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.)


	Two of Babu's six daughters—Tashi, two, and Nima, four—in Kathmandu. (Teru Kuwayama)

TOGETHER WITH THE photographer Teru Kuwayama, we hop a twin-prop 20-seater from Kathmandu to the Solu village of Phaplu, plunking down on a canted gravel airstrip that could pass for a runaway truck ramp. Here we are joined by Nima Sherpa, a porter Babu has hired to help carry Teru's camera gear for the trek. After a four-hour ramble on foot through deep gorges, past monasteries, and up steep, forested hillsides, we arrive in Chhulemu, Babu's home village. We're detouring from the main trekking route to visit Babu's parents—Lhakpa is now 63, and Babu's mother, Pasi, is 61. At the moment we are sitting in their one-room stone house. And they're laughing at me.

I'm probing, with limited success, for details about Lhakpa's life—namely, whether he's ever worked as an expedition porter. Chongba Sherpa, 44, a friend from a nearby village, has been recruited as an interpreter. (In addition to Sherpa, Babu himself speaks—and to a limited extent, reads and writes—Nepali, but his English is rudimentary.)

"Yes," Lhakpa says. He has worked as a porter. And that's all he offers.

"How many times?"

"Once."

"When was that?"

"Long time ago."

"Can you be more specific?"

There is much rapid-fire discussion in Sherpa. Then, an answer: "1953."

"For the Hillary expedition!"

"Yes."

"Wow. OK." I'm at a loss for words. "How heavy was your load?" I finally ask.

"30 kilos." Sixty-six pounds.

"He says you asking many hard questions," interjects Babu. "Nobody ever asking these things in his life."

But as Babu's stout mother speed-shuffles around the room with her thermos, topping off teacups, I persist. It turns out that Lhakpa earned five rupees a day carrying a load from Traksindo to Tengboche for the Hunt expedition and has never bothered to mention this fact to his son Babu, the Everest mountaineer. Babu is unfazed by the revelation, obviously unaware that he could now use the word "dynasty" in his company's marketing campaign. Neither father nor son can understand why anyone would care to learn such things about an anonymous, shriveled-up herder sporting a nice pair of Gore-Tex boots and a toothless smile.

The 45-mile-long Solu-Khumbu Valley has no paved roads and no wheeled vehicles, not even wheelbarrows. (Babu's parents have no electricity or running water.) Almost everything—food, cases of beer, timber, propane tanks—is transported by yak or on people's backs. Though 80 percent of the Khumbu's 3,500 Sherpas earn a living by catering to the 24,000 trekkers and climbers who tromp through the region every year, many below the Khumbu still get by as herders and farmers, just as they always have.

It's the only existence Babu knew for the first 16 years of his life. Lhakpa and Pasi built their house 22 years ago, but Babu didn't exactly grow up in it. The family grazed their cattle at higher elevations in summer, lower in winter, and thus spent much of the year sleeping with the livestock in temporary three-sided shelters woven of bamboo. Babu, the fourth of eight children—four boys and four girls—was born in such a "cow house," as he puts it, in 1966.

When Babu was 16, his parents arranged for him to marry Puti Sherpa, a woman from a nearby village who is three years older than Babu. The bridegroom was already scheming to run away to Kathmandu to earn money. (Two of his brothers had previously slipped off to the capital in search of work.) The trekking business in Nepal had started to boom in the early 1980s, and Babu found a job carrying a 66-pound load on a trek for about 17 cents a day. Having spent all his meager pay from that first assignment on food and bus tickets, he arrived home broke and in tears.

Two years later, Babu returned to Kathmandu and got a job as a trekking "cook boy." Though only a slight promotion from porter, it meant a huge step up, because he no longer had to pay for his meals. Puti, who ran a tiny teahouse they'd started, soon gave birth to their first daughter, Yangdi.

Over the next seven years Babu spent each spring and fall as many Sherpa men do, hustling as much trekking work as he could, picking up snippets of English from clients, and hauling back cash and supplies for the teahouse and his extended family. And like many Sherpas, he had a higher goal: to land a position as a climbing Sherpa on an expedition to one of the 7,000- or 8,000-meter peaks—by far the best-paying and most coveted job in the Solu-Khumbu Valley. Getting hired on usually meant befriending or bribing (or both) the expedition¹s sirdar, the Sherpa in charge of logistics and support.

In the spring of 1989 Babu got his first big break: He hitched onto a Soviet expedition that was planning to do the first traverse of 28,208-foot Kanchenjunga, the world¹s third-tallest peak. The Soviets spent more than 100 days on the mountain, during which time Babu completed a crash course in alpinism and made an important discovery about his physiology. "When we reach Camp IV, a lot of Sherpas get sick," he recalls. "I don¹t have any kind of problem at altitude. I give help to other Sherpas and climbers; when I get to camp, I prepare some tea and soup." After ten climbers completed the traverse, two of them, along with one Sherpa—Babu—climbed Kanchenjunga¹s main summit. And unlike the Soviets, Babu got there without taking oxygen (or "English air," as Sherpas on the Mallory expedition called it).

"It's pretty much settled that Tibetans have an advantage at altitude," says Lorna G. Moore, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, who has studied high-altitude physiology for 30 years. (Genetically, Tibetans and Sherpas are virtually the same.) "But motivation, cultural factors, nutrition, training, gear, smarts, and a lot of other considerations apply." Though Sherpas tend to have large lungs, blood vessels that don¹t constrict in thin air, and a built-in resistance to pulmonary edema, individual Sherpas can succumb to the devastating effects of high altitude just like anybody else.

"It was like big exam, and they tell me I very strong," Babu says of his prowess on Kanchenjunga. "I very happy." He had punched his ticket as a climbing Sherpa, but the next challenge was to make his mark on Everest.

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