Adventure Sports

Everest
May 2019
Adventure Sports

EVEREST 60 - Thoughts on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the first climbing of Mount Everest.

INTERVIEW with Stefan Nestler

Helga’s Everest Nightmare

She was the second but then again, she was also the first. Helga Hengge summited Mount Everest on May 27th of 1999. As the second German woman after Hannelore Schmatz. But Helga survived the descent and Hannelore did not, she died from exhaustion at 8300 meters on the south side of the mountain in 1979. For years climbers passed the corpse called „The German woman” sitting in the snow. Many years later a storm blew it off the mountain. Twenty years after Hannelore, Helga Hengge reached the highest point at 8850 meters climbing from the Tibetan north side of the mountain. „I felt like a goddess”, Helga later said, „floating above the clouds.” Hengge was 32 years old when she stood on top of the world. Today Mount Everest sometimes gives her nightmares, Helga, aged 46, told me when I asked her for her thoughts on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the first ascent.

Elevator to the North East Ridge

„I dreamt that there was an entrance at the bottom of the glacier, a kind of cave where you step into an elevator that takes you up to the ridge.” There were crowds of people pushing upwards using steep iron staircases to climb the Second Step, Helga continues. „At the summit there was a restaurant with a large terrace. Tea and cakes were being served. Then the wind suddenly picked up, clouds were gathering, a storm was brewing. Still there were all these people with their colorful sneakers continuing to climb along the ridge. They were laughing, joking. I had to stop them, tell them that it was too dangerous, that they would all die, if they did not turn around. But no one was listening. Then they suddenly jumped into a long chute and started sliding back down to basecamp, howling with laughter. And I woke up drenched in sweat.” In reality we are not there, yet, but Helga’s nightmare may be initiated by what is currently happening on Everest. „And if they all got bravery medals and candy floss at basecamp to top it off only the hardy mountaineers would be complaining. That is quite a scary thought”, Helga says.

From sport climbing to high-altitude mountaineering

Helga Hengge spent her life alternately in Germany and the US. She was born in Chicago and grew up in Bavaria. From the small village of Deining, located just outside of Munich, she could see the Alps in the distance. Aged 25 Helga moved to New York to work as a fashion editor and to study philosophy, marketing and film at New York University. In her leisure time she went rock climbing and from there discovered high-altitude mountaineering. In 1997 she reached the summit of Aconcagua (6962m), the highest mountain of South America. She went on to climb several other 6000-metre-peaks in the Andes and the Himalaya. In the autumn of 1998 Hengge reached 7500m on Cho Oyu. The following spring, she succeeded on Everest, being the only woman in the commercial expedition team of the New Zealander Russell Brice.

After twelve years in New York, Helga returned to Bavaria. She now lives near Munich with her husband and two children. After Everest Helga continued mountaineering and reached, among other peaks, the summit of Shishapangma (8008 m) in 2001. At that time Helga already had her next goal in mind: to climb the Seven Summits, the highest mountain on each continent. She had found a book by Dick Bass in a bookstore in New York. The American was the first to complete the collection of the Seven Summits in 1985 – however with Mount Kosciuszko in Australia and not, as is more common today, with Carstensz Pyramid in Oceania. „What an amazing idea. To stand on the highest peak of each continent. At the time it was merely a fantastic dream but that didn’t minimize my enthusiasm to dream that dream”, Helga said. When she reached the top of Denali, the highest mountain of North America on May 23th of 2011, ten years later, Helga Hengge had succeeded in climbing the Seven Summits and became the first German woman to do so.

Stefan Nestler

Source: Adventure Sports by Germany Today