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Published 27 Jul, 2014 07:26am

Women scaling the heights

Interestingly, K2 has a particularly nasty reputation when it comes to female climbers. The first woman to reach the summit was the legendary Polish climber Wanda Rutkiewicz, who got to the top in June 1986. In August the same year Julie Tullis of UK also reached the summit but died high on the mountain on the night between Aug 6 and 7. Over the next 18 years all five female climbers who tried to summit this peak were killed. Three died during the descent down to K2, whereas two others died on nearby mountains. The curse was finally broken in 2004 by Edurne Pasaban, a 31-year-old Spanish mountaineer. On Aug 23, 2011, G. Kaltenbrunner also reached the summit of K2, becoming the first woman in the world to climb all of the 14 8,000-metre peaks without using supplemental oxygen. Rutkiewicz, who undoubtedly would have been the first woman to climb all the 8,000-metre peaks died on her ninth one, Knangchenjunga, in 1992.

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