After a frustrated attempt at Manaslu, in 2021, Anto became the first canary on May 16, 2022 to reach the top of Lhotse, at 8,516 meters, and the third to climb a peak of more than eight thousand meters. , after Juan Diego Amador from Tenerife and Javier Cruz from Gran Canaria. Between June 15 and August 3, this postal worker faces the twelfth highest mountain on the planet.
While the streets of the Villa are filled with flowers on the occasion of the Corpus Christi carpets, Antonio Miguel Pérez, Anto, the mountaineering postman from La Orotava, will travel to Pakistan with the aim of reaching the top of his second eight-thousander. He will try to achieve it without extra oxygen supply on the twelfth highest mountain on the planet: the 8,047-meter Broad Peak, located in the Karakorum mountain range, on the border between Pakistan and China, very close to K2. And he will do so with the banners of the Pichón Trail Project, for multiple sclerosis, and Teidela, who fights against Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).
The challenge begins this Thursday the 15th and will last, if all goes according to plan, until August 3rd. It will be 49 days in which Anto will have to complete a long journey by international flight to Islamabad, an internal flight from Islamabad to Skardu, a 10-hour trip by jeep, from Skardu to Jula, at an altitude of 3,163 meters, and from there. seven days on foot to reach the Broad Peak base camp, at 5,117 meters, climbing the Baltoro glacier, one of the longest in the world outside the polar regions, with 57 kilometers of route on rocks and ice.
Anto is in love with the mountains and is used to training hard to arrive in the best conditions for his challenges. Since he was a child, he has climbed Mount Teide more than a hundred times and his love for the mountains became a vital objective since he became a postal worker. He traveled to the Pyrenees, then to the Alps, later to South America, and finally to the Himalayas. He has climbed many 5,000, 6,000 and 7,000 peaks, such as Lenin Peak (7,134) in Kyrgyzstan, or Muztagata (7,509) in China, before facing the feared eight thousand and its death zone. In 2021 he tried to summit Manaslu, but it was not possible. A year later, in 2022, he became the first canary to set foot on Lhotse and the third capable of reaching an altitude of more than 8,000 meters on foot, after Juan Diego Amador and Javier Cruz.
For 4 months he has been training very hard in Tenerife to reach his third eight-thousander in better shape than ever. In long routes around the island in this period he has covered more than 650 kilometers and exceeded 45,000 meters of positive elevation gain. And distributing letters he has walked through the streets of La Orotava another 750 kilometers. He has spent nights in the open and in a single day he has been able to walk up from Socorro beach and climb the four highest peaks on the island: Montaña Blanca (2,748), the Teide (3,715), Pico Viejo (3,135) and Guajara (2,718). A journey of 50 kilometers in less than 9 hours on the move.
In Pakistan, and as part of his acclimatization process, he will ascend the Pastore Peak, 6,209 meters high, and once at the Broad Peak, he will go through a process of rotations between camps, “in which a high-altitude porter and I will go up the necessary material and installing three fields at 5,800, 6,300 and 7,100 meters». His challenge is sporting and supportive, because it also aims to make visible and support the fight against “two terrible and forgotten diseases: multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”
