There are few settings more removed from the rigmarole of modern life than standing on the summit of one of the world’s highest peaks. Yet this is the point in a climb when real life intervenes, says Adriana Brownlee, who in October last year became the youngest woman ever to climb all 14 8,000-metre mountains. Exhilaration “turns into stress. You have to take photos and videos for your sponsors… and you’re trying not to get frostbite because you’re taking off your gloves for the photos… You don’t even take in the view.”
Rather, the best moment, Brownlee, 23, told me on a video call from her home in Kathmandu, Nepal, is “when you know you’re going to summit”. The push to the top of her final eight-thousander, Shishapangma, Tibet, took around ten hours, mostly at night. When climbers making their way down from the summit started passing her, she knew she was close. “That’s where you release all this stress. All you can feel is that energy, that drive to keep going, just the passion.”
All 14 eight-thousanders – Everest, K2, Nanga Parbat, Annapurna I, Shishapangma, Kangchenjunga, Lhotse, Makalu, Dhaulagiri I, Cho Oyu, Manaslu, Broad Peak, Gasherbrums I and II – are found in the Karakoram and Himalayan ranges, and are in the “death zone”, where oxygen levels are too low to sustain human life for any extended time. There is no official list of those who have completed the challenge, but the total is fewer than 100. Standing on the summit of Shishapangma, Brownlee “felt incredibly powerful, but it was also a bitter-sweet moment, because it was the end of the project. Although it was amazing that I got the record, I was like, OK, well now I don’t know what to do. That was my life for three years.” The descent is often the most dangerous part of a climb: the mountain is warmer, and therefore less stable, and climbers are exhausted and still feverish from their summit success. “When you get back down the mountain, that’s when the celebrations really begin, because obviously the summit is only 50 per cent of the way.”
Brownlee was aware when she set out to conquer the eight-thousanders that there was a chance she would be the youngest person or youngest woman ever to do so, but the record “was never really at the top of my mind. As soon as you start thinking like that, that’s when it gets dangerous on the mountains; that’s when you see a lot of casualties and people just driven by the record.”
She prepared physically for the climbs by training in the gym six days a week, as well as learning rope skills and “setting up ladder systems in the garage so I could learn how to walk on [them] with crampons” – the way climbers cross the Khumbu Icefall on Everest. But Brownlee says climbing is “70 per cent mental”: “You can be super-fit, but if you don’t have the mindset and the determination, then you’re not going to do it.” Before each expedition, she would write down everything that could go wrong and how she would respond: “It made me visualise… how to deal with those situations, and so when it came to it on the mountain, it was like muscle memory, and I knew straight away what to do.”
One such moment came on Dhaulagiri, in 2021, when an approaching storm deterred most climbers. Brownlee’s expedition pushed on, making a summit attempt from camp two (as opposed to the usual approach from camp three or four). Within an hour of setting out, the weather changed. “It was 90-100km/h winds, so strong you couldn’t move forward… If you tried to shout, the wind would take your voice away.” Brownlee’s hand froze to the safety device that connected her to the rope; she still has nerve damage from the frostnip she sustained. “The normal thing to do would be to… cancel the expedition” – but, having waited out the storm at camp two (and finished all their supplies), they continued up.
At the summit, she began experiencing symptoms of altitude sickness, and realised her oxygen tank was empty – as was her sherpa’s. Nor did he have a radio to contact the rest of their team, who were already making their way down the mountain. “We knew that if we started arguing at that altitude with zero oxygen, that’s it, we’re both going to die.” Slowly, over the course of 32 hours, they helped each other down to base camp. There, she called her parents, who, having had no contact for 24 hours, had presumed she was dead.
But “probably harder than the climbing itself” was raising the $750,000 the challenge cost. Brownlee says this feat would be even more difficult today: “For people who are trying to do the challenge now it’s pretty much impossible to get sponsorship… It’s overcrowded, and the shine and sparkle of doing the 14 has faded.”
Adriana Brownlee was born in Teddington, south-west London, in 2001. It was her father who introduced her to the mountains: when she was eight, he climbed Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest peak outside Asia. The following year Brownlee wrote a piece of homework about her ambitions to summit Everest: “The goal I would have achieved would be to have climbed the highest mountain and be one of the youngest girls to do this.”
“From the moment I wrote that letter it was 12 years of obsession and training and dedication,” she told me. Brownlee, then nine, and her father completed the Three Peaks Challenge in the UK, before going on to summit Elbrus in Russia, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Aconcagua. “I had to find time between exams, trying to find a week off here, a week off there.” They climbed Kilimanjaro in a break during her GCSEs; she missed her prom for Elbrus – “at the time a big deal” – and reached the summit of Aconcagua on her 18th birthday. She achieved her goal of climbing Everest in 2021.
Brownlee spent four months studying sport and exercise science at Bath, before making a life-changing decision at base camp on K2, Pakistan. The leader of the expedition, recognising her potential, suggested she try for the 14 peaks. “Straight away, I was like, OK, that’s it, that’s my next goal in life. I knew that if I was consistent and persistent, I could make a career out of it, because at the time it wasn’t so popular for women to do the 14 peaks.” She called her parents via sat phone and told them: “I’m not coming back.” Her mother was hesitant at first, but her father understood. “I think he knew that I was always going to go down this path.”
Brownlee still climbs with her father: most recently, they summitted Ama Dablam in Nepal together in 2022. But today Brownlee’s primary climbing partner is Gelje Sherpa, with whom she climbed 12 of the 14 highest peaks. “As soon as we started climbing together, I just knew that I wanted to climb with him forever.” Two years ago, they set up AGA Adventures, an expedition company that brings “a new perspective into the mountaineering world”: two young climbers, one male, one female; one Sherpa, one Western. Safety is their “number-one priority”, in contrast to other companies, which Brownlee describes as being too motivated by “the profit, getting as many clients as they can”.
She believes that in Nepal, climbing is not regulated enough, particularly on Everest. “You get people rocking up who have never seen a mountain before. They might come from a big city, have quite a lot of money, and decide, ‘I’m going to climb Everest’ because they need that personal achievement – which is fine, but you need to put in the effort to train… That’s when the big problems happen.” The same day we spoke, Nepal increased permit fees by more than a third and banned unguided climbs of 8,000-metre peaks.
Brownlee’s next challenge is summiting Everest without supplemental oxygen. She also plans to climb an eight-thousander with her father, who, at 55, is “way stronger than I am”, Brownlee said. “He’s a proper athlete.” I gently suggest that she might be considered a “proper athlete”, too. Adriana Brownlee laughs: “Yeah, maybe I tick that box.”
[See also: Listening through my father’s ears]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025