VIDEO | The CAI launches the all-female K2 expedition

An Italian-Pakistani team for the 70th of the first ascent of 1954

MILAN - An all-female expedition to conquer the summit of K2. It is the undertaking promoted by the CAI to celebrate the anniversary of the 1954 Italian expedition led by Ardito Desio, who was the first in the world to reach the summit of the Karakorum giant.

Seventy years later, nine women (four Italian athletes and one doctor, four Pakistani) will leave for Pakistan for the second highest peak on Earth on 15 June.

The initiative was presented this morning in Milan, with the entire team, among young people, very young people (the youngest is 19 years old) and 'first timers' grappling with the 8000ers: Federica Mingolla, Silvia Loreggian, Anna Torretta, Cristina Piolini, Samina Baig, Amina Bano, Nadeema Sahar, Samana Rahim, and the doctor Lorenza Pratali were the protagonists of the launch day of the project, organized by the Alpine Club with EvK2Cnr, an association that deals with scientific and technological research at high and very high altitudes.

They will arrive at base camp on June 29th where they will begin mountaineering activities and acclimatization, before attempting the summit in the second half of July..

Not just a sporting achievement, but much more.Along the Abruzzi Spur, following the route opened by the expedition led by Ardito Desio, the athletes' climb will also be "an opportunity for training, research and promotion of cultural and social values".

The mountaineers will be coordinated by Agostino Da Polenza, EvK2Cnr president.

The K2-70 project will start with training days on Mont Blanc (15-18 March).Followed by the days at Eurac Research in Bolzano (20-24 March), a research center of excellence in the field of mountain medicine where the athletes will undergo medical-scientific tests to evaluate the impact and that their organism will undergo during ascension.

“I'm very excited, it's definitely a great achievement and a great honor for me - admits Mingolla, climber born in 1994 - the first time on an 8,000m leaves me with many unknowns at the moment, which also leads me to train a lot because I don't know what Wait.

But I'm sure it will be fine."Her traveling companion Silvia Loreggian echoes her.“There will certainly be many new things for many of us, because with every experience you have in the mountains, as much as you can imagine and expect it, there are always many unknowns”.But he promises:“We still have two and a half months and we will continue to train to reach our maximum.”

Among the most experienced on the expedition is Anna Torretta, energized "like a moka with good coffee" for this adventure.“Doing a female expedition is a very important added value.

I have always promoted female mountaineering, since I became a mountain guide I founded the first female mountaineering school in Europe in 2001".

Why?“In a group of only women you can do things that are much more important than things that physically, perhaps would have mental limitations if done in a mixed group.”This is why Torretta sees this experience as "the pinnacle of everything I have always tried and wanted to do".

The president of the CAI, Antonio Montani, who presented the initiative together with the team, rejoices.“It's a great satisfaction.It is an opportunity to celebrate the seventy years of the Desio expedition, also to do something new:the first all-female expedition to this mountain which remains one of the most difficult mountains in the world”.

The choice of Milan as the launch city of the project is not accidental:it is in fact here that "the '54 expedition with Ardito Desio was born, it was organized by the CAI, but it represented all of Italy which was emerging from the war in pieces and which had an opportunity to redeem itself in the eyes of international public opinion" , recalls Montani.

“This is the true historical importance of the 1954 expedition which left from here.And so we also wanted to start from here."

Also present at the event at Boga Space this morning was the Minister of Tourism Daniela Santanchè, who wanted to remember how K2, thanks to that expedition, is "the mountain of Italians" and defines this, all female, "a great victory".

In this sense it will also be good for tourism, where “100,000 jobs have been occupied by women in Italy.It is very important that they find space, because when women have economic independence they are freer to decide their own lives and therefore work to employ women.Not only does it help us with Europe, where we still have a lower female employment gap, but it helps us liberate women. This is a topic to which I am particularly sensitive, as is the entire government, because I remember that we have a Prime Minister who is a woman", concludes Santanchè.