#19 Lydia Bradey - The First Woman to Summit Everest Without Oxygen

The Wild Podcast

Lydia is one of New Zealand's great mountaineers and climbers. She's the first woman to summit Mount Everest without oxygen, back in the 1988. She's since gone on to climb Everest another four times. She also completed the first female ascents of several climbing walls in California's Yosemite National Park, recently popularised in the award-winning film, Free Solo.

We talk about Lydia's childhood and how a girl who hated sports developed a deep love for the mountains. We also go into her time in Yosemite, the time she almost died in an avalanche in India, and touch on the unfortunate controversy surrounding her first Everest ascent.
Here a just a few of Lydia's achievements to date:
- The first woman in the world to climb Everest without oxygen (1988)
- Probably the first woman in the world to climb an "8000er" alpine-style (one push, bottom to summit) without oxygen (1987)
- 7 first female ascents of "Big Walls" in Yosemite Valley, California (early 1980s)
- One of three Kiwis to make the first NZ ascent of the world's 7th highest mountain, Dhaulagiri in Nepal (2017)

If you're interested in learning more about Lydia you can grab a copy of her book, Going Up is Easy, here or here.
You can follow Lydia on Instagram here.
The Wild Podcast is produced by The Content Lab, content marketing, copywriting, and brand storytelling services for New Zealand businesses that want to build audiences and authority online. Visit contentlab.co.nz
Follow The Wild Podcast on Instagram and Facebook.
If you enjoyed this episode it would mean a lot to us if you could leave a five-star rating and/or a short review. This helps us to reach more people, to keep producing more episode, and to keep celebrating and telling the stories of high performers, modern explorers and our wild places.