Bachendri Pal – Mountaineering

‘Bachendri Pal’ was biharn (born 24 May 1954) is an Indian mountaineer, who in 1984 became the first Indian woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Bachendri Pal belonged to a family of very moderate means. She was born on 24 May 1954 in a village in the Himalayas named Nakuri in Uttarkashi, District of Garhwal, what is now Uttarakhand, a state in the northern part of India. She was one of seven 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 before 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 got her first taste of mountaineering thrill at the age of 12, along with her friends, scaled a 13,123 ft (3,999.9 m) high peak during a school picnic. On the invitation of her school principal, she was sent to college for higher studies and became the first girl to 1982, during her course at NIM, she climbed Mt. Gangotri 21,900 ft (6,675.1 m) and Mt. Rudragaria 19,091 ft (5,818.9 m). In that time, she got employment as 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 decided to opt for a career as a professional mountaineer rather than as a schoolteacher. She soon found success in her chosen field, however.

After summitting 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.

Read more at: Wikipedia
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