Бачендри Пал: путь к вершинам мира и помощь пострадавшим.

Indian mountaineer

Bachendri Pal was born to a Bhotiya family on 24 May 1954 in Nakuri village, in the Uttarkashi district in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. She was one of five children to Hansa Devi, and Shri Kishan Singh Pal, – a border tradesman who supplied groceries from India to Tibet. She was born only five days prior to the first anniversary of the original ascension of Mount Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. She completed her M. A. and B. Ed. from D. A. V. Post Graduate College, Dehradun. She started mountaineering at the age of 12 when, along with her friends, she scaled a 13123 feet (4000 m) high peak during a school picnic. On the invitation of her school principal, she was sent to college for higher studies and, during her course at Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, became the first female to climb Mount Gangotri 23,419 feet (7138 m) and Mount Rudragaria 19091 feet (5819 m) in 1982. In that time, she became an instructor at the National Adventure Foundation (NAF), which had set up an adventure school for training women to learn mountaineering. Pal encountered stiff opposition from her family and relatives when she chose a career as a professional mountaineer rather than a schoolteacher. However, she soon found success in her chosen field when, after summiting a number of smaller peaks, she was selected to join India's first mixed gender team to attempt an expedition to Mount Everest in 1984. The team commenced its ascent in May 1984. Her team almost met disaster when an avalanche buried their camp, and more than half the group abandoned the attempt because of injury or fatigue. Bachendri Pal and the remainder of the team pressed on to reach the summit. She achieved this feat on the day before her 30th birthday, and six days before the 31st anniversary of the first ascension of Mount Everest.

Bachendri Pal continued to be active after ascending the highest peak in the world. She successfully led:
An "Indo Nepalese Women’s Mount Everest Expedition – 1993" team comprising only women, which set benchmarks for Indian mountaineering when 18 people reached the summit including 7 women. All women team of rafters in "The Great Indian Women's Rafting Voyage – 1994", which had 18 women in 3 rafts. It was a pioneering effort by women in successfully completing the journey in the river Ganges from Haridwar to Calcutta, covering in 39 days.

Bachendri Pal, along with Premlata Agarwal and a group of ace climbers including Mount Everest summiteers, arrived in Uttarkashi and carried out relief and rescue operations in the remotest high altitude villages of the Himalayas that had been ravaged in the 2013 North India floods.