WHEN Leila Bahrami stood on the 23,500ft (7,161m) summit of Mount Pumori, exhausted but elated, she made a vow to return to the Himalayas to face the greatest climbing challenge of all.

“It would be the first time a Muslim woman climbed Everest,” she said.

Now, three years after the Pumori success, she is preparing to take on the world’s highest mountain with a group of Iranian women climbers, including Farkhondeh Sadegh, one of the two other women who scaled Pumori with her.

“We could see Everest all the time we were climbing,” Ms Bahrami, a 31-year-old Oil Ministry employee, said. “I looked at it and said, I will climb you.

“Fewer than 100 women in the world have climbed Everest. It would show the world the potential of Muslim women as sportswomen.”

Appealing to Muslim, as well as national, pride, the Iranian Mountaineering Federation challenged its women members to conquer the mountain, and 69 responded. The number was reduced to 14 by elimination tests, most recently last weekend at an icefall in the Rudbar-e-Qasran area, near Tehran.

The two friends, each with a decade of mountaineering experience, are confident of their abilities but are also well aware of the perils.

“I think I can climbEverest, but there are always some unpredictable events out there,” Ms Sadegh said. “And I have not been in altitudes over 8,000m before.”

Their final push on Pumori was overshadowed by a tragedy. Days earlier, five young Spanish climbers, with experience in the Andes and the Alps, were thrown to their deaths by an avalanche.

“I was upset but I tried not to think about it and just concentrated on our target,” Ms Sadegh, a 36-year-old graphic designer, said.

The Iranian women, accompanied by an Iranian man and three Sherpas, had better luck. “Pumori wasn’t as difficult as I thought,” Ms Sadegh said. “Although we were late on the summit and I was worried about descending.”

Another preparatory camp is scheduled for the end of this month, and seven or eight women will challenge Everest in May. The £215,000 needed for the expedition is to be raised from the private sector.

Mountaineering has long been popular with Iranian men: a men’s team first scaled Everest in 1998. But the sport has become increasingly popular with women, along with golf, skiing and even paragliding.

They are sports, like more traditional activities such as archery and horse-riding, in which the dress code for women is not a serious hindrance to performance. Covering your hair on the icy crags in the high Himalayas is a life-saving necessity, not an obligation.

Mohammad Hajabolfath, the editor of Iran Mountain Zone, a website for climbing enthusiasts, estimates that there are some 50,000 women trekkers in Iran. About 4,000 are keen mountaineers, of whom around 100 are considered contenders at an international level.

Ms Bahrami and Ms Sadegh, both single, took up climbing while at university. Ms Bahrami’s parents are aware of the dangers but support her Everest ambitions. “They know it is very important to me.”

Pumori, nicknamed Everest’s Daughter, was an invaluable training experience for the two women. The pyramid-shaped peak, five miles (8km) from Everest, is often considered one of Nepal’s easiest high peaks to climb, but experts say that weather conditions can make its avalanche-prone slopes perilous.

Reaching the top of the world, Ms Sadegh said, would be “a very good thing for women in Iran”.

AIMING HIGH

1965: Nawang Gombu Sherpa is first person to climb Everest twice

1990: Andrej and Marija Stremfelj, of Slovenia, are first married couple to reach summit together

1999: Babu Chiri Sherpa spent longest time at summit, 21½ hours

2001: Erik Weihenmayer, an American, is first blind person to reach summit

2003: Yuichiro Miura, 70, of Japan, is oldest man to reach summit

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