"Then whenever I finished an expedition I started to think about which team I could join the following year to go back to the Himalayas", Edurne said recently. She was never short of invitations, but bitter moments also lay in wait. In the autumn of the same year, she tried her luck once more on Dhaulagiri. On summit day, the mountain was in a very dangerous state and Edurne took the hard decision not to go up. Her friend Pepe Garcés did try, but a slip on his way down would cost him his life. Unyielding, the following year Pasaban summitted once more, this time on the very hard Makalu.

If any veteran still doubted that Edurne was something more than a lucky girl in the mountains, they had to eat their words when in 2003 the girl from Tolosa lined up the peaks of three "eight-thousanders" in one year: Lhotse and the two Gasherbrums – an achievement reserved for few elite alpinists.