Spain’s Edurne Pasaban, who claims to be the first female climber to conquer the world’s 14 highest peaks, seeks to become the first woman to climb Mount Everest without oxygen, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Pasaban, 37, scaled the 14 mountains above 8,000 meters in May 2010 after she reached the summit of 8,027-meter Shisha Pangma, situated in China’s Tibet region.

She told a recent Madrid news conference that “something was missing” because her team used supplementary oxygen when they scaled Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain, in May 2001.

News reports in Korea say that her climb without oxygen is intended to cement her claim to be the first woman to have climbed the 14 peaks.

Korea’s Oh Eun-sun also claims that she is the first woman to have scaled the 14 summits, though her 2009 ascent of Kangchenjunga is disputed by Pasaban and other Korean climbers. Oh said that she took a photo just below the summit, then continued to the peak of Kangchenjunga, due to bad weather.

Only 132 people have managed to scale the 8,848-meter Mount Everest without oxygen, all of them men.

Pasaban hopes to start her climb to Everest from the southern Nepalese side on May 23, which is the anniversary of her first successful climb of the mountain a decade ago.

(swchun@heraldcorp.com)