Abele Blanc

Abele Blanc (born September 2, 1954 in Aosta ) is an Italian mountaineer and mountain guide . He is the 23rd person who has climbed all eight-thousanders . After using bottled oxygen on his first ascent of Mount Everest, he repeated the ascent in 2010 in an Italian expedition together with Silvio Mondinelli , Michele Enzio and Marco Camandona without this assistance. On the day of the summit they met Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner , who was climbing alone and whose husband Ralf Dujmovits had stayed behind in the last camp, and they reached the summit together. Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner played a large part in the success, as she could not be dissuaded from success despite the great cold and the stormy wind and, as Mondinelli later put it, “we men did not want to embarrass ourselves” . They were the only five of 400 climbers who reached the summit of Mount Everest by fair means in the spring .

Thus Abele Blanc only climbed the Kangchenjunga with the help of bottled oxygen. Blanc completed the ascent series on April 26, 2011 at the age of 56 on Annapurna .

Until Christian Kuntner's death on Annapurna, Blanc was his regular climbing partner, with whom he had planned a very special project for the International Year of the Mountain 2002: From mid-April to mid-July 2002, all recognized 4000-meter peaks in the Alps were to be climbed. However, weeks of bad weather made it impossible for them and so they “only” reached 60 of the 84 peaks in the planned time.

Blanc and his colleagues Marco Camadona and Marco Barmasse were seriously injured in the avalanche accident on Annapurna in 2005, in which Kuntner was killed.

Blanc has announced that he wants to complete the eight-thousander series without bottled oxygen and climb the Kangchenjunga again. In 1995 he was on the mountain with Sergio Martini . They used bottled oxygen during a rescue attempt for Benoît Chamoux .

See also

• List of climbers who have climbed all eight-thousanders

Web links

• Abele Blanc's website
• Portrait at PlanetMountain.com (Italian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Eberhard Jurgalski : Ascents - Kangchenjunga. ( PDF , approx. 42 KB) In: 8000ers.com. Retrieved August 4, 2010 . 
2. ↑ Abele Blanc summits Annapurna and all 8000ers. In: planetmountain.com. April 26, 2011, accessed April 27, 2011 . 
3. ^ Christian Kuntner : Christian Kuntner - short biography. (No longer available online.) May 20, 2005, archived from the original on February 5, 2010 ; Retrieved April 27, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ fatal ice avalanche on Annapurna! May 19, 2005, accessed April 27, 2011 . 
5. ^ Enrico Martinet: Blanc, la corsa non è finita. In: La Stampa online edition . May 25, 2011, accessed May 16, 2011 (Italian).