“The Little Prince climbed a high mountain”, wrote the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his world-famous story “The Little Prince”, published in 1943. “From a mountain as high as this one, he said to himself, I shall be able to see the whole planet at one glance, and all the people. But he saw nothing, save peaks of rock that were sharpened like needles.” Zsolt Torok, Teofil Vlad and Romeo (called “Romica”) Popa might have been less surprised when they stood on the 7,161-meter-high summit of Pumori last fall and saw nothing else but directly opposite the eight-thousanders Mount Everest and Lhotse as well as the seven-thousander Nuptse. The three climbers from Romania had just opened a new route through the Southeast Face in Alpine style – without the support of Sherpas, without bottled oxygen and without a chain of fixed high camps. They called it „Le Voyage du Petit Prince“ (The Little Prince‘s Journey). I asked Zsolt Torok why they chose this name.

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