Spring climbing season begins on Mount Annapurna

Myagdi. The spring climbing season for Mount Annapurna has officially commenced. The 8,091-meter-tall Annapurna peak is located in Narchyang, Annapurna Rural Municipality-4, Myagdi. Led by Lakpa Sherpa of Seven Summit Treks, a team of seven Nepali and five foreign climbers reached the summit on Saturday.

According to Seven Summit Treks, the climbers include Charles Page from Canada, Valery Babanov, Vladimir Afanasev, and Yuri Kuglov from Russia, and Israfil Ashurli from Azerbaijan. The company stated that along with Lakpa, Nepali climbers Chewang, Dawa Nurbu, Pasang Dungpa, Chhangba, Taraman, and Pasang Sherpa also successfully summited on Saturday.

Similarly, Tej Bahadur Gurung, an activist for the Maurice Herzog trail, reported that two climbers from the Netherlands and Australia, accompanied by a Sherpa, successfully reached the summit at 10:15 AM on Saturday.

"The first climbing team of the season has successfully summited Mount Annapurna," he said. "With the climbing teams, activity has begun at the base camp," added activist Gurung.

This year, the Department of Tourism has issued permits to 27 climbers across four groups for the Annapurna expedition. Branch Officer Sharmila Banjade stated that the department has collected NPR 12,049,175 in revenue from these permits. Annapurna is the tenth-highest mountain in the world. Last spring, 66 people had received permits to climb Annapurna.

The base camp is bustling with climbers and tourists arriving through various agencies. In 1950, Maurice Herzog of France made the first successful ascent of Annapurna. Three years after Herzog's climb, in 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa summited the world's highest peak, Mount Everest.