Anja Blacha Archive - Adventure Mountain

7. October 20247. October 2024

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

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.

27. September 202427. September 2024

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

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.

Anja, Manaslu was your third eight-thousander summit this year. How did you fare on your ascent?

25. September 202425. September 2024

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

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.

13. June 202413. June 2024

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

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?