Breaking news: Anja Blacha is the first German woman to scale Mount Everest without bottled oxygen
“At the moment, I see it above all as an unbalanced combination of numbers.” That was Anja Blacha’s answer a week and a half ago when I asked her what it meant to her that she had climbed eleven of her twelve eight-thousanders without bottled oxygen. Now she has provided a balanced combination of numbers.
The 34-year-old German adventurer also scaled Mount Everest today without a breathing mask. “She was all alone on the summit,” Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, head of the expedition operator Imagine Nepal, informed me at around 8.30 a.m. Central European Summer Time. According to Mingma, Blacha had climbed to the highest point on earth without bottled oxygen and without a Sherpa companion.
On the “roof of the world” for the third time
This is Anja’s third Everest summit success. In 2017, she climbed – with bottled oxygen – via the Tibetan north side of the mountain. In 2021, she made her first attempt to climb the highest mountain on earth via the Nepalese south side of the mountain without a breathing mask. She was unsuccessful at the time. She did reach the highest point at 8,849 meters, but used bottled oxygen above the so-called “Balcony” (at about 8,400 meters).
Blacha is the first German woman to stand on the highest mountain on earth without a breathing mask. Only five men from Germany have achieved this before: Hans Engl (Everest south side, 1978), Jörg Stingl (south side, 2001), Frank Ziebarth (north side, 2009), Ralf Arnold (north side, 2012) and David Göttler (south side, 2022). Ziebarth died of high altitude sickness on the descent at an altitude of around 8,700 meters, Arnold fell to his death at around the same altitude.
Only two eight-thousanders missing from her 8000er collection
With her great success today on Mount Everest without bottled oxygen, Anja Blacha has climbed twelve of the 14 eight-thousanders without a breathing mask. This spring, she had already reached the summits of Annapurna I and Dhaulagiri in western Nepal.
She is now only missing the 8,516-meter-high Lhotse in Nepal and the 8027-meter-high Shishapangma in Tibet to complete her collection of eight-thousanders. So far, from Germany only Ralf Dujmovits has managed to reach the summits of all 14 eight-thousanders. However, he used bottled oxygen on Everest in 1992. He later failed seven times in his attempts to climb the highest mountain on earth without a breathing mask.
