Lei Wang: The First Chinese Woman To Climb The Seven Summits

The seven summits are magical mountains that have been climbed by only a handful of people in the world. These mountains with the highest peaks comprise of Kilimanjaro, Denali, Elbrus, Aconcagua, Carstensz Pyramid, Vinson and Everest. Till date less than 20 women in the universe have undergone and completed the most challenging task of climbing each of the earth’s seven highest peaks. Another extremely challenging task of covering up the whole of the North and the South poles by skiing under the harshest climatic conditions on the coldest continents of the world, present a unique mountaineering experience altogether. This challenge has been completed only by 10 people in the world who have accomplished this huge task along with climbing the seven summits.

Lei Wang, an Asian American, who was born in China’s Jiang Su province, has already successfully climbed six of the seven summits. She climbed the Kilimanjaro in July 2003, Elbrus in Aug 2005, Denali in June 2007, Carstensz Pyramid in Nov 2007, Vinson in Dec 2007, and Aconcagua in Jan 2008, and skied to South Pole in Jan 2008 and North Pole in Apr 2008. She has reached very close to her goal and is now aiming at climbing the tallest mountain in the world-The Everest in 2010. This challenge is commonly referred to as the �7+2� challenge and she is about to be the only Chinese as well as the only Asian American woman to complete this challenge successfully.

Lei was a graduate of Tsinghua University in Beijing and migrated to the U.S in the year 1995 to pursue computer science and gradually received a MBA degree from the Wharton School. At the time of pursuing the MBA, at Wharton, Wang explored into her interest of the outdoors and went climbing her first glacier mountain, Cotopaxi in Ecuador followed by covering the whole of her first biggest peak, Kilimanjaro in Africa. It was at this point of time that Wang realized that she was too weak and unfit to climb the mountain peak. She was determined to improve her fitness and inculcated into herself a never say die attitude. She lived in Boston at that time and had joined a gym where she would run for hours after work. Later that year, she went on to run one half and two full marathons.

On Feb 2004, Wang saw a documentary called Touching the Void, depicted in which was the first ascent of a peak in Peru that ended in tragedy. Later she got a load of another documentary called Women of K2, which was about women mountaineers. She was gradually drawn into the concept of adventuring into climbing the highest peaks in the world by watching more such documentaries every day. She finally realized her dire passion for mountaineering and decided that she would climb all the seven summits along with the two poles.

Wang sacrificed her career and her routine life to acquire more training in the technical skills and undergo the physical stress necessary to qualify her to reach literally the �highest� goal of her life which was climbing the highest mountains in the world. In this extremely long and strenuous process she claims to have experienced first-hand, a physical and ideological transformation. She has also successfully faced the financial challenges to reach this pinnacle. Her ultimate goal is to be a living inspiration to her fellow citizens of the globe to challenge themselves and be determined to achieve the impossible. Amongst the people she aspires to inspire are majorly Chinese people, American immigrants and women all around the world.