood on Mount Everest without a breathing mask. A remarkable achievement that stands out from the almost 800 Everest ascents this spring.

This means that she has climbed twelve of the 14 eight-thousanders – in commercial teams, on the normal routes – without supplemental oxygen. Only Lhotse and Shishapangma in Tibet are still missing from her collection of eight-thousanders. After her safe return from the mountain, Anja Blacha answered my questions.

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Breaking news: Anja Blacha is the first German woman to scale Mount Everest without bottled oxygen

Anja Blacha
Anja Blacha (on a previous expedition)

“At the moment, I see it above all as an unbalanced combination of numbers.” That was Anja Blacha’s answer a week and a half ago when I asked her what it meant to her that she had climbed eleven of her twelve eight-thousanders without bottled oxygen. Now she has provided a balanced combination of numbers.

The 34-year-old German adventurer also scaled Mount Everest today without a breathing mask. “She was all alone on the summit,” Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, head of the expedition operator Imagine Nepal, informed me at around 8.30 a.m. Central European Summer Time. According to Mingma, Blacha had climbed to the highest point on earth without bottled oxygen and without a Sherpa companion.

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Anja Blacha after her Dhaulagiri summit success: “Not in competition with other German female high-altitude mountaineers”

Anja Blacha on the summit of Dhaulagiri
Anja Blacha on the summit of Dhaulagiri

“So, what’s next? Another record-setting expedition? Maybe. As a by-product,” writes Anja Blacha on her website. “Rather than defining my goals based on records, I like to let curiosity guide my way. Following my interests, and living up to my values, virtues, capabilities. The art of striving well. Eudaimonia.” This term from Greek philosophy is made up of “Eu” (good) and “daimon” (demon, spirit). In other words, Anja is trying to live out her own good spirit.

And the 34-year-old German adventurer does this very persistently. This is how Blacha reached the South Pole on skis in the winter of 2019/2020, after pulling her sledge almost 1,400 kilometers from the coast of Antarctica, alone and without outside support.

She has scaled Mount Everest twice – in 2017 via the Tibetan north side and in 2021 via the Nepalese south side. And with her successes on Annapurna I and Dhaulagiri this spring, she has summited twelve of the 14 eight-thousanders in commercial teams via the normal routes – with the exception of Everest, all without bottled oxygen. After her second eight-thousander summit success this season, Anja Blacha answered my questions.

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Summit success on Dhaulagiri: Eight-thousander number twelve for Anja Blacha

Dhaulagiri
The 8,167-meter-high Dhaulagiri in western Nepal

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.

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Anja Blacha after summit success on Annapurna I: “I was very lucky”

Anja Blacha at Annapurna I
Anja Blacha at Annapurna I

No woman from Germany has stood on as many eight-thousanders as Anja Blacha. The 34-year-old has a good chance of becoming the first German woman to scale all 14 eight-thousanders. After her success on Annapurna I on 7 April, she is now only three short of the 14 highest mountains in the world: Lhotse (8,516 m) and Dhaulagiri (8,167 m) in Nepal and Shishapangma (8,027 m) in Tibet.

Anja climbs in commercial teams via the normal routes. She has summited ten of her eleven eight-thousanders without bottled oxygen. Blacha only used a breathing mask on her two Everest successes – in 2017 on the Tibetan north side and in 2021 on the Nepalese south side of the mountian. In the winter of 2019/2020, she reached the South Pole on skis after pulling her sled almost 1,400 kilometers from the coast of Antarctica – alone and without outside support.

Anja Blacha answered my three questions in the Nepalese capital Kathmandu:

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Summit success on Makalu, Icefall Doctors complete route, eleventh 8000er for Anja Blacha

Makalu in first daylight, from Gokyo Ri (in 2016)
Makalu (seen from Gokyo Ri)

On Makalu, the fifth highest mountain on earth, the ropes are now fixed up to the highest point at 8,485 meters. According to Nepal’s largest expedition operator Seven Summit Treks, the eight-man rope-fixing team reached the summit today together with a Nepalese client.

The team was led by the experienced Lakpa Sherpa, who is not called Makalu Lakpa for nothing. It was his eighth time on this summit. In 2022, he made headlines when he scaled Makalu three times in 16 days. The Nepalese Ministry of Tourism has issued 40 climbing permits for Makalu this spring so far (as of 9 April).

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Summit success on Cho Oyu – the tenth eight-thousander for Anja Blacha

Tibetan side of Cho Oyu
Tibetan side of Cho Oyu

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.

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Anja Blacha after her Manaslu success: “I had the summit to myself”

Anja Blacha
Anja Blacha

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.

Last spring, she first scaled Makalu (8,485 meters) and then Kangchenjunga (8,586 meters), both without bottled oxygen. She also climbed without a breathing mask during her successful ascent on Manaslu (8,163 meters) on Monday. Now Blacha wants to try her hand at Cho Oyu (8,188 meters). She answered my questions in Tibet.

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Summit success on Manaslu – eight-thousander number nine for Anja Blacha

Anja Blacha (2016)
Anja Blacha (2016)

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.

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Anja Blacha after Kangchenjunga success: “Never had such heavy legs on the descent”

Anja Blacha
Anja Blacha

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.

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