Dawa Yangzum Sherpa: The First Nepali Woman To Climb All 14 Eight-Thousanders

When Dawa Yangzum Sherpa was a schoolgirl in Nepal's remote Rolwaling Valley, her teacher went around the classroom asking what everyone wanted to be when they grew up. Most kids said teacher. Dawa said she was going to climb Mount Everest. The whole class burst out laughing.

She climbed it anyway. And then she kept going—up Makalu, K2, Annapurna without supplemental oxygen, and eleven more of the planet's most punishing summits—until, in October 2024, she stood atop Shishapangma and became the first Nepali woman ever to complete all 14 of the world's 8,000-metre peaks.

It is one of mountaineering's most exclusive achievements, and for a girl from a village with no television, where women weren't expected to climb at all, it started as little more than a stubborn idea.

Dawa Yangzum grew up 4,200 metres above sea level, in the shadow of Everest, in a village where local men worked as Sherpas and guides but girls were quietly steered away from the mountains. What she had instead was the radio. "We didn't have a television but used to listen to the radio, and we would hear that this person or that person had climbed Mount Everest," she said. That was enough to plant the idea.

At 13, she left home the way the village's men did every climbing season—heading for Kathmandu to find work on expeditions. There was no one cheering her on. "There wasn't anyone to say, 'You should do this.' They said it was almost impossible." What kept her going was something she'd grown up watching: the women of her village doing the heavy lifting and construction work while the men were away in the mountains. If they were strong enough for that, she reasoned, she was strong enough for Everest.

She trained in ice and rock climbing at Nepal's Khumbu Climbing Center, where one of the centre's founders noticed her and picked her for an Everest expedition. In 2012, at just 21 years old, she reached the summit of the world's tallest mountain and poured her earnings straight back into training to become a mountain guide. "I used to think that if I climbed Everest once, I wouldn't need anything else," she has said. "But my story began from there."

Building A Career On The World's Deadliest Mountains

Everest turned out to be a beginning, not an ending. Two years later, Dawa Yangzum joined the first all-female Nepali team to summit K2, the "Savage Mountain" and the deadliest of the 8,000-metre peaks, becoming the youngest woman at the time to reach its top.

She then set her sights on formal credentials, training with the Nepal National Mountain Guide Association while working toward certification from the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations—a qualification that would let her lead expeditions in some of the world's most extreme terrain. It took five years, but she became the first Nepali and first Asian woman to earn it.

Along the way came a string of milestones that read like a résumé no one else in Nepal holds: the first Nepali woman to summit Makalu, the world's fifth-highest peak, including a 21-hour speed ascent in 2019; and, in 2021, the first Nepali woman to climb Annapurna—widely considered one of the deadliest 8,000-metre peaks—without supplemental oxygen. That same year, she joined the landmark Rolex and National Geographic Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition, helping install the two highest weather stations in the world and collect the highest ice core ever recorded, in what became the most comprehensive scientific expedition the mountain has ever seen.

By then, completing all 14 of the 8,000-metre peaks had stopped feeling like a fantasy and started feeling like unfinished business.

The Final Peak, And What Came After

The last mountain on her list, Shishapangma, nearly broke her resolve. She began the climb in October 2023, expecting it to be one of the more manageable of the 14—until the expedition was hit by tragedy: four of her friends were swept away in avalanches, and she was forced to turn back. It was her first experience of a disaster like that on an expedition, and it took months before she could face the mountain again.

A year to the day later, she returned to Shishapangma carrying the weight of what she'd lost. She reached the summit in an emotional ascent, closing out a journey that had taken her across every 8,000-metre peak on Earth and made her the first Nepali woman to do it. "When I started this career, I never thought I would reach this level," she said. "As a girl coming from a simple family background, I'm very proud. It's not just about me but the whole of Nepal. Earlier we didn't have anybody to look up to, but now I hear that young girls are proud of me."

Nine months after that final summit, Dawa Yangzum gave birth to her daughter, Tashi, and has since brought her back to Nepal to see the mountains that shaped her mother's life. She now runs high-altitude climbing courses for young Nepali women, a dream she carried since childhood, and credits the backing of her sponsor Rolex, through its Perpetual Planet Initiative, for helping fund that work.

Looking back on the path from a laughing classroom to the top of the world, she puts it simply: the mountains, she says, treat everyone equally—and if she hadn't climbed them, she wouldn't have reached this place in life.

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