Thanks to a joint effort, the route up to the summit of Mount Everest at 8,849 meters has been secured. This morning local time, a twelve-member Nepalese rope-fixing team led by Mingtemba Sherpa reached the “Roof of the World.” It was the first summit success of this year’s spring season on the world’s highest mountain….
The Nepalese Ministry of Tourism issued only two climbing permits for Manaslu this spring season. This meant that Ukrainian Alexandr Moroz and Kyrgyz Mark Ablovacky effectively had the 8,163-meter-high mountain in western Nepal all to themselves. Last Tuesday, just 15 days after arriving in Kathmandu, Moroz reached the summit of the eighth-highest mountain on earth…
She is a strong woman. Anja Blacha reached the South Pole on skis, solo and without support. And she has already summited twelve of the 14 eight-thousanders, more than any other woman from Germany – and all of them without bottled oxygen. The 35-year-old has even stood on Mount Everest three times: in 2017 via…
All good things come in threes, people say. On his third attempt, Andrzej Bargiel succeeded in scaling Mount Everest without bottled oxygen and skiing from the summit back down to base camp. “It’s one of the most important milestones in my sports career. Skiing down Everest without oxygen was a dream that had been growing…
The final stop was at around 7,400 meters. After almost ten hours of climbing, Tyler Andrews decided to abandon his speed attempt on Mount Everest and descend again. “Slower pace than planned, snow has gotten worse and harder to break through solo,” it said on his website. The 35-year-old long-distance runner from the USA wants…
“In 1980 on Everest, I was more wiped out than ever before and not even after that,” Reinhold Messner told me five years ago when we talked about 20 August 1980—the day he stood alone on the summit of the highest mountain on earth. “I had fantastic weather, was very well acclimatized and made very…
“On 10 July at 11:30 a.m. local time, we stood on the summit of Nanga Parbat after climbing it via a new route in alpine style,” Denis Urubko wrote yesterday to the Russian mountaineering portal mountain.ru. “Maria and I are happy.” Urubko and his Spanish wife Maria “Pipi” Cardell had already travelled to Pakistan at…
Mourning for Klara Kolouchova. The 46-year-old Czech woman fell to her death on Nanga Parbat on Thursday. “An experienced mountaineer, she fell while descending above Camp 2. She was accompanied by her Sherpa, Taraman Tamang, when she slipped on a rocky section of the mountain,” the Nepalese expedition operator Seven Summit Treks (SST) announced on…
Even after returning to his home in Spain, David Göttler still seems to be floating on cloud nine. “It will probably take a month before the euphoria subsides and I can realize it all,” the 46-year-old German climber tells me. On Tuesday last week, Göttler – together with French female climber Tiphaine Duperier and her…
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…
“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….
“I am delighted for Sirbaz that he has now also completed the 14 eight-thousanders ‘topless’,” writes Ralf Dujmovits, Germany’s most successful high-altitude mountaineer. “My heartfelt congratulations to him.” Sirbaz Khan has fulfilled his self-proclaimed “Mission 14”: On Sunday at 11.50 a.m. Nepalese time, the 37-year-old reached the summit of Kangchenjunga at 8,586 meters with the…
“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…
Jost Kobusch kept a cool head on Mount Everest. On his first push this winter, the 32-year-old German climber reached an altitude of 7,537 meters on the West Ridge. The altimeter on his watch showed this value on 27 December. His GPS tracker measured the highest altitude at 7,488 meters. On another model, the figure…
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…
