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.”

Route via Lhotse South Face

Will there be another successful eight-thousander expedition at the end of this fall season in Nepal? Actually, we can answer this question with Yes. Because it already deserves a big round of applause what the South Korean Sung Taek Hong and his team of four Sherpas have achieved so far under difficult conditions in the South Face of 8,516-meter-high Lhotse. In strong winds, the five climbers opened a partially new route up to an altitude of 8,200 meters. Two summit attempts failed: the first at 7,850, the next at 8,000 meters. This weekend Sung and Co. will set off again. If everything goes well this time, they could reach the highest point on Thursday of next week. But this is anything but self-evident.

Sung’s third attempt

Sung Taek Hong

“Now I think can I fully understand how climbers overcome hunger, cold, pain and fears”, Sung wrote in his expedition diary according to explorersweb.com. “I gave Mt. Lhotse all she could have asked of me to reach this point.” In fall 2014, the 49-year-old, along with a Korean team, had tackled Lhotse South face for three months but got not higher than 7,800 meters. In November 2013, Sung’s attempt to solo climb the fourth highest mountain via the normal route had failed. Ten years ago, the Korean adventurer had completed his collection of the “three poles”. In 2005, he reached the North Pole, the South Pole in 1994 and 1997 and the “third pole” Mount Everest from the Tibetan north side in fall 1995.

Pioneers in the wall

Sung climbing Lhotse South Face

The Lhotse South Face was first climbed in 1990. In spring 1990, the Slovenian Tomo Cesen said, he had solo the wall. But he was not able to prove his success. First doubts about the details Cesen had given were expressed by the Ukrainian Sergej Bershov and the Russian Vladimir Karatayev who climbed through the wall on a different route later that year. At the end of 2006, members of a Japanese expedition succeeded in climbing Lhotse South Face for the first time in winter. They had to return 41 meters below the summit, but had reached the summit ridge and thus climbed the entire wall.