On July 1, 2022, Kristin Harila reaches the summit of Nanga Parbat in Pakistan. Image: Kristin Harila
How fast can a person stand on all fourteen eight-thousander peaks in the world? The Norwegian Kristin Harila wants to find out – and enrages traditional alpinists with her record hunt.
How long does it take a person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders? For Reinhold Messner, there were 16 years, three months and almost three weeks between the first and last expedition. He was the first to do this – without bottled oxygen at that. All in all, only around fifty people made it, if you disregard the fact that the majority of them missed one or the other summit by a few meters and were therefore not at the top. Also Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja, by the way, a Nepali who fought in a Gurkha and later a special unit of the British Army before his mountain career.
It took him six months and six days in 2019, using bottled oxygen and not quite reaching two peaks. Today he organizes commercial expeditions to the highest mountains in the world and is celebrated by more than two million followers on Instagram. Whether at the top or not: Nirmal Purja showed what is possible thanks to a heli-shuttle from one mountain to the other, sufficient oxygen bottles, reliable logistics in the background and enough money.
