Today's headline on Edurne Pasabán's blog is simply: "Cumbre!!!"
This afternoon at 2:10 local time, Spanish climber Edurne Pasabán stood on the summit--el cumbre--of 26,545-foot (8,091-meters) Annapurna, her thirteenth 8,000-meter peak, with two members of her Edge of the Impossible climbing team, Alex Chicon and Nacho Orviz, and three Sherpas, Mingma Sherpa, Pasang, and Gempu. With her ascent, Pasabán becomes only the second woman to ascend that many of the world's 14 highest mountains. The other woman, South Korean climber Oh Eun-Sun, awaits her turn on Annapurna from base camp to try to finish the 8,000-meter list.
The climbers left Camp 4 at 23,393 feet (7,100 meters) at six in the morning and steadily worked upward for ten hours and 3,100 feet of vertical gain to the windswept summit where they made the "required pictures" and then descended back to Camp 4 in four hours. Tomorrow the climbers will descend to Base Camp. A team of Sherpas is to leave early in the morning, "loaded with cooked food, fruit, and liquid," to meet the group at Camp 2 for lunch.
Edurne Pasabán said from her tent, "It was very very hard, but we made it up." She also updated her status on her Facebook page: "The team now rests at Camp IV at 7000m. Tomorrow we will continue down from here to base camp and then we can celebrate!"
Also today, Portuguese alpinist Joao Garcia reached Annapurna's summit at 1:30 in the afternoon, becoming the first from his country to climb all fourteen of the 8,000-meter peaks. His team reports that the upper slopes above Camp 4 offered difficult climbing up an icy couloir, which was not fixed with rope.
Photograph above: Edurne Pasabán climbed Annapurna, her 13th 8,000-meter peak, on April 17. Photograph courtesy Edurne Pasabán
Comments
There is one minor difference between Pasaban and Miss Oh. Pasaban climbed all of her 13 8000ers without supplementary oxygen, while Miss Oh utilized huge teams and helicopters on her 13 8000ers – and climbed ALL of them with o2 masks.
It doesn’t matter who finishes first, I think we can conclude that Pasaban’s achievements surpass Miss Oh’s – they’re in a different league.
I agree. Style is everything. How we climb is usually more important than simply getting to the top. It’s what Reinhold Messner calls climbing “by fair means.”
The Korean overkill is controversial, with the choppers and the advance climbers paving the way with fixed ropes and establishing all the camps. I admire Pasaban for being an integral part of her climbing team, of doing her share of actual climbing rather than simply following the leader.
One of them will be the first to climb them all, but hopefully how the summits were reached will also be part of the record books…