Seven Summits with Vanessa Archontidou – Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures
In this episode Jason König interviews Vanessa Archontidou.
Vanessa is a mountaineer and explorer. She was a member of the first female Greek team to reach the summit of Everest, in 2019, and she has climbed the Seven Summits, the highest mountain on all seven continents. Side by side with her mountaineering career, she is an EU Climate Pact Ambassador, and founder of the organisation AWomanCanBe and the outdoor guiding company Up&out.
We start by talking about Vanessa’s first experience of hiking, on Mount Oligyrtos in the Peloponnese, about the training that followed on from that, and about what it’s like to discover that your body has an aptitude for high-altitude climbing.
Vanessa tells the story of the Seven Summits project – starting from Kilimanjaro, encompassing the Everest ascent, and finishing on the summit of Mount Vinson in Antarctica – and discusses her plans for a North Pole expedition.
We discuss the way in which mountains provide powerful vehicles for telling stories about climate change, and the way in which Vanessa’s work with female porters in the mountains in Africa helped to inspire her charity, AWomanCanBe, which aims to ’empower women to lead the way in protecting our planet and making the world better and fairer’.
Finally we return to Greece, and to the question of what sustainable mountain tourism should look like.
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For versions with transcripts or closed captions, view the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures playlist on YouTube.
Sound editor: Zofia Guertin
Video editor: Mary Woodcock Kroble