KATHMANDU: A 48-year-old Nepalese woman climbed Mount Everest for the 10th time on Thursday, beating her own record for most summits of the world’s highest mountain by a female climber, her hiking company said.
Lhakpa Sherpa last climbed the 8,848.86-meter mountain in 2018. A compatriot from Nepal, Kami Rita Sherpa, holds the men’s record of 26 ascents.
“Lhakpa broke her own record and is the first woman to scale 10 peaks,” her brother Mingma Gelu Sherpa, an official at her hiking agency Seven Summit Club, told Reuters.
A Nepalese tourism official, Bhishma Kumar Bhattarai, confirmed that she had reached the summit.
One of eleven children, Lhakpa was born in the eastern district of Sankhuwasabha, where the world’s fifth highest mountain, Makalu, is located.
Also on Thursday, seven members of an “All Black Expedition” made up of climbers from the United States and Kenya scaled Mount Everest, said Jeevan Ghimire of hiking company Shangrila-Nepal Trek.
Fewer than 10 black climbers had previously reached the summit, but this is the first time all members of an expedition have been black, hike officials said.
Everest has been climbed 10,657 times since it was first climbed from the Nepalese and Tibetan sides in 1953. Many have climbed it more than once, and 311 people have died.
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