A NORTH Derbyshire climber has become the first British woman to climb one of the world's highest mountains.
Adele Pennington, aged 42, and her fellow climbers from the Sheffield-based Jagged Globe team are also the first British team to make it up the north east face of Manaslu in the Himalayas - the eighth highest summit in the world.
The Dronfield-based mountaineer has now reached the summits of three 8,000 metre peaks in less than a year after scaling Everest in May and Cho Oyu in the Himalayas - the sixth highest peak in the world - last October.
Adele, who works in Sheffield for Jagged Globe - a world renowned organiser of mountaineering and climbing expeditions - led a team of climbers from Britain, Nepal, New Zealand and Australia to the summit on Saturday.
Simon Lowe, managing director of Jagged Globe, described her achievements over the last year as "an astonishing feat of mountaineering".
He said: "The ascent of Manaslu was made despite atrocious weather conditions, caused by a lingering and turbulent monsoon that still has yet to leave the Himalaya.
"Heavy snowfall threatened the entire expedition, and at one point the mountain had to be abandoned, with the team retreating in a hurry to advance base camp. On return to the climb, the team found that one of the higher camps had totally disappeared under what is considered to have been 10ft of fresh snow. The camp had to be re-established with new tents and food, before the final push for the summit could be made."
Adele, a qualified mountaineering instructor, became just the 20th British woman to climb Mount Everest in May after leading seven climbers to the top.
She climbed her first mountain - Snowdon - with her father when she was just six.
Before becoming a full time expedition leader she was a member of the Scarborough and District Search and Rescue Team for a number of years, searching for people in trouble on the North Yorkshire Moors.
In 1998 she survived a fall from a rope, landing in a gap between snow and rock where she was trapped for more than 17 hours.
She broke her back and pelvis and feared for her life but a friend managed to raise the alarm.
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