Twelve days before she made history, an avalanche buried her camp, knocked her unconscious, and left her to be dug out by her guide. Most expeditions would have gone home. Junko Tabei got up — and on May 16, 1975, she became the first woman ever to stand on top of Mount Everest.
Her story does not begin on that mountain. It begins years earlier, with a door being closed in her face — and her decision to build her own door instead.
“Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves”
In 1969, Japanese climber Junko Tabei founded the Ladies Climbing Club. Its motto said everything: “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves.”
Why start a club of her own? Because male climbers wouldn’t take women seriously. The mountains didn’t care who climbed them, but the climbing world did — and rather than spend her life asking permission from men who had already decided what women couldn’t do, Tabei organized women to go and do it themselves.
That motto is the whole philosophy in one line. Not “let us come with you.” Not “give us a chance.” By ourselves. She built the team, raised the ambition, and pointed it at the highest mountain on Earth.
May 4, 1975: buried
The Everest expedition nearly ended on May 4, 1975. An avalanche buried her team’s camp at 6,300 metres.
Tabei was knocked unconscious in her tent and had to be dug out by her guide. Picture that scene: buried under snow and wreckage, at an altitude where the air itself is working against you, twelve days before the summit window — rescued by digging hands while unconscious.
An avalanche is not a setback like a sprained ankle. It is the mountain demonstrating, as clearly as it can, that it can kill you where you sleep. Expeditions turn back for far less. Climbers go home for far less. The story of almost any mountaineer ends right there, in that buried camp, with a long walk down and a “next year, maybe.”
May 16, 1975: the top of the world
Tabei did not go down. She recovered, she regrouped, and she kept climbing.
Twelve days after being dug out of the avalanche, on May 16, 1975, Junko Tabei reached the summit of Everest with Sherpa Ang Tsering — the first woman ever to stand on top of the world.
No woman in history had done it before her. The club the men wouldn’t take seriously had just put its founder higher than any woman had ever stood. And she had done the last part of it with an avalanche still fresh in her body and her memory.
And then: every continent
If Everest had been the end, it would have been enough. It wasn’t.
In 1992, Tabei became the first woman to complete the Seven Summits — the highest peak on every continent. Not one mountain that the doubters said women couldn’t climb. All seven of the biggest ones, across the whole planet.
That is what “by ourselves” produced: not a single breakthrough to be remembered as a curiosity, but a lifetime of firsts stacked one on another — a club founded in 1969 because the door was closed, a summit in 1975 that no woman had ever reached, and a full set of continental summits by 1992.
The men who wouldn’t take women seriously got their answer. It just took twenty-three years, seven mountains, and one avalanche to deliver it in full.
Join the conversation
She was buried by an avalanche, knocked unconscious, dug out by her guide — and summited TWELVE DAYS later. Be honest: would you have kept climbing, or gone home? And what do you think of her answer to being shut out — not arguing, just founding her own club and going by themselves? Tell us below.
Source note: Junko Tabei’s founding of the Ladies Climbing Club in 1969 (motto: “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves”) after male climbers wouldn’t take women seriously, the May 4, 1975 avalanche that buried her team’s Everest camp at 6,300 metres and knocked her unconscious before her guide dug her out, her May 16, 1975 summit with Sherpa Ang Tsering as the first woman on top of Everest, and her becoming the first woman to complete the Seven Summits in 1992 are drawn from Guinness World Records, the Sports Illustrated obituary (2016), and ExplorersWeb’s 50th-anniversary account. Sources split on her overall summit ordinal, so this article omits it.
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