Photo by Galyna Andrushko
Here’s a roundup of climbing news about those who take on the globe’s highest mountains as well as others who are pushing the boundaries of rock climbing. On Everest, a team that includes a 16-year-old American girl and her father is getting ready to move from Base Camp to Camp One (located at 20,000 feet). Follow their blog
here. Spanish climber
Edurne Pasaban is also at Base Camp, readying for her attempt to be the first woman to climb Everest without oxygen. Neil Beidelman, a survivor of the harrowing 1996 Everest climb chronicled by Jon Krakauer in his book Into Thin Air, will
return soon to make one more attempt at the summit. Meanwhile, on Nepal’s Makalu—the world’s fifth-highest mountain—climber Melissa Arnot and her team, at base camp, are
blogging about their ascent.
Also in the Himalayas is non-traditional Swiss climber Ueli Steck, who just zipped up an 8,000-plus meter peak in Tibet in record time. He left base camp (5603 meters) at 10:30 pm on Saturday night and made it to the peak in just over 10 hours. Steck is known for his “Alpinist” style of climbing: he travels quickly with minimal gear, relying on Olympian-level training to get up and down mountains at high speeds. His style is closely attuned to that of the rock-climbing devotees who practice their art in California’s Yosemite National Park. Climbers there are continually whittling time off existing speed records as they seek the quickest routes up famed El Capitan. They are also climbing with fewer—sometimes zero—ropes. It will be interesting to see if other mega-mountain climbers take on Steck’s hybridized mode of ascent.
Edurne Pasaban. Photo courtesy of sangriasolysiesta.blogspot.com
You may recall that in April 2010, Korean climber Oh Euh-Sun became the first woman to summit all 14 of the globe’s “8,000-ers,” the world’s highest mountains. Just a few weeks later, Spanish climber Edurne Pasaban, who had been working toward the same goal for years, completed her final climb of the 8,000+-meter peaks. Then controversy erupted when Oh Euh-Sun failed to produce photographic evidence of one of her climbs; next Sherpas on her team came out of the woodwork to assert that she’d never made it all the way to the top of that peak. Discredited, Oh Euh-Sun was
stripped of her title by the mountaineering community and Pasaban was subsequently crowned the new “first woman” in history to scale the world’s 14 highest peaks. For her part, Pasaban says she didn’t set out to win anything. A lifelong outdoorswoman from Spain’s Basque country, she told
National Geographic Adventure last year that “My life isn’t going to change much if I’m the first or second woman to do it. …As you can probably tell, climbing is very personal for me. I’m not out there trying to conquer anything or compete with anyone.”
