Dubai-based 18-year-old Briton Leanna Shuttleworth breaks Bonita Norris record and completes the Seven Summits at the same time.
We know this mostly thanks to a release from previous record-holding Everest summiteer, Bonita Norris, via her sponsor, Karrimor, but Dubai-based 18-year-old Leanna Shuttleworth has become the youngest British woman to summit the world's highest peak.
We don't know much about Leanna, except what we can glean from her web site at www.leannashuttleworth.com, which is that she was aiming to complete the Seven Summits and summit two 8,000-metre peaks within 24 hours. The latter would have meant climbing both Everest and Lhotse consecutively, but that didn't happen, but she did complete the Seven Summits.
Leanna, who is supported by Rab, climbed Everest on Sunday 20 May, 2012 as part of a commercial expedition which put five out of seven clients on the summit. If you want to know more, there's a refreshingly well-written account of her summit day on her blog at www.leannashuttleworth.com/MyBlog/ along with some images that graphically illustrate the tough conditions the team encountered.
Meanwhile, Bonita Norris, the previous record holder, is currently at Everest Base Camp preparing for a summit attempt on Lhotse, the neighbouring 8501-metre peak which follows the same path as the normal route on Everest as far as Camp 3 there it diverges.
Precocious stuff which apparently all started with a school trip to Kilimanjaro, which also got her dad - who also, we think, summited Everest on Sunday - hooked on high altitude peak-bagging.
'Training is intense, and balancing that with work and keeping a social life is difficult, but, strangely enough, I kind of enjoy it. And having received 10 A*s for GCSEs, I don’t think I’m doing too badly at keeping the balance!' she writes on her web site.
Impressive and slightly surreal at the same time if you ask us.
