Marrakech – There’s a certain magic in the contrast — the rich, velvety sweetness of fine chocolate and the biting cold of the Himalayan wind.
But then again, some women don’t just live in contrasts. They thrive in them. And Hind Zemmama? She’s one of those women.
You might know her as the Moroccan powerhouse behind a beloved chocolate brand, charming taste buds and sweetening lives.
But in the spring of 2025, she traded chocolate truffles for crampons and stepped into the pages of mountaineering history — by reaching the summit of Mount Everest.
Yes, Everest. The kind of place that looks like a dream on postcards but feels like survival in real life.
At 8,848 meters above sea level — where oxygen is scarce and every breath feels like a victory — Hind planted her flag.
A Moroccan woman in her fifties, a mother, a grandmother, an entrepreneur — and now, a mountaineering legend.
Let’s pause there. Because we need to talk about what this really means.
Climbing Everest is not a whimsical escape. It’s two months of snowstorms, sleeping in frozen tents, and making peace with the sound of your own heartbeat in the thin, icy air.
Just days before her Everest summit, Hind conquered Island Peak — a physically demanding and technically challenging climb on its own.
That was just her warm-up. Casual, right?
But Hind wasn’t climbing for fame or likes. She was climbing with a fire in her heart — to raise the Moroccan flag to the highest point on Earth, and to show the world that passion doesn’t retire at 50.
That dreams don’t come with expiration dates. That women — especially Moroccan women — can rewrite the rules at any stage in life.
And if you think this summit is the finish line? Think again.
This icy triumph is just one chapter in Hind’s pursuit of the Seven Summits — the tallest mountain on each continent.
With Toubkal, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, Aconcagua, Island Peak, and now Everest under her belt, she’s just one summit shy of joining one of the most elite mountaineering clubs in the world.
A place very few women have ever reached.
But here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about: when she’s not scaling mountains, she’s making chocolate. She’s balancing budgets.
She’s doting on her grandchildren. She’s laughing at the dinner table, and then, before you know it, she’s off again — this time with an ice axe instead of a ladle.
In a world that loves to put women in neat little boxes — the homemaker, the career woman, the dreamer, the doer — Hind Zemmama has climbed right out of all of them.
She’s the reminder we all need: that femininity and fearlessness are not opposites, that ambition and warmth can coexist, and that reinvention is always just a mountain away.
