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

Returning home to Norway during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, she was forced to quarantine in a hotel for 10 days. “I was stuck in this room, and I couldn’t stop thinking about these 8,000-meter peaks,” Harila said. “I was thinking: I’m 35, and I really want to climb them all. If I want to do it, I need to do it fast. That was part of it. And the other part of it was: If I’m going to change this sport, the best way I can do it is by showing that women are just as capable as men on these high mountains.”

The modern history of mountaineering has been overwhelmingly male, especially in the sky-scratching Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, which are home to the 14 peaks. The question of who has truly summited all 14 peaks is a fierce debate in the mountaineering community, but there’s no question that most of the attempts have been made by men. Of the 53 climbers who claim to have summited them all, only four are women. All four climbers officially recognized by 8000ers.com, a well-respected but unofficial record keeper of these expeditions, are men. (Purja is among them, but the website lists his official time as 2 years, 5 months and 15 days because he stopped at a false summit of Manaslu on his original expedition.)

“The mountains are a great equalizer,” said Melissa Arnot Reid, who has been an Everest guide since 2008 and was the first American woman to summit the world’s highest peak without supplemental oxygen. “They don’t care what your gender is. They don’t care what your bank account balance is or what degree you have or what color your skin is — but the reality is way more nuanced than that. To get to the mountains, you have to get to the base. And that’s expensive. This is a colonial activity. It’s really white, and it’s really wealthy, and it’s really male.”

In 1994, when Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, an Austrian mountaineer, started her mission to summit all 14 peaks without bottled oxygen, she had no choice but to wear the smallest size men’s gear, she told The New York Times in an email. Twenty-five years later, when the American Caroline Gleich was getting her gear together for her “Climb for Equality” on Everest, she faced the same issue: She couldn’t find a technical snowsuit in her size. Gleich reached out to Reid, who stuffed her own suit in a priority mail box and shipped it to Gleich.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/19/sports/kristin-harila-record.html