Annapurna North: SUMMMIT!!
May 12, 2005 08: 05 EST
Mario Merelli, Mario Panzeri, Daniele Bernasconi, Ed Viesturs, and Veikka Gustafsson have reached the summit of Annapurna today at 2:30 pm, local time.
Silvio Mondinelli did not make it to the summit due to cold. The news was reported via satellite phone by Mario Merelli, who could barely say a couple of sentences before running out of batteries. Further details are expected soon.
Ed Viesturs has therefore become the first American to summit all the 14 8000ers.
The Italians have been fighting the mountain for two months; they had previously fixed the route up to Camp 3, where they had been for three days, unable to leave their tiny tents due to high winds. Viesturs and Veikka reached the mountain a week ago after climbing Cho Oyu, and joined the Italians for their summit bid. They were prepared to wait for days in C3 at 7000m if necessary.
Year after year, climbers return to Annapurna despite its reputation as a difficult, dangerous mountain (a reputation earned in large part due to the high risk of avalanche.) Annapurna (8,091 m) is statistically the most dangerous peak of all the eight thousanders. The overall summit fatality rate is 40% (although not all climbers summit, of course).
Annapurna was the very first 8,000m peak ever summited. In 1950, French climbers Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal used only a rough map as a guide, and picked their way up an untried route to the summit. Their descent turned into a hellish nightmare, leaving them near death, with their extremities completely deadened by frostbite. Herzog and Lachenal survived their ordeal, but too many others have lost their lives over the years.
On Christmas Day 1997, Anatoli Boukreev was killed in an avalanche, an event that shocked the mountaineering community. In total, only 135 climbers have summited Annapurna - last year Ralf Dujmovits, Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Denis Urubko summited the mountain from the North side.
Image of Annapurna courtesy of Silvio Mondinelli.
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