Piyali Basak is set to launch summit attempts on Mt Annapurna and Mt Makalu. And like her previous summits in recent years, these two attempts will also be without supplemental oxygen.
The Chandernagore-based mountaineer will board Mithila Express on March 16 from her hometown for Raxaul, from where she will head to Kathmandu by road, before proceeding to Pokhara, the gateway to the Annapurna circuit.
“I was supposed to leave on March 9 but had to postpone the trip as I needed to raise more funds,” said the 32-year-old primary school teacher who is the only earning member in her family of four. The expedition will cost her Rs 33 lakh.
Basak had made history when she became the first Indian civilian to scale Mt Dhaulagiri, the world’s seventh highest peak, without oxygen in 2021.
By then, she had climbed Mt Manaslu, the eighth highest peak, in 2018 without oxygen. It was during that expedition that she found that her oxygen saturation remained high even in high altitude.
“I had taken oxygen along but unscrupulous agents do not fill the cylinders of those like me who pay less. Since there was no oxygen flow, I was having to take the mask off anyway. Some foreigners who were climbing with us were measuring everyone’s saturation levels. It was found that while others had suffered a drop to 50 or 60 per cent without the mask, mine remained around 95-96 even without oxygen,” Basak told The Telegraph.
“That gave me the confidence to attempt summits without oxygen support thereafter.”
In 2022, Basak climbed Mt Everest and Mt Lhotse. “It was only on reaching 8,750m that I needed supplemental oxygen at Everest, and that too because there was a blizzard,” recalled Basak, whose imagination was fired at the age of five when her mother read her an account of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s Everest conquest.
“Since I was adamant about following in their footsteps even at that age, my parents started taking me along on pilgrimages in the mountains like Kedarnath, Amarnath and Gangotri. They had no idea what mountaineering was.”
Little Piyali would run ahead of her parents and come back in search of them, sometimes climbing an adjoining ledge for fun before rejoining them.
At the age of nine, she started rock climbing under Apurba Chakraborty of her hometown and later completed an advanced mountaineering course from the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute.
Basak wants to climb all the remaining peaks above 8,000m without oxygen.
“I have already climbed four of the nine within our access. Indians are not allowed to climb the six 8000m-plus peaks, like K2, in Pakistan,” said the sparsely-built mathematics teacher, who idolises Reinhold Messner, an Italian who has climbed all 14 8,000m-plus peaks without supplemental oxygen.