A team of seven school boys, four of them from Punjab and the rest from Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, are set to create history by attempting to scale Mount Everest on the 60th anniversary of the first ascent to the world’s tallest mountain peak.
If successful, this feat will go into the record books as the first school team from any part of the world to have scaled the 8,848-metre peak. The boys visited the holy city Amritsar on Thursday to pay obeisance at the Golden Temple ahead of their rigorous journey.
Team members Hakikat Singh, Guribadat Singh, Prithvi Singh, Ajay Sohal, Shubham, Fateh Singh and Raghav Joneja said they trained hard as individuals and as a team. “We have faith in our training and our expedition leader (Col Neeraj Rana),” they said. The team, which begins its journey next Thursday, will be at the Everest base camp till April 19.
Col Rana said “they effectively learnt survival and mountain rescue techniques. As part of training, they climbed two major peaks in the Kanchenjunga area - B C Roy peak and Frey peak. Their training was done at heights as high as 19,000 feet.”
Praveen Vashisht, the headmaster of Lawrence School Sanawar in Himachal Pradesh said the students were in the 16-17 year age group. They boys initially underwent a basic and advanced mountaineering training at the renowned HMI (Himalayan Mountaining Institute), Darjeeling.
Thereafter, the team underwent a systematic seven month extensive training programme in all aspects of stamina build-up, physical fitness, team integration and mental conditioning. The boys were given elaborate training about mountains, rock craft, black and blue ice craft, snow and glacier craft in addition to complex mountaineering tools like crampons, pitons, jumars, harnesses, laddering and a plethora of rope techniques.
The rigorous module of training included much more.