‘Iron woman’ Dr Usha Hegde of Mysuru scales Mount Everest

Major Smitha Lakshman, who was part of an army team, is the only other woman mountaineer from Karnataka to reach the peak of Mount Everest in 2012. Dr. Usha Hegde is the first civilian from the State to have accomplished the ‘Himalayan feat’, according to mountaineers and adventure sports enthusiasts from Mysuru.

At 6.10 a.m. on May 19, Dr. Usha Hegde, a professor at JSS Dental College in Mysuru, etched history by becoming the first civilian from not only Mysuru, but entire Karnataka to scale Mount Everest, the tallest peak in the world, standing at a height of 29,031 feet.

A mother of two students of medicine and wife of an orthopaedic doctor, Dr. Usha realized her dream of reaching the ‘top of the world’ at the age of 52.

Major Smitha Lakshman, who was part of an army team, is the only other woman mountaineer from Karnataka to reach the peak of Mount Everest in 2012. Dr. Usha is the first civilian from the State to have accomplished the ‘Himalayan feat’, according to mountaineers and adventure sports enthusiasts from Mysuru.

As a triathlete, who had completed the gruelling Ironman Western Australia event in 2019, Dr. Usha was not new to taking up formidable challenges and even completing them with elan.

“Though I was active in sports during my student days, it was limited to college-level sports,” she told The Hindu. Starting with running in her early 40s, Dr. Usha was initially participating in 5K and 10K runs in Mysuru before graduating to half-marathons and marathons in different parts of India. When the Ironman challenge beckoned, she took to hours of cycling and enrolled herself for training in swimming before emerging as a triathlete.

Despite her background in endurance sports, Dr. Usha undertook a couple of mountaineering expeditions to places like Ladakh and to Africa, where she scaled mount Kilamanjaro in Tanzania, which is the tallest peak in Africa, standing at a height of 19,340 feet, before aiming for Mount Everest, the tallest in the world.

She underwent months of preparation, including a training programme at Tata Steel Adventure Foundation (TSAF) in Jamshedpur that helped instill confidence in her to face the likely challenges she could encounter, like negotiating glaciers, crevasses and rocky surfaces, in the mighty Himalayas.