Kristin Harila, a Norwegian female climber, is ready to summit K2 and Nanga Parbat, in her attempt to climb five 8,000-metre peaks in Pakistan in two months.
According to the sources, the mountaineer reached Pakistan as part of her expedition to beat the time record to scale the world’s 14 highest peaks in six months.
The mountaineer has already scaled six mountains over 8,000 meters (26,250 feet) high, including Everest, in the last two months.
Moreover, the 36-year-old Harila hopes to match or surpass Nepali adventurer Nirmal Purja and his unmatched 2019 record of six months and six days — an accomplishment that broke the previous record and was depicted in a famous Netflix documentary — to change how the mountaineering world views women athletes.
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“In history and until now, it has been the strong macho men going out climbing mountains,” the Norwegian climber said while talking to the media.
“When I talk to people that are not in this sport, they believe that men are more capable than women… If we are going to change, we need to get attention and show that women are just as capable.”
Male mountaineers and guides far outnumber women in the top tier of the sport, with just a handful of women climbers getting attention and sponsorships for their journeys.
As per the data released by the Nepali government, Out of almost a thousand climbers who climbed Nepal’s famous Himalayan peaks this year, only around a fifth were women.
Harila’s first momentous climb was on Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro in 2015, and then she made headlines last year to be the fastest woman to travel between the peaks of Everest and Mount Lhotse in Nepal.
She successfully accomplished that feat in just 12 hours, but smashed her own record this year, knocking four hours off her time.
But neither record was sufficient to persuade key sponsors to support her current endeavor.
