Adele Pennington and teddy bear on Everest's summit

The only British woman to have climbed Everest twice will give a lecture in her home town this month.

Adele Pennington has also summited three 8,000m mountains in one year, despite an accident that left her close to death. The 43-year-old Sheffield-based mountaineer began her career on the hills by getting lost on a family walk up Snowdon at the age of six.

Since that inauspicious start, Ms Pennington has established herself as one of the country’s top instructors and expedition leaders. She works for both Jagged Globe and Adventureworks and was the first British woman to climb Manaslu in the Himalaya.

Her career nearly came to an end 11 years ago after she made a technical error and fell off the end of her rope, spending more than 17 hours with a broken back and pelvis trapped in a bergschrund.

She said “I thought about not climbing anymore [after the accident] but I live and breathe it. The accident spurred me on; I was back with a vengeance.”

She was also a search and rescue team member, helping find bodies on the northern Pennines after the Lockerbie aircraft massacre, has climbed extensively in the Himalaya, Bolivia and Antarctica. She also enjoys a pint of Timothy Taylor’s ale.

Ms Pennington, of Dronfield, will deliver her lecture at the Lescar Hotel on Sharrow Vale Road, Sheffield on 14 December. She said: “I’m quite excited about it. I just hope people find [the lecture] inspirational. It is the story of a mountaineer, rather than the story of a climb.”

Tickets for the lecture are available on the Heason Events website.