D.he 19-year-old Pakistani Shehroze Kashif was overjoyed when he was able to share a photo of himself on the summit of Manaslu (8,163 meters) on social networks at the end of September. After Mount Everest (8,849 meters), K2 (8,611 meters) and Broad Peak (8,051 meters), he was also able to cross the eighth highest mountain on earth from the list to become the youngest climber to have climbed all 14 eight-thousanders. Just four days later, Shehroze Kashif reached out to his followers again. With the official summit certificate in his hands, he declared that he would return to Manaslu and climb again – but then to the real summit.
The summit is always the highest point of a mountain, the point from which it only goes down on all sides. So simple, so complicated. While the summit of Mount Everest is clearly recognizable for every climber, especially since it is marked with a survey tripod that a Chinese expedition left there in the mid-1970s, this is not so obvious on other eight-thousanders. “You stand on the ridge at Manaslu and have the feeling that you can’t go much further. Up there it is very difficult to assess how far the cornices are still stretching, “says Billi Bierling, who climbed Manaslu in 2010 with an oxygen mask and in 2011 without bottled oxygen, and who has been doing this for many years for the American journalist Elizabeth Hawley in the sixties Established Himalayan Database works, the Chronicle of Himalayan Mountaineering.
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