Wasfia Nazreen Mountaineer, activist, and educator

Wasfia Nazreen holds the Bangladeshi flag atop Denali, North America’s tallest mountain. She has climbed every continent’s highest peak. 

When Wasfia Nazreen reached the summit of Mount Everest in 2012, she took out her satellite phone and called her mom in Bangladesh. It was a turning point for Nazreen, who would descend from the top of the world to international acclaim and, finally, acceptance from her family. Her mother had abandoned her when she was 11. By the time they reconnected almost two decades later, Nazreen had become an outspoken gender activist and mountaineer. Her family did not approve, but after Everest their shame turned to pride. “If I’d known this, I probably would have strategized climbing mountains before,” she says, laughing.

Nazreen describes herself as “the odd one out” at home in Bangladesh. She went to the U.S. at age 17 on a full college scholarship and then to India, where she worked with Tibetan refugees and discovered a passion for mountain climbing. In 2011, two years after returning to Bangladesh, she announced a plan to summit the highest peak on each of the seven continents. Timed to the 40th anniversary of Bangladeshi independence, her goal was a celebration of progress for women. But she discovered there was still work to do when her critics mounted attacks: “They didn’t want to see a woman on top,” she says. “Literally.”

In November 2015 she planted the Bangladeshi flag on Oceania’s Puncak Jaya and became one of some 50 women to accomplish the seven-summit feat. Already that challenge has paled in comparison to what’s next: using Ösel Bangladesh, her new foundation, to build a support network for young women in her country and then across South Asia through education and outdoor training. So far, three fathers have contacted her to say they named their daughters Wasfia. “I’m not saying this out of ego,” she says. “But they’re thinking bigger for their daughters, and this is such a nontraditional thing to imagine.”