Google on Sunday celebrated the 80th birth anniversary of Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei, who became the first woman to climb Mount Everest in 1975.

The doodle depicts an animated version of Tabei jumping across seven mountain peaks – to highlight that Tabei became the first woman to complete the “seven summits” across continents despite battling illness. “Tabei eventually reached mountaintops in 76 different countries,” Google said.

“I did not intend to be the first woman on Everest,” she had said after her achievement, according to Google. Tabei said she would be more than happy to be referred to as “the 36th person to climb Everest”. “It took two months until I could settle at home,” she recalled later, referring to the attention and praise she got. “My three-year-old daughter was scared of all the cameras.”

Tabei was born in 1939 in a small town in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture. She founded the Ladies Climbing Club in 1969 to encourage women to take up climbing expeditions. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2012 and died on October 20, 2016 at the age of 77.


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