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.
The first summit successes of the fall season on the eight-thousanders in Tibet are now perfect. The expedition operator Imagine Nepal announced that an eleven-member team led by Mingma Gyalje Sherpa reached the summit of Shishapangma at 8,027 meters today. Five team members had completed their eight-thousand-meter collection, it said: the Nepalese Mingma Gyalje Sherpa and Dawa Gyalje Sherpa, the US-American Tracee Lee Metcalfe, the Japanese Naoki Ishikawa and the Pakistani Sirbaz Khan.
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.
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?
Norrdine Nouar listened to his body. On the evening of 22 May, the German mountaineer, who wanted to climb Mount Everest without bottled oxygen and without a Sherpa companion, set off from the South Col at around 7,900 meters. His goal: the highest point on earth at 8,849 meters.
However, the 36-year-old turned back at an altitude of around 8,100 meters. “I realized pretty quickly that I might manage to reach the summit, but that I would never come back,” Norrdine writes to me.
Among the hundreds of Everest summit successes that have been reported in recent days, one stands out: Piotr Krzyzowski from Poland climbed the 8,516-meter-high Lhotse on 21 May without bottled oxygen and without a Sherpa companion.
Instead of returning to base camp, as he had actually planned before the start of the expedition, Krzyzowski climbed from the Lhotse flank to Everest South Col and then on towards the summit at 8,849 meters. On 23 May, Piotr stood on the highest point on earth, barely 48 hours after his summit success on Lhotse. Such a double ascent of these two eight-thousanders without bottled oxygen had previously only been achieved by a handful of mountaineers.
Norrdine Nouar has scaled his second eight-thousander without bottled oxygen. Last Sunday (14 April), the 36-year-old German mountaineer stood on the 8,091-meter-high summit of Annapurna I in western Nepal. In spring 2023, Nouar had already scaled the 8,516-meter-high Lhotse. Norrdine did not join any large teams on either occasion, but went it alone – on the normal routes, which were secured with fixed ropes by the commercial teams.
Nouar was a late bloomer when it came to mountaineering. Neither his family nor his friends were drawn to the mountains. He is the son of a native Algerian who came to the former GDR as a guest worker and met his future German wife there. Norrine grew up in the southern German state of Franconia, studied International Technology Management and spent his free time playing computer games rather than going out into nature.
So why did the mountain fever take hold of him at some point? “Ever since I can remember, I have been driven by an insatiable curiosity, a thirst for adventure and the constant urge to take on a new challenge,” Norrdine writes on his website. “I couldn’t help but opt for an uncertain adventure. So I went to the mountains, albeit late.” He reached his first summit at the age of 23. He later climbed four-thousand-metre peaks in the Alps, in the High Atlas in Morocco and also high mountains in the Caucasus and other mountain regions around the world. Nouar has stood on the summits of Mont Blanc, Elbrus and Kilimanjaro, among others. He lives in the municipality of Oberstaufen in the Bavarion region of Allgäu.
After his summit success on Annapurna, Norrdine, currently in Kathmandu, answered my questions.
Norrdine, congratulations on your summit success on Annapurna I. What was going through your mind on the summit?
