Italian climber Nives Meroi has broken her leg after vicious weather defeated her bid to scale the world's fifth-highest mountain.
Meroi fell while racing down from an advance camp on Himalayan peak Makalu - the successful ascent of which would have made her the first woman to climb 11 of the world's 14 highest mountains.
She was helicoptered off the mountain to a hospital in Kathmandu.
Doctors said her condition was OK and it would take about two months for the shin-bone to heal.
When they set off for the top of Himalayan peak Makalu on Christmas Eve, Meroi and husband Romano Benet were also aiming to pull off the first midwinter ascent of the mountain known as Big Black.
At the time, she said: ''We know what to expect: short days, high winds, biting snow, cold, and more cold. But with the help of our crack Kazakh team we think we can do it''.
But Meroi and her team were hit by the fiercest storms in years.
The last winter attempt on Makalu, on the same route, was by Frenchman Jean-Christophe Lafaille in January 2006.
Lafaille died near the summit.
Meroi, 47, from Tarvisio in Italy's northeastern mountains climbed Everest in June to conquer her tenth 8,000 metre-high peak.
In all, there are 14 of these in the world.
Meroi is vying with Austria's Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, who caught up with her mark two months ago, and Basque climber Edurne Pasaban who has climbed nine.
In June Meroi also became the first Italian woman to conquer Everest without oxygen tanks or high-altitude bearers - the so-called 'Alpine way'.
She took the same approach on Makalu.
With her conquest of the world's highest mountain, Meroi managed to climb three of the world's 8,000m-high peaks in less than a year.
The others were world No.2 K2 and No.7 Dhaulagiri.
As well as Makalu (No.5), the four others left for Meroi to achieve her feat are No.3 Kangchenjunga, No.8 Manaslu and No.10 Annapurna.
The eight-thousanders are all in the Himalayan or Karakoram ranges in Nepal, Nepal/Tibet, Pakistan and Pakistan/China.
