Lenin Peak (7,134 m) – First solo ascent.

He managed to survive and was also instrumental in saving the lives of others, including New York socialite Sandy Hill Pittman. From 1985 he was part of a Kazakhstani mountaineering team, and he became a citizen of Kazakhstan in 1991 after the breakup of the Soviet Union.īoukreev worked as a commercial guide in the 1990s, and was working with Scott Fischer's adventure company Mountain Madness during the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Boukreev moved to Alma-Ata, the capital of the neighbouring Kazakh SSR (present day Kazakhstan) located in the Tian Shan mountain range. At the same time, he also completed a coaching program for cross-country skiing.Īfter graduation, the 21-year-old dreamed of mountain climbing. After completing high school in 1975, he attended Chelyabinsk University for Pedagogy, where he majored in physics and earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1979. He came from the narod, the common people, and his parents were both poor. Boukreev's companion, Linda Wylie, edited his memoirs and published them in 2002 under the title, Above the Clouds: The Diaries of a High-Altitude Mountaineer.īoukreev was born in Korkino, within the Soviet Union's Russian SFSR.

In 1997, Boukreev was killed in an avalanche during a winter ascent of Annapurna in Nepal. He became even more widely known for saving the lives of climbers during the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. From 1989 through 1997, he made 18 successful ascents of peaks above 8000 m.īoukreev had a reputation as an elite mountaineer in international climbing circles for summiting K2 in 1993 and Mount Everest via the North Ridge route in 1995, and for his solo speed ascents of some of the world's highest mountains. Anatoli Nikolaevich Boukreev ( Russian: Анато́лий Никола́евич Букре́ев Janu– December 25, 1997) was a Soviet and Kazakhstani mountaineer who made ascents of 10 of the 14 eight-thousander peaks-those above 8,000 m (26,247 ft)-without supplemental oxygen.

Jon krakauer anatoli boukreev