PUNE: Three mountaineers from the city have scaled Mt Manda-1, a 6,510-metre-tall mountain, which is known to be one of the most technically challenging climbs.
Teams from Giripremi, a mountaineering group in the city, had tried climbing the mountain in 1989 and 1991, but couldn’t scale it.
After a long wait of 32 years, Giripremi’s younger generation of mountaineers — Sumeet Mandale, Vivek Shivade and Pawan Hadole — managed to scale the mountain on September 18.
Mt Manda-1 is one of the Manda group’s three peaks located in the Kedar Ganga Valley in Uttarakhand. It is one of the most challenging peaks in the Indian Himalayas and has witnessed fewer climbing expeditions. Umesh Zirpe, the mentor of the team, who was at the base camp monitoring the expedition, said, “Our younger generation of mountaineers managed to scale the mountain after battling the challenges such as rockfalls, hard ice and snow coupled with crevasses and a steep climb, among others.”
Mingam Sherpa and Nim Dorje Sherpa accompanied the mountaineer’s team from Giripremi.
The team reached the summit via the north ridge route, which is considered as a knife edge route where climbing gets difficult because of the narrow corniced ridge at the top and steep slopes running down in the valley.
Zirpe added, “Mt Manda-1 is a challenging mountain. It challenges the mountaineers on different levels. Reaching the summit of Mt Manda-1 marks the historic moment in Indian mountaineering history as the first successful ascent from this difficult north ridge.”
