Mountaineering in Nepal - He Ain't Your Sherpa (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine April 2001

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True EVEREST
He Ain't Your Sherpa (Cont.)


	Home away from home: Babu surveys the views around Base Camp. (Grant Dixon/Hedgehog House)

WHILE TRENCHING through waste-deep snow below Everest's North Col on the afternoon of June 7, 1922, a teammate of George Mallory, who was leading the first attempt to climb Everest, triggered an avalanche that flushed nine Sherpas over an ice cliff and into a crevasse. Frantically clawing at the frozen debris, the British climbers and other Sherpas managed to free two of the men, one of whom was still alive after having been buried for 40 minutes. The other seven perished. Mallory later lamented, in a letter to his wife, "There is no obligation I have so much wanted to honor as that of taking care of those men." (Expedition photographer John Noel, expressing a more imperial point of view, later wrote that the surviving Sherpas "had completely lost their nerve and were crying and shaking like babies.") Those seven were the first climbers to die on Everest. Of the 167 climbers who"ve been killed on the mountain, 47 have been Sherpas—double the number of any other ethnic group or nationality.

Sherpas have lived in the Himalayas for nearly five centuries. They are an ethnic group whose nomadic ancestors migrated in the 16th century 1,250 miles from Kham, a province in eastern Tibet, via an 18,753-foot pass called Nangpa La, and moved into the Solu and Khumbu Valleys in northeastern Nepal. ("Sherpa" derives from the Tibetan word for "easterner.") No one knows why they left Kham—Tibetan genealogies are their only historical records—but their tradition teaches that Guru Rimpoche, the eighth-century founder of Tibetan Buddhism, designated the Khumbu as a sanctuary to be used in a time of unrest; they were said to have been following magical descriptions in religious texts when they found the valley.

These high-altitude pioneers settled between 8,000 and 14,000 feet in the Solu-Khumbu region; people often refer to the two valleys as one, because together they're the cultural heart of Sherpa country, and because they're linked by the Dudh Koshi River, whose waters flow from Everest. They built houses of stone, tended yaks, and carved narrow terraced plots to grow meager crops of buckwheat and barley. "Sherpas have always lived on the edge," says Frances Klatzel, a Canadian scholar who has lived in Nepal on and off for 20 years. "They were never able to grow enough food to last the year, and as the population grew, they traveled to trade."

In the mid-19th century, hundreds of young Sherpa men left the Kingdom of Nepal to seek better work and higher wages as coolies on the tea plantations and road-building projects of the British Raj. Many flocked to the Indian hill station of Darjeeling. From there, after the turn of the century, British adventurers began staging their first surveys of the region around Everest. In the competition for work, Sherpas vied with virtually every hill tribe in the Himalayas—Tibetans, Rai, Limbu, Bhutanese, and others&#!51;and, as Babu is doing now, aggressively advertised and strived to demonstrate a superior tolerance for cold and high altitude. By the time Mallory's 1922 expedition assembled for its monthlong trek north across the Tibetan plateau to Everest, the Sherpas had established a unionlike foothold that they've been building on ever since.

Over the next three decades, Sherpas distinguished themselves as high-altitude specialists—hiring mules or Tibetans to carry loads to the mountain—who would happily risk their lives for their sahibs. But they also fought for greater respect. John Hunt, leader of the 1953 British expedition to Everest that put Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary on the summit, learned this the hard way. As described in Sherry Ortner's 1999 book, Life and Death on Mount Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering, upon assembling the expedition in Kathmandu, Hunt quartered his men inside the British Embassy and stuck the Sherpas in the garage. Furious, the Sherpas registered their outrage and solved a practical problem—the garage had no bathrooms—by urinating in the road outside the embassy the next morning.

On that expedition, more than 350 porters were required to haul the team's supplies and equipment. One of the laborers hired on was a 15-year-old boy named Lhakpa Sherpa—Babu Chiri's father.

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