South side of Mount Everest

Mount Everest was scaled for the first time in this spring season. Today, eight climbers from Nepal reached the highest point at 8,850 meters after climbing up on the south side of the mountain. Pasang Tenjing Sherpa, Pasdawa Sherpa, Lakpa Dendi Sherpa, Jen Jen Lama, Siddi Bahadur Tamang, Pemba Chhiri Sherpa, Tenzing Gyaljen Sherpa and Datuk Bhote fixed ropes up to the summit, paving the way for the clients of the commercial expedition teams.

“Man without fingers” on top of Annapurna

Kim Hong-bin

The summit success of South Korean Kim Hong-bin is reported from Annapurna. For the 53-year-old, it is the twelfth eight-thousander. In 1991, Kim suffered severe frostbite at Alaska’s highest mountain, 6,190-meter-high Denali, and all ten fingers had to be amputated. He was accompanied on the Annapurna by four Sherpas.

No trace of Petrov

R.I.P.

Meanwhile, the partner of the Bulgarian climber Boyan Petrov, who has been missing for ten days on the eight-thousander Shishapangma, has asked to stop the search for the 45-year-old above Camp 3. That’s too dangerous for the rescuers, Radoslava Nenova wrote on Facebook. Reportedly, the Sherpa team nevertheless wants to climb up to the summit on Monday if the weather permits. Petrov had set off for a summit attempt on 29 April, alone and without bottled oxygen. He had already scaled ten of the 14 eight-thousanders without breathing mask. He is the most successful high altitude climber of Bulgaria.

Kim and Co., in the background Annapurna I

“The man without fingers” wants to get his twelfth eight-thousander. Kim Hong-bin is the only foreign mountaineer to whom the Government of Nepal issued a permit for the eight-thousander Annapurna this spring. However, that does not mean that the 53-year-old Korean will be traveling alone. In the picture from the north side of the 8091-meter-high mountain, which was published by the South Korean newspaper No Cut News, I count 20 other people besides Hong-bin. “He probably has a large base camp support team,” Billi Bierling from the chronicle Himalayan Database writes to me, adding, that the Korean will be accompanied during his climb by four Sherpas.

Accident on Denali

Kim Hong-Bin

In 1991, Kim Hong-bin had suffered severe frostbite on the 6190-meter-high Denali in Alaska, the highest mountain of North America. All ten fingers had to be amputated. In 2017, he scaled Lhotse in spring and Nanga Parbat in summer, his eight-thousanders number ten and eleven. Apart from Annapurna, only Gasherbrum and Broad Peak, both located in Pakistan, are still missing in his collection. Under optimal circumstances, he could climb all three mountains this year.

Paralympics athlete

The 1.76 meter tall South Korean, who lives in the city of Gwangju in the south of the country, has never let his disability slow him down. Kim is also a ski racer. So he took part in the Paralympic Games 2002 in Salt Lake City and finished both Slalom and Super G ninth. In winter 2017, he won – at the age of 52 – the gold medal in slalom at the Korean alpine ski championships of disabled athletes.

On top of the Seven Summits

On the summit of K 2 in 2012

In spring 2007, Kim Hong-bin scaled Mount Everest. Barely two years later, in early 2009, he completed his collection of the “Seven Summits” by climbing Mount Vinson in Antarctica. “If the accident at Denali hadn’t happened, I would have remained an ordinary climber,” Hong-bin once said. “The hardship made me challenge the seemingly impossible. I overcame the handicap a mountain gave me by climbing mountains.”

Broad Peak

From Pakistan, this summer season’s first ascents on the 8051-meter-high Broad Peak are reported. Seven members of the team of the Austrian expedition operator Furtenbach Adventures and four climbers of the team of the Swiss operator Kobler@Partner reached the summit of the twelfth highest mountain on earth, it said. According to Furtenbach Adventures, expedition Rupert Hauer succeeded, along with three Sherpas and three clients, the first summit success on Broad Peak this season – even though there was a meter of fresh snow above the last high camp: “The sherpas made an unbelievable job and worked really really hard.”

Cadiach turned around

According to Kobler@Partner, their expedition leader Herbert Rainer also reached the highest point, together with two clients and a Pakistani climber. Last weekend, the Spaniard Oscar Cadiach and his group had abandoned their first summit attempt because of too much snow in the upper part of the mountain and had returned to the Base Camp. Broad Peak is the last of the 14 eight-thousanders, which is still missing in the collection of the 64-year-old Catalan Cadiach.

Without fingers on Nanga Parbat

Kim Hong Bin

Already last Saturday, according to the Alpine Club of Pakistan, eight climbers reached the 8,125 meter-high summit of Nanga Parbat – among them the Korean Kim Hong Bin and his Nepalese Climbing Sherpa Lakpa. In 1991, Kim had suffered so severe frostbite on Denali, the highest mountain in North America, that all ten fingers had had to be amputated. For the 53-year-old, Nanga Parbat was his eleventh eight-thousander. Last May in Nepal, he had scaled Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain on earth. In addition to Kim and Lakpa Sherpa, according to ACP, four other climbers from Nepal, a Chinese and a Japanese reached the summit of Nanga Parbat last Saturday.

Track ends at the fracture line

Tragic certainty

Meanwhile, the Romanian climber Alex Gavan, according to the website “Altitude Pakistan”, gave details of the search for the Spaniard Alberto Zerain and the Argentinian Mariano Galvan. As reported before, the two climbers almost certainly had been killed by an avalanche accident on the Mazeno Ridge. Gavan had coordinated the search for the two missing from Nanga Parbat Base Camp and had later flown in one of the two Pakistani rescue helicopters. “We extensively searched this area, looked up the open crevasses, searched the nearby valleys,” Alex writes, “we searched the Mazeno (Ridge) up to almost 7400m, much farther than they could have realistically climb.” Without success. Gavan presented pictures, on which a track in the snow can be seen. It ends at the fracture line of an avalanche. The last GPS point, sent by the GPS tracker of Zerain and Galvan, lies in the avalanche cone. “The evidence was much too heavy, much too hard to digest,” says Alex. “But now everything was clear.”