2023-06-26 09:19:00
It’s done ! Eleven years after her debut at Shishapangma, Sophie Lavaud has just completed the famous loop by reaching the summit of Nanga Parbat this morning. The French curse on the fourteen 8,000 is finally broken.
© Sophie Lavaud
The memory of Benoît Chamoux, Éric Escoffier, Chantal Mauduit and Jean-Christophe Lafaille
It had been stuck in the shoe of French mountaineering for quite a while this little pebble that Sophie Lavaud has just placed at the top of Nanga Parbat this morning. Nothing really bad, but enough to make your heart feel a little lighter than usual, with the memory of Benoît Chamoux, Éric Escoffier, Chantal Mauduit and Jean-Christophe Lafaille at the bottom of your backpack.
37 years after Reinhold Messner, a French woman has just finished with the highest challenge in the world. Funny story for Sophie Lavaud, an amateur mountaineer who came to the Himalayas almost by chance in 2011 when the company set up with her brother in the financial events sector ended up sinking, as a consequence of the 2008 crisis: “I I found myself in front of a blank page. I finally had time and some savings,” she explained to our Swiss colleagues from Time in 2017.
2012, the debut at Shishapangma
When she set foot on the Shishapangma in the spring of 2012, the one who is also Swiss and Canadian, had nothing very specific in mind, except to discover this very special world of very high altitude. The previous year, the Austrian Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner became the third woman to complete the fourteen 8,000 (the first without oxygen), behind the Spaniard Edurne Pasaban and the South Korean Oh Eun-Sun. A month later, Sophie already has two 8,000 in her pocket after another success at Cho Oyu, something not so common for the time which has not yet seen the tornado Nims Dai.
She will also have to wait two years and May 25, 2014 before returning up there, to afford the summit of Everest by its Tibetan side, in the company of her friend François Damilano who follows her camera in hand to bring back the cute movie We Walked on Everest.
2016, stoppage at K2
Gasherbrum II in 2015, Makalu in 2016… little by little, his business is starting to look like a quest. A quest weighed down by a strange French curse with the successive disappearances of Benoît Chamoux at Kangchenjunga in 1995 (thirteen 8,000), of Chantal Mauduit at Dhaulagiri in 1998 (six 8,000), of Éric Escoffier (five 8,000) at Broad Peak the same year, and finally Jean-Christophe Lafaille at Makalu in the winter of 2006 (eleven 8,000). sweeps camp 3, fortunately empty at this time. The material engulfed, it is necessary to give up the summit. Present with his camera, the guide François Damilano brings back a new film, with a slightly more bitter taste than the first: K2, a special day.
2019, acceleration in the wake of Nims
The following year, she experienced another failure at Kangchenjunga but ticked off Manaslu and Broad Peak before finally reaching the summit of K2 in the summer of 2018, after an ascent under oxygen, like Everest or Makalu. Sophie makes no secret of it, she is an ordinary mountaineer who uses fixed ropes and benefits from the work of the Sherpas.
In 2019, the world of the Himalayas is changing era. In the wake of Nims tearing up everything in her path, Sophie climbed Annapurna, Kangchenjunga and Gasherbrum I, and by the end of the year she had only four peaks left to finish. But the health crisis that is bringing the world to a standstill forces him to put his story on hold, until the fall of 2021 and his success at Dhaulagiri.
2022, return to Manaslu
Despite his success at Lhotse in the spring, the finish line is still not in sight. In the fall, he must first return to Manaslu to mark the real summit and then hope to obtain a permit from the Chinese authorities to return to Shishapangma, only 8,000 located entirely in Tibet. She will finally succeed in slipping into the Norwegian Kristin Harila’s team in extremis to officially climb her thirteenth 8,000 on April 26th.
The privileged witness of the evolution of a world which, in the space of a decade, has taken a serious step of old.
It’s his agency Seven Summit Treks which announced its success at Nanga Parbat this morning, in the company of the inevitable Kristin Harila (10th 8,000 since April 26) and the Turkish Tunc Findik (who also finishes with the fourteen 8,000). François Damilano and our colleague Ulysse Lefebvre were also there this morning, at the top of the ninth highest mountain in the world, to witness this moment which is both banal and historic.
By taking her time, being transparent about the style and avoiding the controversies that increasingly plague this challenge, which has become the symbol of the industrialization of the Himalayas, Sophie Lavaud, 55, has written her own story on the Himalayan giants and will have been the privileged witness of the evolution of a world which, in the space of a decade, has taken a serious step of old.
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