Mountaineering in Nepal - He Ain't Your Sherpa

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Outside Magazine April 2001

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True EVEREST
He Ain't Your Sherpa
There's nobody more qualified to drag you to the top of the world than Babu Chiri Sherpa. And he'll gladly do it. But when he's through, he's got some business of his own to attend to. Namely, obliterating every last climbing record on Everest, shattering the myth of his people as high-altitude baggage handlers, and taking the Sherpa brand global.

By Eric Hagerman


	Mountaineer, businessman, cultural icon, potato lover: Babu Chiri Sherpa at Everest Base Camp. (Teru Kuwayama)

BABU CHIRI SHERPA, the greatest Mount Everest climber of this or any age, reclines on a couch, slurping milk tea, as his sidekick and business partner—whose first name is also Babu, but who goes by Karma—fires up his Pentium PC, checks their e-mail, and downloads a large graphics file. Karma opens the attachment and a bright yellow-and-green design for a promotional ad appears on the screen. "What do you think?" Karma asks. "We're making a new sticker."

The obsolete version, one of which is pasted crookedly on the door to their third-floor office in Kathmandu's Thamel district, is plain white and reads:

BABU CHIRI SHERPA, 9 TIMES EVEREST SUMMITER
NOMAD EXPEDITIONS
HIMALAYAN ADVENTURE TRAVEL SPECIALTIES
TREKKING, EXPEDITIONS, & TOURS

"Looks sharp," I say of the new design,

MORE ABOUT BABU CHIRI SHERPA

In April 2001, Babu Chiri Sherpa died after falling into a crevasse near Everest's 20,833-foot Camp II. His sponsor, Mountain Hardwear, subsequently established a memorial trust to benefit the 35-year-old climber's family. Click here to read more.

leaning toward the monitor to check out the text. The words are arranged around a photo of Babu, Nomad's 34-year-old co-owner and star climbing guide, flashing an arched-brow grin with the peak of Lhotse in the background. "But it's a little weird to say, "Two unique world records from Nepal." A world record is unique by definition."

Karma, a 38-year-old former monk, says something in Sherpa to Babu, who's sitting under a curtained, glassless window; I can hear pigeons cooing loudly from the concrete ledge outside, along with car and motorcycle horns and the frantic ringing of bicycle rickshaw bells in the two-way street below—a sharply crowned, heavily potholed lane barely fit for one-way traffic. Babu replies in a low, guttural grumble.

Karma turns back to me. "What should we say?"

"I don't know—maybe drop 'unique' because it's redundant. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah, sure," he says. "But we need your help because this is your language."

"Well, I'd skip 'Nepal.' And it should say more about Everest, since that's where he set the records, right?"

Karma nods knowingly and jots down a few notes.

"Yeah," I continue. "I mean, who else would you rather have take you up Everest?"

Karma shoots me a wide-eyed look. "Here, will you write it?" he says, pushing his paper and pen at me.

We settle on the phrase "Who better to guide you to the top of the world?" —a rhetorical question, really, considering Babu's track record. He's climbed Everest ten times, in good weather and bad, from the north and from the south, by himself and chaperoning clients. In May 1999 he spent 21 hours hunkered in a tiny tent at 29,035 feet, by far the longest any human being has stayed at the summit. Last May he sprinted from Base Camp to the top in 16 hours and 56 minutes, the fastest time ever. Except for the final 1,100 feet of his speed climb, Babu has accomplished all of this without the use of supplemental oxygen. And this season he plans to return and summit not once but twice, in the hope of breaking the record of 11 ascents, currently held by his compatriot Apa Sherpa.

"Other Sherpas don't do this kind of stuff, and it says a lot about Babu's ambitions," says Elizabeth Hawley, the 77-year-old doyenne of the mountaineering community in Kathmandu, who has been keeping records of Himalayan climbs since 1963. "Babu has ambitions that go beyond the job."

For starters, he has six daughters to put through elite private schools in Kathmandu. He's trying to get a primary school up and running in a remote valley near Everest so local kids have a shot at clawing their way out of Nepal's dismal status quo (45 percent of the kingdom's 22 million citizens live below the poverty line; more than half are malnourished). And when he finally retires, he doesn't want to end up like the vast majority of climbing Sherpas before him, scratching potatoes out of a patch of dirt and herding yaks, thank you very much.

Where those ambitions will ultimately take him is the subject of some spirited speculation. Martin Zemitis, a tent designer at Mountain Hardwear, Babu's sponsor (Zemitis designed the shelter Babu used on top of Everest and calls Babu "Mr. Happy"), predicts that Babu will help to "put a new face on how people view Sherpas." Jon Tinker, a British mountaineer who has climbed with Babu many times, declares that his friend is a "world-class quarterback" who is helping to push "the seismic shifts going on in Sherpa culture," in part because he "scores goals, gets results, and has a Monty Pythonish sense of humor." Tashi Jangbu Sherpa, president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association in Kathmandu, offers up what is perhaps the most unusual theory of all. "Other Sherpas, sometimes they get a tent, or a jacket, or an ice ax or something, but nobody has sponsorship like Babu," he says "Babu has become an American."

Like the other 110,400 Sherpas who live in Nepal, an officially Hindu kingdom, Babu is a Buddhist, and both his religion and his culture tend to place more value on humility than swagger. As a Sherpa who works in the Himalayas, he"s supposed to be a dutiful servant: a strong and gracious helper who schlepps the loads, cooks the meals, puts in the routes, and, when necessary, saves the lives of the foreign climbers who pay outfitters up to $65,000 to be guided up the tallest mountain in the world. And he's supposed to do it all with a cherubic smile.

But Babu sees more in life than the praise, gratitude, and $7-a-day wages that have sufficed for more traditional Sherpas. He is charting a new course for Sherpa business opportunities, Sherpa cultural aspirations, Sherpa community responsibility. He is going global.

"I want to change things," Babu says. "A lot of Sherpas go to the mountain with fear, but that"s no way to climb. They have to go, because it's a job and they're being paid well for it. If they don"t have any education, they don't have a choice. I want Sherpa kids to have options. If we can be more famous or more rich and we get that opportunity, we'll take it."

Still, despite all this, the enormity of his brand potential is just dawning on Babu and Karma. "Should we change the name," asks Karma, "to Babu Chiri Sherpa Expeditions?"

But I'm no longer thinking about Babu's marketing challenges. I'm pondering the days ahead. Babu and I are about to depart Kathmandu for a three-week trek to Everest Base Camp—a Sherpa-style tour of Babu's native territory and stomping grounds—and I'm becoming preoccupied by a rather unseemly notion: that this short, stumpy icon of Himalayan mountaineering doesn't appear to be much of an athlete. Looking at Babu's taut potbelly, which gives him the outline of a miniature Buddha, I begin to imagine myself handily outstriding him over high passes and along dusty yak trails.

Then the thought grabs hold: I can take this guy.

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