Yelkov Alexandr

 The first public performance of the Nepalese climber Nirmal Purji (easier, Nims) after the completion of his epic project Project Possible (14 eight-thousanders in 6 months and 6 days) took place in Moscow. The hero of this season came to Russia at the invitation of the 7 Summits Club. About 250 people came to listen to Nims's performance in the lecture hall of the Sport Marathon Travelers Club. The performance of the Nepalese was not long and detailed, he has no right to show part of his materials, because of obligations to sponsors. However, our audience remained completely satisfied. In particular, the fact that Nims devoted a lot of time to joint photographs and signing autographs. He withstood the whole rather big queue and this procedure took about an hour.

   The 7 Summits Club in the person of its President Alexander Abramov handed Nims "Golden Ice ax", so we evaluate his achievement ...

What was Nims talking about?

Nothing is impossible! The main thing in the project was precisely this idea! Show that it is possible. Nims sacrificed his pension,  laid his own house. And normal sponsorship appeared only after the completion of the first, most difficult part of the project.

 But at the same time, he wanted to show that Nepalese can be considered  as leaders in high altitude mountaineering. They consider themselves underrated.

Nims paid special attention to the fact that during the project, his team held four rescue actions. Critically, this could affect success. Especially at the very beginning, when the schedule was broken due to the rescue action at Annapurna.

The most difficult was, of course, Kanchenjunga. It was only the fourth day after the descent from Dhaulagiri. Fatigue was incredible. However, when on the descent, Nims's group found three climbers who were unable to move independently, they were assisted. And of the 40 climbers who were in the nearest camp, no one took part in the action.

Nims also climbed with  supplemental oxygen because there can be different situations on the ascent and often other climbers have to be helped. What would be impossible without additional oxygen.

Before K2 he was worried more than usual. After all, no one was able to get to the top before them. Even very strong teams. Under the mountain there were about a hundred climbers. When they arrived at the base camp, everyone turned to Nims with a question about their plans. He answered - today we drink (alcohol) and no plans. And in the morning his team took the storm of the most formidable mountain.

By the way, during the 16-year service in the elite unit of the English army (the Gurkhas are considered by many to be “the best warriors in the world”) Nims did not drink alcohol at all. But now he believes that it can even be useful in the mountains.

On Pakistan's eight-thousanders, the Nims team had difficulties associated with the work of local porters. Nepalis simply did not like the pace of their movement. Therefore, they carried goods under Broad Peak and Gasherbrum independently.

Nims plans to issue book,  ti finish a film, work in his company Elite Himalayan Adventures, make a new route to Cho Oyu, perhaps for new records ...

And! Collaborate with  the 7 Summits Club and work with our groups. And not only in Nepal!

From an interview with Forbes magazine:

I am not really afraid of anything. But there is an old saying: If someone says, “I’m not afraid of dying,” they must either be a Ghurka or they must be lying. I am a Ghurka (laughs)!

Reinhold Messner, the man of the era who first climbed the eight-thousanders: “Nims, I can see in your eyes - it comes from your soul, from your heart - I think you can do this project.”

 Now we made sure that Messner was right. Nims is a very honest, decent, pure in his goals, strong person in every way, and at the same time he is adequately thinking. We are friends now!

Nepalese climber, the new world record holder in the speed of ascents to all 14 eight-thousandths of the planet Nirmal Purja (Nims) accepted the invitation of the 7 Summits Club to come to Russia!

So - Miracles do come true!

 During the autumn expedition on Manaslu (8156m), the members of the 7 Summits Club group headed by Ludmila Korobeshko met Nims, who was completing his unique program of climbing the eight-thousandth peaks.   We have established good friendly relations and invited the Nepalese to visit Russia at the end of his program.  Soon climbing to the top of Shisha Pangma Nims issued a new phenomenal record, passing all 14 eight-thousandths less than 7 months.   Suffice it to say that the previous achievement he beat by more than seven years!  

And recently, on behalf of the 7 Summits Club, we sent him an official invitation to come to Russia.  Nims agreed, and with the support of the Russian Embassy in Nepal, he got a visa.

  December 7^th  the 7 Summits Club  participates in the organization in Moscow a gala evening of the Russian mountaineering Federation, dedicated to the summing up of the year.  During this event, the Golden ice Axe of Russia ceremony will be held – an award for the best mountaineering achievement of the year.  And there will also be a presentation of the "Everest Climber" honours to climbers who have reached the world's highest peak for the first time this year.

It is planned that Nims will speak to Russian climbers with a story about his unique record project and his future plans. The speech in Moscow will be his first public appearance outside Nepal!  Do not miss this historic event!

We will also organize two more performances of Nims at our friends:

 December 7^th in Moscow in the lecture Hall of the Club of Travelers of the Sport Marathon;

December 8^th in St. Petersburg in the RedFox trade center.

Climber who became a French national hero after making the first ascent of Annapurna.

The Guardian, Friday 14 December 2012

In late 1950, Maurice Herzog lay in the American hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts ofParis, dictating what would become the bestselling mountaineering book of all time,Annapurna, published the following year. The effort was emotionally exacting, as he revisited every twist and agonising turn of one of the most important Himalayan expeditions in the sport's history – the first ascent of Annapurna, in central Nepal.

Annapurnawas the first mountain over 8,000m to be climbed. Others were higher – such as Everest, the site of British assaults in the 1920s and 30s – but no summits had been reached. Furthermore, the geography of theAnnapurnaregion was little known. Herzog's expedition only settled on it as an objective after first exploring the approaches to a neighbouring 8,000m giant, Dhaulagiri.

The personal cost of this triumph to Herzog, who has died aged 93, was horrific. In reaching the summit in the summer of 1950 with Louis Lachenal, Herzog's hands and feet had been frozen, and doctors had amputated all his fingers and toes. He spent months in hospital recovering from his injuries, plunged in a deep depression. Writing his book was not only cathartic but also sealed his reputation as a dynamic and courageous leader, and helped restore self-respect to postwarFrance.

When Paris Match put a picture of Herzog standing on the summit with the tricolour flying from his ice axe, it broke all previous sales records for the magazine. In January 1951, Marcel Ichac's film of the expedition opened in Paris, with the French president Vincent Auriol in the audience. A month later, another photograph of Herzog – this time gesturing with his ruined hands as he spoke to the film's audience – ran on the cover of Paris Match. "Our number one national hero," was what the magazine called Herzog – while failing to mention Lachenal at all. "Annapurna, to which we had gone empty-handed," Herzog wrote in his book, "was a treasure on which we should live for the rest of our days."

In 1958, Herzog became minister for youth and sport. After France's poor showing in the Rome Olympics in 1960, he was charged by Charles de Gaulle with re-invigorating French sport and inspiring a new generation, something he did to great effect. He was elected mayor of Chamonix in 1968, and headed several enterprises, including the company running the tunnel underMont Blanc. In a 1998 memoir, he recalled suggesting to John F Kennedy the idea of the Peace Corps and meeting the biggest names of his day, including Brigitte Bardot and Juan Perón.

In 1996, Yves Ballu published his revelatory biography of Gaston Rébuffat, one of the Annapurna climbing team, and in the same year Michel Guérin published the diaries of Lachenal, previously expurgated in a 1956 publication by Herzog's brother Gérard after Lachenal's early death, but now restored. These fresh perspectives told a more complex tale of a great enterprise whose image was controlled and exploited for political and personal interests. They cast the leader in an altogether less flattering light. Herzog protested indifference, but in private was bitterly upset.

He was born in Lyon, the eldest of eight children. His father, Robert, an alpinist himself, had served in the French Foreign Legion during the first world war. The family owned a chalet at the foot of the Bossons glacier that flows from Mont Blanc, which sparked Herzog's passion for the mountains.

He passed his baccalaureate in Paris and did a postgraduate course in business studies. Towards the end of the second world war, he fought with French partisans in the Alps, first the Armée Secrète and then the left wing Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. They made him a captain, and Herzog overlooked their affiliations. He received the Croix de Guerre and would cite the example of the resistance in celebrating the "victory" onAnnapurna.

In 1945, he went to work for the tyre manufacturer Kléber-Colombes and continued with his passion for mountaineering asFranceemerged from the horror of occupation.

Later that decade a generation of French alpinists came to the fore, including the guides Rébuffat, Lachenal and Lionel Terray. These three formed the nucleus of the team forAnnapurna, put together by the autocratic Paris-based president of the French Alpine Club, Lucien Devies. They were, however, professionals, and to maintain the amateur ideals of mountaineering, Devies appointed Herzog leader, and added Jean Couzy, an aeronautical engineer, and Marcel Schatz, a physicist. The doctor was Jacques Oudot and Ichac, already a celebrated cinematographer, would shoot the film.

Herzog's climbing record was respectable but not spectacular, and making him leader was a risk. Devies clearly had doubts about whether the guides in particular would toe the line for the greater glory of France. Two days before departing, he made them all swear an oath of allegiance to their leader.

Herzog and his team performed one of the great feats of exploratory mountaineering, trekking up the Kali Gandaki valley to examineDhaulagirifrom the east and north. The mountain was judged, in Terray's phrase, "fiendishly difficult" and so the expedition turned its attention to Annapurna, so far unseen. Just getting a view would prove surprisingly elusive.

By mid-May, the team still hadn't made progress so Herzog called a council of war at their base camp in the village of Tukucha, and with time running out before the monsoon, committed his forces to the Miristi Khola, hoping to get lucky and find a practicable route to the top. Working at extraordinary speed, and after coming to a dead end on the peak's north-west spur, the team rapidly pushed a route and a series of camps up the north face. Terray and Herzog had proved the strongest and best acclimatised, but when the supply chain stalled, Terray gave up his chance for the summit to push supplies to a high camp. Lachenal took his place at camp IV.

Wearing leather boots that offered insufficient insulation, Lachenal was anxious about his feet, not least because losing toes could threaten his livelihood. What would Herzog do, he asked, if he turned around? "My whole being revolted against the idea," he wrote in Annapurna. "I should go on by myself," he told Lachenal. "Then I'll follow you," Lachenal replied.

They reached the summit at 2 pm on 3 June, and while some historians question the validity of the summit photograph, they were close enough. Herzog was in a blithe mood – his spiritual musings were a key part of his book Annapurna's appeal – perhaps boosted by the "pep pills" Oudot had prescribed to keep them going. It was in that frame of mind that soon after they began descending he removed his gloves to open his rucksack and watched "quite stunned" as the gloves slid away down the slope. The mistake would cost him his fingers.

The descent of Annapurna was a protracted and freezing horror. Terray and Rébuffat climbed up to campIV to support them. Terray discovering a frantic Lachenal lying in the snow, desperate to get down to a lower camp so Oudot could do something to save his frozen feet. They spent the following night in a crevasse, confused and lost in a storm. Terray and Rébuffat, hunting for a route in the white-out, suffered agonising snow-blindness.

It would take six weeks for Herzog to make it home, suffering agonies in his hands, by which time his blackened feet were riddled with maggots. His serious climbing was behind him. His book, which has sold more than 11m copies, did not make him rich. The royalties went to French mountaineering, which had funded the expedition.

Herzog married Marie-Pierre de Cossé-Brissac in 1964. They had two children, Laurent and Felicité, and divorced in 1976. He had two more children, Sébastien and Mathias, with his second wife, Elisabeth Gamper, whom he married in 1976.

• Maurice Herzog, mountaineer, born 15 January 1919; died 14 December 2012