Endesa y Edurne Pasaban
Edurne Pasaban
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The challenge

The 14 eight-thousanders
There are 14 peaks on the planet of over 8,000 metres in height – all in the Himalayas between Nepal, Tibet and Pakistan. To get to the base camps, it is necessary to walk for days over ever higher, more isolated lands to get into the hostile world of rock and perpetual ice. Seen from close-up, the eight-thousanders seem immense and insurmountable. To try to reach the summit is seen as madness, or the challenge of a lifetime.

Only fourteen people have crowned the 14 eight-thousanders, all men. It is hardly surprising: to climb just one of these mountains requires experience, mastery of techniques on rock, ice and snow, physical and mental training, time, money, capacity to suffer... and luck.
But to consider climbing them all is only conceivable for professional alpinists who devote their lives to it. And it is not an easy life.



The long road to eight thousand meters
Whoever has faced the Himalayan giants must go into what is known as the "Death Zone" above 7,500 metres, where the body is incapable of acclimatising and literally consumes itself until it dies. They chance falling into cracks or over precipices, of being buried by avalanches, swept away by a storm, suffering from hypothermia, freezing and altitude sickness, or simply dying of exhaustion. All this, as the alpinist Lionel Terray said, for "conquering the useless". That is if you finally get to the top, because the odds are against it.
Climbers require weeks between acclimatisation, several partial ascents setting up camps and working on the route, violent storms that paralyse the work and multiply the risk of avalanches, etc. When in the end the ideal conditions are given (if they are ever given) for a summit attempt, there is normally only enough time and strength left for one attempt..

The question is: Is so much risk, so much suffering worthwhile? For Edurne Pasaban it certainly is.
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