At over 6,000 metres, where glaciers creak underfoot and every exhale is earned, a flash of bright colour cuts through the white of the landscape backdrop. Layers of embroidered skirts ripple in the wind. A bowler hat sits confusingly firm against the elements. And step by deliberate step, a group of Indigenous Aymara women climb higher into terrain that was never meant to include them. They are the Cholitas Escaladoras, and they have been changing the face of mountaineering. During the Fort William Mountain Festival in February, we were thrilled to be joined by writer and climber Anna Fleming, who through an illustrated talk introduced us to these remarkable Bolivian women.
For decades, as is often the case with indigenous peoples of our planet’s mountainous regions, these women existed on the periphery of the climbing world. Many worked as cooks or porters for expedition teams, supporting male guides who would go on to summit while they stayed behind. The mountains were familiar, but access to their highest points was not. Mountaineering, like so many other spaces, drew a firm line, and the Cholitas were expected to remain on one side of it.
They didn’t.
In 2015, a small group of women, including Cecilia Llusco, decided to climb Huayna Potosí, a 6,000 metre peak that looms like a sentinel above La Paz in the Cordillera Real mountain range in Bolivia. The name Huayna Potosí means “young mountain” in Aymara, Llusco’s first language. The mountain is considered sacred and people bring offerings of coca leaves and alcohol to seek permission to ascend.
The group’s ascent was not framed as a revolution at the time, just a decision to try. But when they reached the summit, there was a marked shift and a realisation around what mountains could represent on a broader level.
What makes their ascent instantly recognisable is also what makes it quietly radical. The Cholitas climb in traditional dress, layered skirts (“polleras,”), alongside shawls and bowler hats. Cecilia Llusco proudly confirms, “I have never worn trousers to go up a mountain and I never will.” Clothing once used to mark them as “other”, is now carried deliberately into one of the most elite arenas of outdoor sport. There is no compromise here. Crampons bite into ice beneath the hem of a skirt. Ropes are coiled and carried in woven cloth. Tradition and technical precision move together, step by step. The visual contrast is striking, but it’s the intent behind it that resonates strongly, the refusal to shed identity in order to belong.
Since that first climb, their ambitions have stretched far beyond Bolivia. They have stood on the summit of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas at 6,961 metres. They continue to climb peaks across the Andes, many now working as qualified guides, bringing others into a world that once excluded them.
But the story of the Cholitas Escaladoras isn’t simply about firsts or records.
In reclaiming the word cholita, once a slur, they’ve reshaped it into something powerful. On the mountainside, it becomes a declaration of identity, of resilience, of belonging. Their climbs push against deeply rooted assumptions, that mountaineering looks a certain way, that it belongs to certain people, that tradition and progress cannot sit together.
They prove otherwise.
There is also urgency in their story. As glaciers retreat and Andean landscapes shift under the pressure of climate change, the peaks they climb are changing. Routes evolve, ice thins, and the mountains themselves become less predictable. Their ambition to one day climb Everest sits against this backdrop, a race not just for altitude, but against time. And yet, their approach remains grounded in something enduring. Community sits at the centre of what they do. These are collective efforts shaped by shared experience, rather than solitary ascents driven by individual ambition. Each step upward carries the weight, and strength, of those who climb alongside them.
Cecilia speaks of climbing with a quiet reverence: “I feel free, so happy, as if I’m escaping and the mountain is calling me.” It is a sentiment echoed by Lhakpa Sherpa, the Nepali mountaineer who, at 52, has summited Everest more than ten times, the most of any woman in history. Born in a cave in the Himalayas in 1973 and raised in deep poverty as one of eleven children, Lhakpa was denied an education because she was a girl; instead, she recalls carrying her brothers to and from school on her back.
Lhakpa Sherpa
As a result, unsurprisingly, she quickly realised she was stronger than many of the male porters employed on Everest expeditions. In defiance of entrenched social stigma, she carried herself as a man to secure work, gaining access to a world otherwise closed to her. This exposure introduced her to the realities of high-altitude climbing and allowed her to learn through experience rather than formal training, an opportunity unavailable to her both culturally and economically. She progressed from load-carrying to mountaineering itself, her ascent marked by physical endurance and persistent resistance.
Beyond Everest, hardship continued to define her life. After moving to the United States, she endured a violent and abusive marriage while working low-wage jobs as a dishwasher and retail assistant. Reflecting on this stark juxtaposition, she has said, “On Everest, I am a tough mountain queen, but back home, I am a scared little mouse.”
Now a mountain guide with her own business, (Hiking with Lhakpa), and recognised as one of the BBC’s 100 Women, Lhakpa has challenged long-standing cultural and gender norms and opened pathways for future generations. At the same time, her story (documented in 2024 in Netflix’s ‘Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa’) plays bare the inequalities within the global climbing industry, particularly the lack of recognition and security afforded to the local climbers who make high-altitude expeditions possible.
Lhakpa’s legacy sits within a longer, often underacknowledged lineage of Sherpa women redefining their place in mountaineering. In 1993, Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, (who Lhakpa credits as being her main inspiration) became the first Nepali woman to summit Everest, a historic achievement that ended tragedy during the descent where she lost her life. To this day, women Sherpas continue to assert both presence and leadership in an industry where Sherpa contributions have too often been framed in supporting roles. In addition to being feats of endurance and technical skill, their expeditions are acts of visibility; reclaiming narrative authority in the high Himalayas. Lhakpa, Pasang, and many other members are part of a broader, collective movement in which Sherpa women are no longer at the margins of mountaineering history, but at its forefront.
A couple of years after Lhakpa was born, Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei became the first woman to summit Everest, later also recognised as the first woman to complete the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent. Raised in post-war Japan, Junko’s passion for climbing began at the age of ten on a school trip to Mount Nasu, though her family lacked the means to support any further pursuits in climbing. After graduating in the early 1960s, she joined a men’s mountaineering club, where she encountered open hostility; some men flat out refused to climb with her, whilst others assumed she was there simply to find a husband. Undeterred, she went on to summit all of Japan’s major peaks, including Mount Fuji.
In 1969, Junko founded Japan’s first women’s climbing club. The group’s inaugural expedition, in 1970, saw them summit Nepal’s Annapurna III (7,555 metres), marking both the first female and first Japanese ascent of the mountain. Five years later, a team of fifteen women, including working mothers, set their sights on Everest. Securing funding proved difficult; Junko was repeatedly told that “women should be at home raising children.” Eventually, a local newspaper offered partial sponsorship, but each climber still had to contribute the equivalent of £3,600. (The equivalent, in today’s money, of approximately £60,000.) To make the journey possible, Junko gave piano lessons and handmade much of her own equipment, fashioning waterproof gloves from her car cover and sewing trousers from old curtains.
When altitude sickness affected the Sherpa team, only one climber could make the final ascent. Junko was chosen by her peers. Returning home to a surge of media attention, she downplayed the milestone, remarking that she would rather be known as the 36th person to reach the summit: “I did not intend to be the first woman on Everest.” She continued climbing for decades, while also passionately advocating for mountain conservation. Notably, she declined further sponsorship after Everest, choosing instead to fund her expeditions through public speaking, guiding, and teaching music and English to local children.
Junko Tabei, photo credit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Also born in Japan, Sophia Danenberg’s ascent of Everest in 2006 marked a quiet but powerful milestone; she became the first Black woman, and the first African American, to reach the summit. Born to a Japanese mother and African American father, Sophia did not come up through elite climbing circles but built her experience steadily, balancing a demanding career in engineering with high-altitude expeditions. Her path into mountaineering began almost by accident, after signing up for a beginner course, and evolved into a disciplined pursuit that took her to Denali, Aconcagua, and beyond. On Everest, she climbed as part of a diverse international team, navigating the same risks and rigours as any expedition, yet her achievement resonated far beyond the mountain. Her success expanded the image of who belongs in high-altitude climbing.
Another Everest achievement that established a woman on the world stage was the summit by Wanda Rutkiewicz in 1978, being the first Pole and first European woman to do so. Also becoming the first woman to climb the world’s second highest mountain (and widely considered more technical-than-Everest) K2 (8,611 metres) in 1986, Wanda disappeared in 1992 whilst attempting a summit of Kangchenjunga, (8,586 metres) as part of her wider goal to be the first woman to summit all of the ‘eight-thousanders.’ Her body has never been found to this day, her legacy suspended between achievement and enigma.
Arunima Sinha’s journey to Everest is one of the most striking stories of determination in modern mountaineering. Born in Uttar Pradesh, India, and raised in a lower-middle-class family, she grew up in an environment where opportunities, particularly for women in sport, were often limited by both economic constraint and social caste expectation. She lost her leg after being thrown from a moving train during a robbery in 2011. Less than two years later, she summited Everest, becoming the world’s first female amputee to do so. Training with a prosthetic limb in some of the harshest conditions on earth, Arunima confronted not only the physical demands of high-altitude climbing but also deep-rooted assumptions about disability and capability. Like Junko, she too went on to complete the Seven Summits, using her platform to advocate for people with disabilities and to establish a sports academy for underprivileged individuals in India.
Looking further back in time, and geographically closer to home, in the early 1800s, Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the more widely known William Wordsworth, was a familiar figure in the Lake District. She would gather up her thick tweed skirts and turn her bonnet to one side of her face to avoid the vertiginous drop as she walked. Setting out on long hikes before the publication of reliable maps, Dorothy often covered as much as 40 miles in a single day.
Dorothy Wordsworth
By the end of the 19th century, Scafell Pike, the highest peak in England, was well established as a popular climbing destination. But decades earlier, in 1818, Dorothy and friend Mary Barker made the ascent. Her manuscript account of the climb stands among the earliest records of a recreational ascent of the mountain, and is also one of the first such narratives written by a woman. Dorothy was not alone, she and Mary were part of a wider, largely overlooked group of women who helped pioneer mountaineering in its early days.
In documenting her climb, Dorothy’s endeavour was not merely physical but quietly progressive, made possible, in part, by her status as a ‘spinster,’ free from the domestic expectations placed on many of her contemporaries. Today, when the idea of setting out to climb a comparatively ‘smaller’ mountain can feel almost routine, it is easy to overlook the significance of her contribution in opening up the landscape, and the sport, to women. As the Victorian era progressed, more women followed, continuing to test the limits of what was considered possible. Among them was Lucy Walker, who became the first woman to summit the 3,970 metre Eiger in the Alps, nearly fifty years after Dorothy’s climb of Scafell Pike. At the turn of the 20th century, Gertrude Bell, mostly famously known for her travels in the Middle East, tackled the Alps with a seriousness and technical skill that defied the expectations placed on women of her class and time. She completed numerous first ascents, most notably in the Bernese Oberland, where the Gertrudspitze still bears her name. Climbing in an age before modern equipment or widespread support networks, she navigated both physical danger and social constraint, earning the respect of her male contemporaries in a field that rarely welcomed women as equals. For Getrude, mountaineering was simply an extension of her independence. In a period when access to such spaces was tightly restricted, her presence on the peaks signalled a quiet but significant shift in who could claim authority in exploration and adventure.
Gertrude Bell
In a global outdoor culture still grappling with representation, these women didn’t ask for space. They took it. Visibly, unapologetically, and on their own terms. They were not just reaching summits. They redefined them.