For 10 days in October, Kristin Harila loitered at the blisteringly chilly base camp of Cho Oyu in the Himalayas.
She was chasing Nirmal Purja.
In 2019, Purja tried to ascend all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter mountains in a single season. It initially appeared laughable, even to the most aggressive climbers. But he proved that it was potential, setting a mind-bending report of six months and six days. Now, Harila needed to show that girls might attain the identical heights as males in excessive mountaineering.
Harila, a 37-year-old Norwegian and a novice explorer, was assured that she might deal with the climb. She and her crew, Pasdawa Sherpa and Dawa Ongchu, had spent the earlier 5 months scaling 12 of the world’s 14 8,000-meter peaks at an unprecedented tempo.
But she wasn’t assured that this try can be value the danger.
Each day, sherpas at Cho Oyu would climb as excessive as they might, hoping to repair ropes alongside a brand new path to the summit. But every evening, they returned with alarming studies: Tents arrange close to the first camp had been washed away in an avalanche; ropes mounted between the first and third camp had been buried in snow; and winds at the summit had been ripping at 60 miles per hour.
Even if the gear might face up to the climate, the sherpas weren’t positive the climbers might.
When approached from the Tibet facet, Cho Oyu is the most secure of the 14 peaks. But Harila and her crew had been compelled to aim it from the Nepal facet as a result of their visas and permits to enter Tibet had by no means been authorized by the Chinese authorities. And even when they did accomplish this groundbreaking ascension of Cho Oyu, they’d haven’t any approach to entry the mission’s closing peak as the Shishapangma mountain is solely inside Tibet.
“It was impossible for me to climb it alone,” Harila mentioned on a video name in November. “Otherwise, I would have tried. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone losing a finger or a toe — or their life.”
Eventually, Harila’s crew satisfied her to name off the expedition.
“My plan now is to do a Cho Oyu winter expedition,” she mentioned, her focus unwavering. “It’s possible to do the whole mission again in five months if I start in winter. Then it won’t be just 14 peaks — it’ll be 14 plus one or two that I’ll end up climbing twice.”
In some methods, Harila is an unlikely successor to — or surpasser of — Purja. A former skilled skier, girls’s jail guard and furnishings firm govt, Harila summited her first 8,000-meter peak solely in 2021. But on that first try, she realized that she may very well be an elite climber: She recorded an unplanned report, changing into the quickest girl ever to summit Mount Everest and Lhotse, reaching each peaks in lower than 12 hours. (She broke that report once more on her 14 peaks try final yr.)
Returning residence to Norway throughout the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, she was compelled to quarantine in a lodge for 10 days. “I was stuck in this room, and I couldn’t stop thinking about these 8,000-meter peaks,” Harila mentioned. “I was thinking: I’m 35, and I really want to climb them all. If I want to do it, I need to do it fast. That was part of it. And the other part of it was: If I’m going to change this sport, the best way I can do it is by showing that women are just as capable as men on these high mountains.”
The fashionable historical past of mountaineering has been overwhelmingly male, particularly in the sky-scratching Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, that are residence to the 14 peaks. The query of who has actually summited all 14 peaks is a fierce debate in the mountaineering group, however there’s no query that almost all of the makes an attempt have been made by males. Of the 53 climbers who declare to have summited all of them, solely 4 are girls. All 4 climbers formally acknowledged by 8000ers.com, a well-respected however unofficial report keeper of those expeditions, are males. (Purja is amongst them, however the web site lists his official time as 2 years, 5 months and 15 days as a result of he stopped at a false summit of Manaslu on his unique expedition.)
“The mountains are a great equalizer,” mentioned Melissa Arnot Reid, who has been an Everest information since 2008 and was the first American girl to summit the world’s highest peak with out supplemental oxygen. “They don’t care what your gender is. They don’t care what your bank account balance is or what degree you have or what color your skin is — but the reality is way more nuanced than that. To get to the mountains, you have to get to the base. And that’s expensive. This is a colonial activity. It’s really white, and it’s really wealthy, and it’s really male.”
In 1994, when Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, an Austrian mountaineer, began her mission to summit all 14 peaks with out bottled oxygen, she had no alternative however to put on the smallest measurement males’s gear, she advised The New York Times in an e-mail. Twenty-five years later, when the American Caroline Gleich was getting her gear collectively for her “Climb for Equality” on Everest, she confronted the identical situation: She couldn’t discover a technical snowsuit in her measurement. Gleich reached out to Reid, who stuffed her personal go well with in a precedence mail field and shipped it to Gleich.
“When you can’t even find equipment that fits you,” Gleich mentioned, “it sends a powerful message about where the world says you belong.”
To fund her expedition, which she mentioned price about $500,000, Harila spent months looking for sponsors. She hadn’t secured any by the time she was scheduled to depart Norway to start out her expedition final spring. Undaunted, she bought her house and put all the proceeds towards the mission. It wasn’t till she arrived in Nepal and was getting ready to summit the Annapurna mountain that she secured her predominant sponsor, the watch firm Bremont. (The firm additionally sponsored Purja, and a spokesman mentioned each climbers acquired the identical assist.)
Sponsorships, and permits, will probably be a key to her capability to embark on one other record-breaking try, starting this winter.
But Harila is unflappable. In the previous yr, she’s misplaced greater than 20 kilos from a punishing mixture of bodily exhaustion and common battles with meals poisoning, she’s been blasted in the leg by a tumbling boulder, she’s fallen off the again of a truck, and she’s survived ice storms, freezing summit pushes and close to misses with avalanches.
She’s additionally summited 12 of the world’s 14 highest peaks, and she hopes that paperwork gained’t be what retains her from reaching her final peak as soon as once more.
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