World’s highest peak Mount Everest at 8848 meters from sea level in the Himalayan range has been one of the greatest attractions for mountaineers for several decades now, with many reaching the desired destination at the top, some surrendering and some not making it back. The first successful summit was achieved by Edmund Hillary a mountaineer from New Zealand and accompanying him Tenzing Norgay a Nepali-Indian Sherpa Mountaineer in the year 1953. The first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest was Janko Tabei from Japan in 1975.
Over the years many Indians, Nepali’s and other people representing other countries went on an expedition to the summit of Mount Everest. However, on 22nd May, Wednesday, a Kashmiri woman named Nahida Manzoor scaled the Mount Everest, marking the first Kashmiri woman to do so. A resident of Zewan in Srinagar, Nahida had interest for mountains and snowy peaks, which later developed into a passion to climb mountains at an early age of 10. By 2017, she enrolled herself for mountaineering, rock climbing, skiing as her professionally from Nehru Institute of Mountaineering and Indian Institute of Skiing and Mountaineering. Her previous expeditions include Mount Deo Tibba, Manali (6001 metres), Friendship Peak of Himachal Pradesh (5,289 metres) and Srinagar’s highest peak Mount Mahadev and Mount Tatakooti in Pir Panjal. Belonging from a middle-class family, she started an online crowd-funding campaign on social media in March, with the dream to reach the Everest through the southern side which the less opted way by climbers. This attracted many sponsors making her dream believable as she became the first Kashmiri woman to climb the highest peak, for which she received a lot of praises from Srinagar deputy commissioner Shahid Choudhary who also said that her achievement has open up ways for other climber to make their dreams achievable.
