How Nirmal Purja Summited the World’s 14 Tallest Mountains – InsideHook
Few mountaineers ever summit Mount Everest, and those who do often have some combination of fortune and finance rather than skill to thank for it.
Far, far fewer reach all 14 of the world s tallest mountains, which are scattered throughout the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges in China, Tibet, Pakistan and Nepal. They re the only peaks in the world that climb above 8,000 meters, and scaling them in aggregate is regarded as one of the sport s greatest and most dangerous achievements.
In 2019, Nepali mountaineer Nirmal Nims Purja and his team set out on what he called the Possible Project. His goal was to summit all 14 of these towering goliaths in just seven months. The first person to reach them all was Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who scaled the final peak in 1986; the feat took him over 10 years in total, and prior to Purja, the speed record stood at just under eight years.
Crazy.