TEN YEARS INTO his American life, Tsering Norbu Sherpa is thriving. He hasn't yet put his degree to use—he'd need two more years of classes to achieve U.S. standards, he says, a hurdle that other educated Sherpas also face. But driving a taxi has given him and his family a steady means of support. He and Nima and their friends save up by working hard, eating at home, and hanging out together on weekends, dropping a few bucks on gin rummy and swapping ring tones like "Chyangba Hoy Chyangba," a ridiculously catchy Nepalese jingle. Galgen just bought a good-size new apartment in Queens with his taxi wages.

Despite the profits, life in the city takes a toll. Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, one of the Utah SuperSherpas, lived in Queens for 14 months before decamping to Salt Lake. "Wow, very big city," he said, laughing at the memory of his stint in New York. "All those people underground! Very hurry, hurry, hurry!"

"You're not able to give much time to your family," Tashi Gyalzen Sherpa told me, wearily answering two phones at once in his travel-agency office in the back room of Himalaya Video. "In Nepal, you worked for three months and relaxed the other nine. Over here, most of your money goes to rent. Back home, people think, 'You must be making 'dollar-crazy!' but I tell them, 'No, you have to work hard.' It's difficult."

The downside of separation crashed into Tashi's life in May, when his sister, Pemba Doma Sherpa—the first Nepali woman to summit Everest via the North Face—was killed while descending 27,940-foot Lhotse. Unable to travel on such short notice, Tashi had to watch footage of her somber cremation at Everest's Tengboche Monastery on SherpaKyidug.org, the New York Sherpas' virtual home.

Moments like this bring up the not-so-small issue of reconciling American and Himalayan values. "We get homesick," Nima says. And she worries about the transition Norkhila will face when they can finally bring her here. "I will try to teach her the culture, but it will be hard," she acknowledged. "Once we have all the papers, we will take the whole family back to Darjeeling every year. We will show her."

One might think that leaving the traditional homeland would be frowned upon, but generally that's not true. "There's no shame in it," Lakpa told me during a stopover in New York last spring. After ten years in Virginia, she was taking her three-year-old son and moving to New Delhi for a consulting job. "As long as you preserve our traditional ways, others are happy for you," she said.

"My main goal is education for my three kids," Apa Sherpa, in Utah, says. "That way, they can help in Nepal in the future. We're very happy in Salt Lake. The kids are doing good. Everybody achieves. You don't see that in Kathmandu."

Tsering and the other Sherpas know that the money they send only partially compensates for the pain of empty rooms and divided families. But the danger, instability, and diminishing returns of guiding have pushed them to reach for another plateau, a place in the world beyond thin air.

"I am trying to break up my cycle," Tsering told me. "My grandfather was a mountaineer. My parents were mountaineers. I grew up as a mountaineer. I don't want my kids to grow up as mountaineers. Sherpas are meant to be doctors, to be engineers, computer programmers! And why not? In the future, you might see a Sherpa baseball player! Or, in American football! OK, maybe not in basketball—I hate basketball. Sherpas are short people, you know."