How Dawa Yangzum Sherpa’s last mountain became her hardest one

She left the Rolwaling Valley at 13 with a porter’s load on her back. Twenty years later, one avalanche-scarred peak in Tibet stood between her and a first no Nepali woman had ever claimed.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, roughly 50 climbers were spread across the slopes of Shishapangma, a 26,335-foot (8,027-meter) peak that stands entirely inside Tibet. Fresh snow had fallen. Wind was loading the upper slopes. Two American climbers, Anna Gutu and Gina Marie Rzucidlo, were racing each other up the mountain; whichever woman summited first would become the first American woman to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks.

Neither of them came down. Two separate avalanches near 7,800 meters killed Gutu and Rzucidlo along with their Nepali guides, Mingmar Sherpa and Tenjen Lama Sherpa, the man who had climbed all 14 eight-thousanders with Kristin Harila in 92 days only months earlier. Rescue teams reported multiple injuries among the survivors. No one climbed Shishapangma again that season. The Chinese authorities closed the mountain.

Among the climbers who watched that season end was a 32-year-old Nepali guide who had summited Cho Oyu, her thirteenth eight-thousander, just days before. Her name was Dawa Yangzum Sherpa. She had one mountain left, and it was the one that had just killed four people.

She went home. Then, a year later, she came back.

At 9 a.m. on October 8, 2024, Dawa Yangzum and American climber Anna Pfaff, her teammate on The North Face athlete roster, left for the summit of Shishapangma. Eight hours of climbing through the night brought them to the top at 5:30 a.m. Nepal time on October 9, according to the expedition organizer and reports in the Kathmandu Post.

The timing carried its own weight. She stood on the summit almost exactly one year after the avalanches. “This mountain has a special and emotional meaning for me,” she said afterward. Returning to Shishapangma, she told the climbing press, was the hardest thing she had done in the mountains, less for the terrain than for what the mountain now held.

With that ascent, Dawa Yangzum Sherpa became the first Nepali woman to summit all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks. The list of Nepali men who had done it was already long; Sherpa climbers had been carrying loads, fixing ropes, and quietly finishing the collection for two decades.

No Nepali woman had ever been in a position to try. The reasons for that gap are not found on any mountain. They are found in villages like the one she left at 13.

Dawa Yangzum was born in Na, a settlement of stone houses at roughly 13,800 feet (4,200 meters) in the Rolwaling Valley of Dolakha district, beneath the sacred peak of Gaurishankar. The valley had no road. It still doesn’t. It has instead produced more than 70 notable climbers and Everest summiteers, almost all of them men. For years, Dawa Yangzum was the only woman from Rolwaling working as a climber.

At 13, without telling her family, she joined a trekking group crossing the Tashi Lapcha pass as a porter. In 2008, her older brother Dawa Gyalje Sherpa, by then an established guide, gave her a 15-day trek to lead. She earned $100. A year later she began climbing, and in 2010 she trained at the Khumbu Climbing Center, the school co-founded by American alpinist Conrad Anker.

The record from there reads like a ladder with no missing rungs. Everest at 21, in 2012. K2 on July 26, 2014, with Maya Sherpa and Pasang Lhamu Sherpa Akita: the first Nepali women ever to stand on the world’s second-highest mountain, with Dawa Yangzum the youngest of the three.

In 2017 she passed her final exams for IFMGA certification, the international mountain guide qualification often compared to a doctorate in mountaineering, becoming the first woman from Nepal, and the first from Asia, to hold it. Fewer than a few hundred women worldwide have earned the credential.

Then the eight-thousanders began to fall in sequence. In 2019 she became the first Nepali woman to summit Makalu, and joined The North Face as a sponsored athlete. In 2021 she climbed Annapurna I, statistically among the deadliest of the fourteen, without supplemental oxygen the ascent she would later call the highlight of her entire project.

That autumn she became the first woman to reach the true summit of Manaslu, a distinction that matters because for years most climbers had stopped at a lower foresummit. The same year, Rolex made her its first Nepali brand ambassador. In the summer of 2023 she compressed Nanga Parbat, Gasherbrum II, and Gasherbrum I into a single 16-day stretch in Pakistan, according to her expedition organizer.

The completion of the fourteen invited an obvious framing, and she rejected it. The 2024 autumn season on Shishapangma produced 15 finishers of the 8,000er list in a single day, most of them clients of commercial operators using bottled oxygen and fixed ropes; critics of modern Himalayan climbing noted that the list had lost much of its old meaning.

Dawa Yangzum did not argue. “I have seen some mountaineers among those who have completed the 14 peaks who are not skilled in ice climbing,” she told the German journalist Stefan Nestler. She also declined to compare herself to earlier pioneers who climbed with less support, saying plainly that her generation could not reach that level.

What she talks about instead is who comes next. She has spent more than a decade mentoring young Nepali women, supplying gear and training to girls who want to climb, and she serves as second vice president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association. “For Nepali women it’s more difficult than for western women,” she said in the same interview, “because the way we and they start is different.” She started by running away from home with 30 pounds on her back.

Days after her final summit, Nestler asked her which of the fourteen ascents she would single out. She did not choose Shishapangma, or Everest, or K2. She chose Annapurna, climbed on her own lungs.

Of the record itself, she was briefer still. “14 peaks,” she said, is “not important as a record.”