Telangana Girl Scales Tallest Peaks In Six Continents

When Malavath Poorna, 18, conquered Mt. Vinson Massif, Antarctica's highest mountain peak (4,987 mts), she accomplished a unique feat - she became the first and youngest tribal woman in the world to set foot on the tallest mountain peaks of each of six continents.

So far Poorna has scaled Mt Everest (Asia, year 2014), Mt. Kilimanjaro (Africa, 2016), Mt. Elbrus (Europe, 2017), Mt. Aconcagua (South America, 2019), Mt. Cartsnez (Oceania region, 2019) and Mt. Vinson Massif (Antarctica, 2019). And she is thus very close to achieving her goal of scaling the tallest summits in each of the seven continents - she is now gearing up to scale Mt. Denali (North America's highest mountain peak), the dream of every mountaineer in the world.

Poorna's journey from climbing small hills in her tribal village of Pakala to the tops of the world's tallest mountain peaks began with the conquest of Mt. Everest in 2014 - when she was just 13.

Poorna accomplished her Mt. Vinson mission with the help of the government of Telangana, Transcend Adventures and crowd funding, and thanked Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao and Minister for Welfare Koppula Eshwar for helping her achieve her dream.

"I wouldn't have achieved any of my mountaineering feats if not for the solid support of Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao," she said.

She also thanked Secretary, TSWREIS, Dr R S Praveen Kumar and her coach Sekhar Babu Bachinepally of Transcend Adventures, Hyderabad, for their unwavering support and encouragement.

Dr Kumar was effusive in his praise for the prodigy, too. "Poorna's expeditions will remain engraved in golden letters in the annals of the world's mountaineering history," he gushed.

Poorna is currently pursuing an undergraduate course at the Minnesota State University, USA, as a fellow of the Global Undergraduate Exchange Program of the USA. Her parents work as agricultural labourers in Pakala, a remote tribal hamlet in Nizamabad district.