Queen of the Climbers: Annie Smith Peck’s 1908 Conquest of Huascarán Norte

In the late winter of 1908, high above the Callejón de Huaylas in northern Peru, an improbable alpine drama reached its climax. Standing at 6,655 metres on the knife-edge ice crest of Nevado Huascarán Norte was a fifty-seven-year-old former Greek professor from Rhode Island: Annie Smith Peck. Dressed in wool knickerbockers, heavily nailed boots, a felt mask, and layers of flannel, Peck looked out across the sea of glaciated Andean giants. In her gloved hand, she held a banner bearing four simple words: Votes for Women.

The ascent marked the first time human feet had touched the summit of Peru’s great northern titan. It was a triumph forged through sheer willpower after five grueling, heartbreaking expeditions over five years, silencing critics who insisted that high-altitude exploration was strictly the domain of men.

A Passion for the Heights

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1850, Annie Smith Peck refused every constraint imposed upon women of the Victorian era. She insisted on a university education when few institutions admitted females, earning two degrees from the University of Michigan before becoming the first woman to study classical archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

In her forties, Peck discovered alpine mountaineering. In 1895, she caused an international scandal by ascending the Matterhorn in a tunic and climbing trousers. Newspapers expressed moral outrage, but Peck brushed aside the criticism with wry humor: “A woman who climbs a mountain has no business thinking of anything but climbing that mountain.”

Yet the European Alps soon felt crowded to Peck. She looked to South America, where the colossal, uncharted cordilleras remained largely unmeasured and unclimbed. Believing that Mount Sorata (Illampu) in Bolivia or Nevado Huascarán in Peru might rival or exceed Mount Aconcagua, she launched her quest to find the “Apex of America.”

Five Years of Heartbreak on Huascarán

Between 1903 and 1906, Peck mounted four expeditions to Mount Sorata and Mount Huascarán. Each campaign was plagued by logistical nightmares: local porters fled in terror from the glaciated “spirits,” blizzards shredded primitive canvas tents, and funding constantly evaporated.

Refusing defeat, Peck returned to Switzerland in early 1908. She sought out veteran Zermatt mountain guides Gabriel Zumtaugwald and Rudolf Taugwalder. Both men were hardened alpine professionals who had guided wealthy aristocrats across the Swiss Alps. Convinced by Peck’s determination, the guides agreed to sail to South America and attempt the northwest ice face of Huascarán.

Arriving in Yungay in August 1908, the party assembled a modest pack train of mules and local porters to carry supplies to the snowline at 5,100 metres. From there, the Swiss guides and Peck were on their own.

The Battle with the Seracs

The northwest flank of Huascarán presented a chaotic labyrinth of hanging glaciers, collapsing seracs, and gaping crevasses. Zumtaugwald led the rope team, wielding his ice axe for eight to ten hours every day to cut thousands of stepped notches into blue glacial ice. Peck, laden with heavy wool and down garments, matched the guides step for step, balancing across precarious snow bridges that creaked beneath their weight.

At 5,900 metres, night overtook them. Carving out a narrow snow bench beneath an overhanging ice wall, the trio endured a sleepless bivouac in temperatures plunging below minus twenty degrees Celsius. The wind roared down the mountain like an express train, threatening to blow their canvas shelter into the abyss.

On the morning of September 2, 1908, with their feet and fingers aching from creeping frostbite, the trio began the final push. Scaling steep 50-degree ice aprons, they broke through the bergschrund and emerged onto the windswept northern crest. At 3:30 in the afternoon, Annie Smith Peck planted her boots upon the summit of Huascarán Norte at 6,655 metres.

Vindication and Legacy

The descent was an ordeal of survival. Gabriel Zumtaugwald suffered severe frostbite on his hands, losing several fingers after descending to Yungay, while Peck battled hypothermia. Yet she had achieved the unimaginable: setting the highest altitude ever attained by an American climber, male or female, up to that date.

Back in the United States, rival mountaineer Fanny Bullock Workman disputed Peck’s claim that Huascarán was higher than Aconcagua, privately financing a French engineering team to triangulate the peak’s height. While the survey confirmed that Huascarán Norte stood at 6,655 metres (slightly below Aconcagua), the measurement firmly established that Peck had set an undisputed world altitude record for female climbers.

In 1927, the Peruvian government officially named the northern peak Cumbre Aña Peck in her honor. Annie Smith Peck climbed her final mountain, Mount Madison in New Hampshire, at the age of eighty-two. Her historic ascent of Huascarán Norte remains a beacon in mountaineering history—a triumph of intellect, grit, and the indomitable fight for human equality.