Nepali smashes women’s record for fastest ascent of Everest

AFP | Kathmandu, Nepal

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Nepal’s Phunjo Lama smashed the record yesterday for the fastest ascent of Everest by a woman, conquering the world’s highest mountain in 14 hours and 31 minutes.

Climbers usually take days to reach the top of the 8,849-metre (29,000-foot) mountain, spending nights on its different camps to rest and acclimatise. But Lama, who is in her thirties, shaved more than 11 hours off the previous best that had stood since 2021.

It means she has reclaimed her own world record. “She started (from the base camp) at 15:52 on May 22, summited 6:23 am May 23,” Khim Lal Gautam, chief of the tourism’s department field office at the base camp, told AFP.

Earlier this month, when Lama was still at base camp, she said in a post on Facebook that she was “100 percent sure” she would reach the top of “the Mother Goddess”. In 2018, Lama clinched the record for the fastest ascent by a woman by climbing Everest in 39 hours and six minutes. That record was broken in 2021 by Ada Tsang Yin-hung from Hong Kong, who conquered the mountain in 25 hours and 50 minutes.

Nepali climber Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa holds the record for the fastest ascent of Everest, reaching the summit in 10 hours and 56 minutes in 2003. More than 500 climbers and their guides have already reached the summit of Everest after a rope-fixing team reached the peak last month.