Anthony Perezthe mountaineer postman La Orotavaannounces that it has achieved the challenge of reaching the top of Lhotse8,516 meters high, on an expedition to the Himalayas organized to make visible, through the association Pigeon Trail Projectthe fight against multiple sclerosis and its dramatic consequences. His expedition began on April 9 and on the morning of May 16, at 9:10 a.m., he managed to reach the summit of the fourth highest mountain in the world, together with his guide Kaljang Sherpa.
Anthony Perezwhich in 2021 had to give up attacking the summit of the Manaslu due to bad weather, and Fefi Hernandezan experienced mountaineer with ascents on four continents, including the 7,134-meter Lenin Peak in Kyrgyzstan, have been protagonists of two solidarity expeditions, with a shared route in Nepal, which has allowed Anto to climb Lhotse, at 8,516 meters, and Fefi to Lobuche East, whose summit is at 6,119 meters.
They left La Orotava on April 9 and shared the journey between the island and the Everest base camp (at an altitude of 5,360 meters), which they reached after a 140-kilometre walk from Luckla. Fefi returned to Tenerife on May 3, after crowning the Lobuche to show the work of Afes Mental Healthand Anto focused from then on the complicated ascent to the so-called Everest South Col, from where he attacked the top of Lhotse. After reaching the summit of Muztag Ata, in China, at an altitude of 7,546 meters, and verifying the hardness of Manaslu, Anto had prepared himself like never before to become one of the few Canary Islanders to have climbed an eight-thousander and the first to reach the top in the Lhotse.
Anto recognized before leaving that he had trained conscientiously to achieve this dream, for which he spent the 13 weekends of last winter spending the night at more than 3,300 meters of altitude, after carrying out extremely hard training on foot from the town of La Orotava to the top of Teide, passing through Guajara, the Siete Cañadas and Pico Viejo. “It has been hard, we are not going to deny it, but I feel much better prepared now than last year,” he acknowledged to EL DÍA before leaving for the Himalayas last April.
Anto’s first words after his achievement
Despite the difficulty of communications, Anto says that “on May 16 at 9:10 a.m., on a day with some wind, but good in general, my Kaljang Sherpa guide and I stepped on the summit of the fourth highest mountain in the world. Until now, it has been the strongest and toughest challenge of my entire life mountaineer The conditions of living at more than 7,500 meters of altitude are difficult to imagine and much more difficult to explain”.
“After a first frustrated attempt for various reasons, such as the wind and the intense cold, which got me scared for my fingers and toesI decided to try again but this time with the help of supplemental oxygen to have more options to reach the top. Without that extra contribution, I wouldn’t have made it”, admits Anto.
“The conditions of living at more than 7,500 meters of altitude are difficult to imagine and much more difficult to explain”
This mountaineer from Tenerife says that “the very small peak of Lhotse, where we could barely fit two people, is accessed by a rocky wall of about 15 meters that leads to a very unstable snow ledge which cannot be accessed. The precariousness of the situation at the top meant that I couldn’t take the photos and videos that I would have liked to take.”
