This means that the Spaniard is now listed in the record books as the oldest person ever to stand on an eight-thousander. He replaces Japanese climber Yuichiro Miura, who climbed Mount Everest in 2013 at the age of 80 – for the third time in his life.
“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.
Anja, first of all, congratulations on your 12th eight-thousander. The weather conditions were difficult at first. Then a weather window opened up. How did you experience the ascent and descent on Dhaulagiri?
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.
At first it was an apprehension, now it is a sad certainty: five Russian climbers with whom radio contact was lost on Sunday on the eight-thousander Dhaulagiri in western Nepal are dead. According to the newspaper “The Himalayan Times”, the crew of a rescue helicopter discovered the bodies of the five missing mountaineers at an altitude of around 7,100 meters. It is assumed that Alexander Dusheyko, Oleg Kruglov, Vladimir Chistikov, Mikhail Nosenko and Dmitrii Shpilevoi fell around 500 meters to their dead, it said.
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