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.)


	In Thamo, Babu takes a snapshot of the great Apa Sherpa (left) and Ang Rita Sherpa. (Teru Kuwayama)

TWENTY MINUTES out of Namche we get our first view of Everest. The dark, humpy peak sneaks in and out of view over the next couple of days as we climb higher into the valley. Pines and rhododendrons give way to scrub brush, until eventually, at around 14,000 feet, there is nothing but moraine. Tablets and boulders carved with Buddhist prayers in Tibetan serve as cairns to lead the way through the drab foothills. Several hours beyond Periche, the last permanent settlement on the trek to Base Camp, we reach 16,000 feet. I'd like to be able to report that I'm holding my own against the great Snow Bear—as Babu's Sherpa admirers call him—but he only seems to grow more robust as I start to bog down in the thinning air.

He is waiting for me over a rise. Up ahead, silhouetted against the backdrop of a barren, dun-colored ridge, hundreds of neatly stacked rock towers are scattered helter-skelter across a low knoll. They're monuments to dead climbers—not gravestones per se but carefully constructed shrines. Babu and I wander into the sanctuary, looking at chest-high tablets inscribed with epitaphs for both Sherpa and foreign climbers. One stone is dated 1957. Babu pauses in front of a particularly imposing shrine set off by itself. "He was a very good climber," he says. "It was a waste. He shouldn't have died." The stone is dedicated to Scott Fischer, one of the two guides who died in the 1996 disaster on Everest.

"I don’t do climbing for myself or for records," says Apa, who has summited Everest 11 times, more than anyone else. "I do it only for clients."

Another few hours ahead, set off the trail, is a cremation site for Sherpa climbers called Chukpo Lare ("Rich Man's Yak Corral"). When the body of a dead climbing Sherpa is recovered, it is brought here, burned to ashes, and ceremonially placed inside a small shrine of stacked rocks. Because Buddhists believe that humans lose their individuality after death, there are no names on these shrines. For Sherpas, there is no more powerful reminder of their mortality in the face of the surrounding peaks than this place. "The whole category of gods who inhabit mountains tend to be irritable," says Sherry Ortner, the scholar of Sherpa history. "They're powerful beings who will protect you if you treat them right and who will really give you some bad trouble if you don't."

Indeed, climbing Sherpas and their families live with fear just as all climbers and their families do, which is why some end up making the choice of 34-year-old Ang Temba Sherpa, an accomplished climber and businessman at whose lodge we stayed in Pangboche. He first summited Everest in 1991 with the Sherpa Expedition, an endeavor designed to showcase Sherpas' technical climbing skills and to demonstrate that they're more than barrel-chested workhorses. After Ang Temba descended, his wife, Yangjing, congratulated him on his accomplishment—and then informed her husband that one Everest summit was enough. But six years later he accepted an invitation to join another Everest expedition, knowing that his wife would never agree to let him go. "So I made a lie to her," he told me. He convinced Yangjing that he was going to visit some friends in Canada and then hooked up with the expedition in Kathmandu. Yangjing got word of his subterfuge, and gave him a tongue-lashing when he returned from the unsuccessful attempt from the north side. "I don't need money—I need you," she told Ang Temba. When Babu spent 21 hours atop Everest, his wife back in Kathmandu became so worried that she stopped eating and fell ill. It makes little difference to these women that the Nepalese and Chinese governments require each Everest expedition to insure every climbing Sherpa's life for $3,500.

Unlike Americans or Europeans, Himalayan Sherpas consider high-altitude climbing to be decidedly unglamorous, dangerous, dirty work. In 1983 Tenzing Norgay's second son, Jamling, asked his father's permission to join an Indian expedition to Everest. Tenzing refused, saying he wanted his son to finish high school and go to college. In Jamling's memoir, Touching My Father's Soul, which will be published in April, he recalls his father's words: "I climbed Everest so that you wouldn't have to.... You can't see the entire world from the top of Everest, Jamling. The view from there only reminds you how big the world is and how much more there is to see and learn." Tenzing died in 1986, and Jamling eventually summited in 1996.

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