For 10 days in October, Kristin Harila loitered on the blisteringly chilly base camp of Cho Oyu within 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 probably the most aggressive climbers. However he proved that it was doable, setting a mind-bending file of six months and 6 days. Now, Harila wished to show that ladies 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 group, 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.
However she wasn’t assured that this try can be well worth the threat.
Every day, sherpas at Cho Oyu would climb as excessive as they may, hoping to repair ropes alongside a brand new path to the summit. However every evening, they returned with alarming stories: Tents arrange close to the primary camp had been washed away in an avalanche; ropes mounted between the primary and third camp had been buried in snow; and winds on the summit had been ripping at 60 miles per hour.
Even when 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. However Harila and her group 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 permitted by the Chinese language authorities. And even when they did accomplish this groundbreaking ascension of Cho Oyu, they’d haven’t any solution to entry the mission’s ultimate peak because the Shishapangma mountain is fully inside Tibet.
“It was not possible for me to climb it alone,” Harila mentioned on a video name in November. “In any other case, I’d have tried. I didn’t wish to be answerable for anybody dropping a finger or a toe — or their life.”
Finally, Harila’s group satisfied her to name off the expedition.
“My plan now could be to do a Cho Oyu winter expedition,” she mentioned, her focus unwavering. “It’s doable to do the entire mission once more in 5 months if I begin in winter. Then it gained’t be simply 14 peaks — it’ll be 14 plus one or two that I’ll find yourself climbing twice.”
In some methods, Harila is an unlikely successor to — or surpasser of — Purja. A former skilled skier, ladies’s jail guard and furnishings firm government, Harila summited her first 8,000-meter peak solely in 2021. However on that first try, she realized that she might be an elite climber: She recorded an unplanned file, turning into the quickest girl ever to summit Mount Everest and Lhotse, reaching each peaks in lower than 12 hours. (She broke that file once more on her 14 peaks try final 12 months.)
Returning residence to Norway throughout the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, she was compelled to quarantine in a lodge for 10 days. “I used to be caught on this room, and I couldn’t cease serious about these 8,000-meter peaks,” Harila mentioned. “I used to be considering: I’m 35, and I actually wish to climb all of them. If I wish to do it, I have to do it quick. That was a part of it. And the opposite a part of it was: If I’m going to alter this sport, the easiest way I can do it’s by exhibiting that ladies are simply as succesful as males on these excessive mountains.”
The fashionable historical past of mountaineering has been overwhelmingly male, particularly within 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 within the mountaineering group, however there’s no query that a lot 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 ladies. All 4 climbers formally acknowledged by 8000ers.com, a well-respected however unofficial file 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 authentic expedition.)
“The mountains are an amazing equalizer,” mentioned Melissa Arnot Reid, who has been an Everest information since 2008 and was the primary 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 checking account steadiness is or what diploma you’ve or what colour your pores and skin is — however the actuality is far more nuanced than that. To get to the mountains, you must get to the bottom. And that’s costly. It is a colonial exercise. It’s actually white, and it’s actually rich, and it’s actually 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 dimension males’s gear, she informed The New York Instances in an electronic 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 subject: She couldn’t discover a technical snowsuit in her dimension. Gleich reached out to Reid, who stuffed her personal go well with in a precedence mail field and shipped it to Gleich.
“When you may’t even discover gear that matches you,” Gleich mentioned, “it sends a robust message about the place the world says you belong.”
To fund her expedition, which she mentioned value about $500,000, Harila spent months looking for sponsors. She hadn’t secured any by the point she was scheduled to depart Norway to begin her expedition final spring. Undaunted, she bought her condominium and put all of the proceeds towards the undertaking. It wasn’t till she arrived in Nepal and was making ready to summit the Annapurna mountain that she secured her major sponsor, the watch firm Bremont. (The corporate additionally sponsored Purja, and a spokesman mentioned each climbers obtained the identical assist.)
Sponsorships, and permits, might be a key to her capability to embark on one other record-breaking try, starting this winter.
However Harila is unflappable. Previously 12 months, she’s misplaced greater than 20 kilos from a punishing mixture of bodily exhaustion and common battles with meals poisoning, she’s been blasted within the leg by a tumbling boulder, she’s fallen off the again of a truck, and she or he’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 or he hopes that paperwork gained’t be what retains her from reaching her final peak as soon as once more.