18-Year-Old Melbourne Girl Climbs Everest On Her Second Try
Bianca Adler became the youngest Australian to reach the top of the world, turning last year’s heartbreak into this year’s summit.
At 2.30am Nepal time on Wednesday, 18-year-old Bianca Adler from Melbourne stood on top of Mount Everest. She had done it and she was only in Year 12.
Her Garmin tracker confirmed the summit. So did a radio call she made to her father, Paul, who was waiting at base camp below.
“I feel really good up here. Physically I feel really great,” Bianca told her father.
“It’s amazing what you’ve done and so much hard work — it’s amazing,” Paul replied.
“Thanks Dad,” she said.
Who Is Bianca Adler?
Bianca grew up partly in Annecy, a small town in the French Alps, where eight years of mountain scenery planted a dream of one day climbing in the Himalayas.
Her parents, Paul and Fiona, were not just supportive they were experienced climbers themselves. Paul summited Everest in 2007. Fiona did it in 2006. When the family moved back to Melbourne, the flat landscape didn’t stop Bianca.
She went hiking, rock climbing, kayaking, canyoning, skiing, and biking with her family from a young age. None of it was professional-level, but it gave her a solid base. As she got older and showed a serious interest in climbing, her father started taking her on bigger and harder expeditions first in the French and Italian Alps, then further afield.
She was always the youngest on the mountain. Often the slowest too. But she always found a way to finish the climb.
A Journey Built on Setbacks and Records
Bianca’s path to Everest wasn’t a straight line. In April 2024, she attempted to climb Ama Dablam (6,812 metres) in Nepal. She injured her knee on a steep ice section and had to turn back. At the time, she said it felt like a complete failure.
She rebuilt the strength in her knee and went back. In October 2024, she reached the summit of Ama Dablam and broke the world record for the youngest female to do so. Then, on 25 September that same year, she summited Mt Manaslu becoming the youngest woman in the world to reach that peak too.
By the time she set her sights on Everest, Bianca already held multiple world records, including a Guinness World Record. She had spent two years doing intense cardio and strength training to prepare her body for the highest mountain on earth.
2025 So Close, But Not This Time
In May 2025, Bianca made her first attempt on Everest. She got within 400 metres of the summit before strong winds forced her to turn back. It was, by her own description, an “extremely tough” and devastating decision.
“But I always want to choose life over a potential summit,” she wrote on Instagram.
It was the kind of maturity that most climbers take decades to develop. Bianca was 17.
2026
This year, the planning was even more careful. Bianca’s mother, Fiona, wrote in a blog post before the summit attempt that the weather forecasts were hard to read and the team wasn’t fully confident. Winds were expected to pick up. But enough forecasts were optimistic, and a large group of climbers were making their attempt that same night a sign conditions were considered acceptable.
Bianca left Camp 4 very early on purpose. The plan was to beat the queues of other climbers on the mountain. Crowds at high altitude are dangerous; getting stuck means standing still in the cold, which can be deadly.
She reached The Balcony a rare flat spot about halfway up and kept going without stopping to radio in. Her guides, Pemba and Ngdu, were with her the whole way.
At around 2.30am Nepal time, she reached the 8,849 metre summit. She summited in the dark, but her family said it was a small price to pay for a safe climb. She took photos, then started coming down.
The descent turned out to be the hardest part. Writing from Camp 4 after making it back down, Bianca said the section between the South Summit and the summit was more technical than she expected. There were about a dozen other climbers in her way, and she had to work carefully to clip around them while staying safely attached.
“I felt like I needed to be so much more cautious and it was a lot of work clipping around people,” she wrote. “It was pretty tough getting around them while staying clipped in.”
By Wednesday afternoon she was back at Camp 4, resting, and planning to continue down to Camp 2.
Bianca’s father told the ABC on Wednesday that her parents were “extremely proud” of her. Her next goal, he said, was straightforward: get back to Melbourne and get through Year 12.
Nepal’s department of mountaineering had issued 410 permits to foreign climbers for Everest this spring season, at a cost of US$15,000 each. Bianca was one of them and on Wednesday, she became the youngest Australian to make it all the way to the top.
From the French Alps as a child, to world records on Ama Dablam and Manaslu, to turning back 400 metres short of Everest last year, to standing on the summit in the dark at 2.30am Bianca Adler got there in the end.
Read Bianca Adler Everest 2025 story Here
