A Race Up the World’s Tallest Mountains, and for Gender Equality

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 attainable, setting a mind-bending report of six months and 6 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 staff, 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 definitely worth the danger.

Every day, sherpas at Cho Oyu would climb as excessive as they might, 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 tools might face up to the climate, the sherpas weren’t certain the climbers might.

When approached from the Tibet facet, Cho Oyu is the most secure of the 14 peaks. However Harila and her staff had been compelled to try it from the Nepal facet as a result of their visas and permits to enter Tibet had by no means been accepted by the Chinese language authorities. And even when they did accomplish this groundbreaking ascension of Cho Oyu, they’d don’t have any technique to entry the mission’s last peak because the Shishapangma mountain is totally inside Tibet.

“It was unattainable 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.”

Ultimately, Harila’s staff 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 attainable to do the entire mission once more in 5 months if I begin in winter. Then it received’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, girls’s jail guard and furnishings firm govt, Harila summited her first 8,000-meter peak solely in 2021. However on that first try, she realized that she may very well be an elite climber: She recorded an unplanned report, turning 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 12 months.)

Returning house 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 fascinated with these 8,000-meter peaks,” Harila mentioned. “I used to be pondering: I’m 35, and I actually wish to climb all of them. If I wish to do it, I must 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, one of the simplest ways I can do it’s by exhibiting that girls are simply as succesful as males on these excessive mountains.”

The trendy historical past of mountaineering has been overwhelmingly male, particularly within the sky-scratching Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, that are house to the 14 peaks. The query of who has really summited all 14 peaks is a fierce debate within the mountaineering neighborhood, however there’s no query that many 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 fantastic 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 stability is or what diploma you will have or what shade your pores and skin is — however the actuality is far more nuanced than that. To get to the mountains, you need to get to the bottom. And that’s costly. This can be 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 selection however to put on the smallest measurement 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 concern: She couldn’t discover a technical snowsuit in her measurement. Gleich reached out to Reid, who stuffed her personal swimsuit in a precedence mail field and shipped it to Gleich.

“When you’ll be able to’t even discover tools 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 trying to find sponsors. She hadn’t secured any by the point she was scheduled to depart Norway to start out her expedition final spring. Undaunted, she bought her condo and put all of the proceeds towards the undertaking. It wasn’t till she arrived in Nepal and was getting ready to summit the Annapurna mountain that she secured her important sponsor, the watch firm Bremont. (The corporate additionally sponsored Purja, and a spokesman mentioned each climbers obtained the identical assist.)

Sponsorships, and permits, will likely be a key to her capacity to embark on one other record-breaking try, starting this winter.

However Harila is unflappable. Up to now 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 received’t be what retains her from reaching her final peak as soon as once more.