A meeting room, dimmed lights, Nappa leather seats, a call console resting on the tempered glass desk, somewhere in Oxfordshire, UK. “The important thing for us, Kristin, is time. With or without oxygen, we don’t care, the Guinness Book doesn’t care “. With a stubborn forehead and scraggly dreadlocks, Kristin is weary. Above all, she’s thinking about the 7-figure budget that Bremont, the watch manufacturer, might not let go of. There’s as much in common between Himalayan climbing and her sponsor as there is between an organic leek and a taurine drink. So she sighs. “You’ll do the 8000 faster than anyone before you, and you’ll go down in history not just as the first woman, but the first woman!” says the Head Marketing Officer.
Is it a fable? Bremont Watches has its new Nimsdai, and is keen to make the most of its investment. Not to finance a fad like climbing without oxygen. Kristin H. is out of arguments. But a very big cheque. An amount that’s impossible to refuse. She abandons the idea that she revealed to everyone, even here, of doing the two 8000 climbs she missed last year and all the 8000 without oxygen in 2023.
Kristin leaves the meeting relieved, or almost, but with a bitter taste in her mouth. A month later, she was on the Sino-Nepal border, on the Friendship Route. Strangely enough, her usual sherpas had not been given the go-ahead by the Chinese authorities and were being