Himachal bus driver’s daughter becomes first Indian to summit four 8,000-metre peaks in less than one month

Baljeet Kaur has become the first Indian mountaineer to scale four 8,000-metre peaks in less than a month after she successfully climbed Mount Lhotse, the fourth highest mountain in the world.

Baljeet scaled Mt Lhotse only a day after she had scaled Mt Everest, the highest peak in the world standing tall at 8,848.86 m.

She successfully scaled the world’s fourth-highest peak with her guide Mingma Sherpa.

Baljeet and Mingma submitted Mt Annapurna I (8,091-metre) on April 28, Mt Kanchenjunga (8,586-metre) on May 12. On May 21, they scaled Mt Everest (8,849 metre).

As the news trickled down, Baljeet’s mother Shanti Devi turned emotional. “Meri beti ne jo kar dikhaya hai, woh toh hamare liye sabse uncha kam hai (Our daughter’s feat is the highest honor for us),” Shanti Devi was quoted saying by The Indian Express from her village Panjrol in Kandhaghat tehsil of Himachal’s Solan district.

The news, however, didn’t come entirely as a surprise for Shanti Devi, who saw in the feat a culmination of her daughter’s childhood dreams. “She was always fascinated by mountains. As a child, she would climb the small hills near our village,” recalled Shanti Devi.

As a young child, Baljeet, along with her three siblings, would often help Shanti Devi in managing the farm work. With her father Amrik Singh working as a bus driver with Himachal Road Transport Corporation, Baljeet would help her mother apart from pursuing studies in the Government Senior Secondary School at Mamligh, a neighboring village.

It was at the school that she enrolled herself with the National Cadet Corps (NCC). During an NCC camp, Baljeet had her first tryst with mountaineering. At the age of 20, she was selected for an NCC expedition to Mt Deo Tibba followed by a team of 10 NCC mountaineers for an expedition to the 7,120[m high Mt Trishul. The team reached a height of 6,350m before the climb had to be curtailed due to bad weather in 2015. A year later, Baljeet was once again part of the NCC expedition to Mt Everest, a climb where the team reached 8,548m before the ascent was called off. The last year has seen Baljeet summiting the 7,161-m high Mt Pumori near the Nepal-Tibet border becoming one of the first Indian woman mountaineers along with Gunbala Sharma of Rajasthan to achieve the feat. She later became the first Indian female mountaineer to successfully climb the 8,167-m high Mt Dhaulagiri.

Image courtesy of (Image courtesy: msn.com)

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