Indian School Team to Bid for Mount Everest World Record

Chandigarh: A six-student team will make a bid for a world record to become the first school team to scale Mt Everest, the highest peak in the world.

Supported by leading outdoor adventure gear brand Woodland, the school team will try to scale the 8,848-metre high peak in May this year to mark the 60 years of Everest treks. The expedition will be flagged off from India April 5. The young team members, all of whom are from the Lawrence School at Sanawar in Kasauli hills of Himachal Pradesh, are Hakikat Singh Grewal, Guribadat Singh, Prithvi Singh, Ajay Sohal, Shubham and Fateh Singh. Four of them are from Punjab and one each from Delhi and Himachal Pradesh.

Woodland managing director Harkirat Singh said the team members had undergone strenuous high-altitude and endurance training in the last few months. 'The Teens Tame Everest is a step ahead of our aim of promoting outdoors in the country. This one is very special to us since we intend to send our youngest ambassadors on an expedition to Mt. Everest for a world record. We are very delighted to back this historic project,' Harkirat Singh told media persons.

Expedition leader, Col. Neeraj Rana said: 'The thought of sending the world's first school team was very inspiring yet challenging. The thought of the project came alive some seven months back and we started working backwards on a fast pace to have a great team like this.'

The team, comprising all teenagers, has undergone a five-month extensive training (September 2012 to January 2013) in all formats of stamina build-up, fitness as well as adventure sports to equip them to cope up with the hard tenure at Mt. Everest, Rana said.

This included high-altitude training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling, to a 1,000-km cycling campaign in Thar Desert.

After a 10-day winter-cum-high altitude acclimatisation at Khardung-La in Ladakh, the team members will take their annual examinations in school in March before setting out for the Everest expedition.

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