While the field of mountaineering in India has undergone a sea change with a new generation of young mountaineers scaling summits zealously, back in 2009, there were just three individual Mount Everest climbers, one of them being Krushnaa Patil. At the age of 19 then, Patil successfully ascended the peak to become the youngest Indian woman to climb the world’s highest mountain that year, and overall, being the second youngest Indian to summit! While her record has been surpassed by younger mountaineers, she remains the first civilian woman from Maharashtra to have ascended Mt Everest.
Patil’s passion for scaling peaks began with family vacations that were always in the Himalayas. In 2007, she enrolled for the Basic Mountaineering Course at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering (NIM) at Uttarkashi, and the following year, took up the Advance Mountaineering Course. Post her training, she got to be a part of a pre-Everest expedition, and at 18, became the youngest person to scale Mount Satopanth in the Garhwal Himalayas.
Post scaling the Everest, in 2010, she attempted to climb the Seven Summits, the highest mountains of the seven continents, which is regarded as a mountaineering challenge. Patil successfully scaled all but one, Mount McKinley (now called Denali), as the summit had to be abandoned owing to technical reasons.
Patil’s summits not only inspire young mountaineers to scale heights, but also motivate them to set their eyes on new horizons. On the plus side, mountaineering, as a sport, has been receiving increasing support from the government of India, with the country being home to several premier mountaineering institutes and four national institutes, namely, Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling, Jawahar Institute of Mountaineering and Winter Sports in Pahalgam, National Institute of Mountaineering and Allied Sports (NIMAS) in Arunachal Pradesh, apart from Nehru Institute of Mountaineering in Uttarkashi.
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