Andrea Cardona: Guatemala's Grand Slam finisher

Andrea Cardona was born in Guatemala City in 1982. She had asthma as a child and, by her own account, was afraid of heights. At 18 she left on a scholarship to study tourism economics at the University of Genoa in Italy. On 23 May 2010 she stood on the summit of Everest, the first woman from Central America to do so.

Two years later she finished the Explorers Grand Slam, also called the Adventurers Grand Slam: the highest mountain on each continent plus a ski journey to both poles. Her own site describes her as the first Latin American person to complete it, in 2012.

The two poles, back to back

The polar half of the Grand Slam came in a single season. Cardona skied the last 111 kilometres to the South Pole and the last 111 kilometres to the North Pole between December 2011 and April 2012. That last-degree distance is the standard guided format at both ends of the earth, and it is the version the Grand Slam is usually counted on.

The ordering matters for anyone planning something similar. The Antarctic window and the Arctic window sit a few months apart, with the Antarctic season running through the southern summer and the Arctic last-degree trips going in April before the sea ice breaks up. Fitting both into one four-month stretch leaves very little room for a delay, and delays on polar logistics are normal.

What the Grand Slam asks on top of the 7 summits

The 7 summits challenge is already two different sports. Everest and Vinson are high-altitude expeditions with fixed camps and weather windows. Kosciuszko is a walk. Carstensz is rock climbing in jungle heat, reached by a long approach or a helicopter.

The Grand Slam adds a third sport. Skiing a last degree means hauling a pulk across sastrugi at sea level, in cold that is steadier and longer than anything on a summit day, with no altitude at all. The skill transfer from mountaineering is partial. Fitness carries over, cold management carries over, and the rest is learned on the ice.

That combination is why the finisher list for the Grand Slam is far shorter than the list for the mountains alone. Our page of everyone who has completed the 7 summits tracks the mountain side of it, and the polar legs sit outside that record.

Everest in 2010

Cardona's summit date of 23 May 2010 places her in the second half of a busy spring season on Everest. Her own account gives the summit elevation as 8,849 metres, the figure agreed by Nepal and China in 2020 and now in general use. The route she took and the operator she climbed with are not stated in the material published on her site.

For anyone reading this while planning their own attempt, the practical detail is in the Everest guide rather than in a profile. What a profile can show is the shape of a climbing life: an asthmatic child in Guatemala City, an economics degree in Genoa, and a summit twenty-eight years after birth.

Un Paso Más

Cardona now runs an app called Un Paso Más, which translates as "one more step". It carries exercise routines, guided breathing, active breaks and a daily visualization recorded in her own voice. The design idea comes straight off a rope team: climbers move at the pace of the slowest member, and the app is built to be used with a partner, family or friends. She also runs a workplace wellbeing programme under the same name, alongside speaking engagements.

That is a more common second act than it used to be. A finisher with a public profile has a choice between guiding, speaking and building something, and the three pay very differently. The rope-team framing is at least honest about where it came from.

Guatemala and the 7 summits

Central America is thinly represented on the 7 summits. The cost of a full campaign is the obvious reason, and the second reason is that the sport grows where there are mountains to learn on. Guatemala has volcanoes well above 3,000 metres, which is enough to build a climber but not enough to prepare one for the Khumbu.

A climber from a country without a deep mountaineering tradition carries an extra load: no national federation pipeline, no obvious sponsors, and a long way to travel before training even starts. Cardona's route through all of that ran via Italy, where she was studying at 18.

We take the view that firsts by nationality are worth recording even when they are statistically inevitable. Someone is always going to be the first Central American woman on Everest. The value is not the record itself but the effect on the next climber from the same place, who now knows the thing is possible and roughly what it costs.

What is on record

The verifiable dates from Cardona's own account are the Everest summit on 23 May 2010 and the Grand Slam completion in 2012, with the two polar legs falling between December 2011 and April 2012. The individual summit dates for her other six mountains are not published there.

If you are working out the sequence for your own attempt, the order most finishers use is driven by season and by money: Kilimanjaro and Elbrus early because they are cheap and teach altitude, Aconcagua for a first long expedition, Denali for self-sufficiency, then Everest and Vinson when the budget allows. Operators for each peak are listed by mountain.

This story is part of This week on the 7 summits: 2–8 November 2026, the week's news in brief.