13-year-old Malavath Purna becomes youngest woman to scale Everest

[Recursion]

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/13-year-old-malavath-purna-becomes-youngest-woman-to-scale-everest/

In a historic feat for Indian mountaineering, 13-year-old Malavath Purna today became the youngest female climber to scale the Mount Everest.

Purna was accompanied by Sadhanapalli Anand Kumar (16), a Class IX student from the Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh, and completed the feat this morning.

Anand and Purna are both students of Andhra Pradesh Social Welfare Educational Society.

“They climbed Everest at 6 am today after a 52-day long expedition,” he said.

That's certainly an achievement she should be proud of, but coming on the heels of one of the deadliest seasons ever (which saw the southern route closed after an avalanche killed 17 Sherpas, sparking a Sherpa strike) this brings, yet again, into focus the question of the over-commercialization and excessive traffic on Everest. Do teenagers really belong up there at all, particularly ones selected earlier in the year by a reality-show-style contest?

Climber David Breashears has argued that Everest is dangerous because it's so easy -- the southern route has only one piece of technical climbing, which inevitably becomes a bottleneck as inexperienced climbers take time executing it, and the northern route actually has none ever since an early Chinese expedition fixed a ladder on the shelf. This makes it physically possible for climbers with insufficient experience and conditioning to get higher than they can safely survive (there's clearly a metaphor in there somewhere...) Unfortunately, the mountain has become a cash cow for Nepal, China, and the Sherpa communities, so there's strong resistance to any attempts to scale back the circus...

[yuiyoshida]

1. awesome