An 18-year-old girl from the United States has reached the peak of Mt. Qomolangma, becoming what is believed to be the youngest person to scale the highest peaks on each of the seven continents.

"We made it to the top!" Samantha Larson, of Long Beach, California, said to her mother in New York via satellite phone from the top of Mt. Qomolangma on Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday.

According to Web site 7summits.com, which records those who have accomplished the feat, completing the climb of Mt. Qomolangma in Nepal makes Larson the youngest person to have completed the "Seven Summits" challenge, breaking a 2006 record set by then-20-year-old British climber Rhys Miles Jones.

Larson, who graduated last year with a 4.43 grade-point average from Long Beach Poly High School, put off going to Stanford University for a year so she could climb some of the world's tallest peaks with her father, 51-year-old anesthetist David Larson.

The Nepalese government said on Friday that she was the youngest foreigner ever to reach the 8,844-meter summit of Mt. Qomolangma, though some climbing Web sites claim that a 17-year-old boy from France did it in 1990.

A 15-year-old girl from Nepal was the youngest ever to climb the mountain.

"She's just amazing," said her mother, Sarah Hanson. She said her daughter has "a kind of persistence that just seems to be part of her nature, and it has been since she was little."

Since New Zealanders Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay first conquered Mt. Qomolangma on May 29, 1953, about 2,000 climbers have scaled the mountain.

Larson said Qomolangma was "much harder, longer and higher" than the other peaks she has climbed in the past.

"There were a lot of difficult moments. It was a long trip. It was hard in general," she said. "It was one big challenge. I never gave up hope completely. Deep down I thought I would make it."

Larson has been climbing high mountains since she was a child. She said she was 12 when she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.

Since then she has scaled the highest peaks on all seven continents, also called the "Seven Summits."

"It kind of happened. It was a gradual thing," she said of her mountaineering experience.

Larson is set to start classes at Stanford University in the fall.

Editor: Wing