Pinay Everest climbers hailed - Top Stories

MANILA - Filipinos turned out en masse to welcome back the three Filipina conquerors of Mt. Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

The three are Noelle Wenceslao, Carina Dayondon and Janet Belarmino. They became the first women from Southeast Asia to achieve the feat. Wenceslao reached the summit at around 6:10 a.m. Nepal time (8:10 a.m. Manila time) May 17.

She was followed 10 minutes later by Dayondon.Belarmino, who initially lost radio contact with the “Kaya ng Pinay” Philippine team at the Everest’s base camp, reached the top at around 8:50 a.m.

Leo Oracion, the first Filipino to scale the 29,035-foot peak last year, waited at the base camp to welcome the Filipina mountaineers.
Belarmino sobbed as she recounted the ordeal of climbing the mountain just five months after she gave birth to her first baby.
“Napakahirap kaya masaya ako na makakabalik na kami (It was very difficult that is why I’m glad that we can now come back)," she told radio DZMM. Malaca±ang lauded the feat of the three Filipino female mountaineers.

Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said: “We are congratulating the three Filipinas, mga babae na nakarating sa tuktok ng highest mountain in the world. Kaya binabati natin sila,” he said.

He noted that the three mountaineers were suitably and physically fit for mountain hiking because they were in the service of the Philippine Coast Guard. Last year, three Filipinos — Leo Oracion, Pastor Emata and Romeo Garduce — reached the summit of Mt. Everest.

Their leader, Art Valdez said the three set two world records in Everest history. They are the first Filipinas and first ASEAN women to reach the summit of Mount Everest and the first women to cross the mountain from the north route in Tibet to the south route in Nepal.

Crossing the mountain from Tibet to Nepal has only been done by a handful of mountaineers - all of them men. The traverse posed a bigger challenge for the women as they passed an unfamiliar route during the descent.

They are also the first women climbers to reach the Everest summit from the tougher south side of the mountain in Tibet.
The Filipino women’s media partner is ABS- CBN.
LOS ANGELES - An 18-year-old woman has reached the summit of Mount Everest, becoming what is believed to be the youngest person to scale the highest peaks on each of the seven continents.
“We made it to the top!” Samantha Larson, of Long Beach, gasped to her mother in New York via satellite phone from the top of Everest on Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

According to 7summits.com, a Web site that tracks those who have accomplished the feat, completing the climb in Nepal makes Larson the youngest person to have completed the “seven summits” challenge, breaking a 2006 record set by then-20-year-old British climber Rhys Miles Jones. Larson, who graduated last year with a 4.43 grade-point average from Long Beach Poly High School, put off going to Stanford University for a year so she could scale some of the world’s tallest peaks with her father.

The Nepalese government said she was the youngest foreigner ever to reach the 29,035-foot summit of Everest, though some climbing Web sites claim a 17-year-old boy from France did it in 1990.
A 15-year-old Sherpa girl from Nepal was the youngest ever to climb Everest.
Larson has been climbing sky-high mountains since she was a child. She reached the summit of South America’s Aconcagua when she was 13 and Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro when she was 14.

“She’s just amazing,” said her mother, Sarah Hanson. She said her daughter has “a kind of stamina and persistence that just seems to be part of her nature, and it has been since she was little."