Kangchenjunga is the third highest mountain in the world, with an elevation of 8,586 m (28,169 ft) and located along the India-Nepal border in the Himalayas. Kangchenjunga is also the name of the surrounding section of the Himalayas and means "The Five Treasures of Snows", as it contains five peaks, four of them over 8,450 m (27,720 ft). The treasures represent the five repositories of God, which are gold, silver, gems, grain, and holy books.

Three of the five peaks – main, central, and south – are on the border of North Sikkim in India and Taplejung District of Nepal, while the other two are completely in Taplejung District. The Kangchenjunga Himal, or region, includes twelve more peaks over 7,000 m (23,000 ft).

Until 1852, Kangchenjunga was assumed to be the highest mountain in the world, but calculations based on various readings and measurements made by the Great Trigonometric Survey of India in 1849 came to the conclusion that Mount Everest (known as Peak XV at the time) was the highest. It would be 1856, allowing for further verification of all calculations, before it was officially announced that Kangchenjunga had moved from highest to the third-highest. Kangchenjunga was first climbed on May 25, 1955 by Joe Brown and George Band, who were part of a British expedition. The British expedition honoured the beliefs of the Sikkimese, who hold the summit sacred, by stopping a few feet short of the actual summit. Most successful summit parties since then have followed this tradition.

Edurne Pasaban Lizarribar (born August 1, 1973, in Tolosa, Spain) is a Basque Spanish mountaineer, from the province of Gipuzkoa in the Basque Country. On May 17, 2010, she became the 21st person and the first woman to climb all of the fourteen eight-thousander peaks in the World. Her first 8,000 peak had been achieved 9 years earlier, on May 23, 2001, when she climbed to the summit of Mount Everest.

Pasaban summited her ninth eight-thousander, Broad Peak, on July 12, 2007 together with the Austrian climber Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner. On May 1, 2008, Pasaban summited Dhaulagiri, as did Kaltenbrunner the same day again. Both downplayed the aspect of a race between them for the first woman to climb all 14 eight-thousanders. On May 18, 2009, Pasaban climbed the Kangchenjunga with, among others, Juanito Oiarzabal and the Polish climber Kinga Baranowska. With that she exceeded Kaltenbrunner and Nives Meroi and she became the first woman in climbing twelve eight-thousanders. Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner equaled her two days later when summited Lhotse. Nives Meroi, then tried to achieve the summit in the Kangchenjunga, had to give up when her husband and fellow climber, Romano Benet, had health problems.