No choice but to keep on climbing

In memory: A photo of the mountaineer Tenjen Lama Sherpa at his home in Kathmandu, Nepal on Oct 9, 2023. Lama was one of the most storied mountain guides of his generation. — Photos: ©2024 The New York Times Company

IN July 2023, mountaineer Tenjen Lama Sherpa guided a Norwegian climber to summit the world’s 14 highest peaks in record time. In a sport that demands an alchemy of sinewy resolve and high-altitude faith, Lama did everything his client did and more. But she received most of the money, fame and attention.

The kind of lucrative endorsements enjoyed by foreign athletes are not usually given to Nepal’s ethnic Sherpas. For them, the profession of Himalayan guide offers a path out of deep poverty, but also a possible route – strewed with avalanches and icefalls – to a premature death.

Lama could not afford to rest after guiding the Norwegian, Kristin Harila, he told The New York Times. Life in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, was expensive. He could not read or write, but he wanted his sons to get the best education, a costly endeavour.

So only three months after climbing the 14 peaks, Lama was back working as a Sherpa – his name, his ethnicity, his profession and, ultimately, his fate. Another foreigner chasing another record had hired him as a guide. This time, it was Gina Marie Rzucidlo, who was trying to become the first American woman to climb the world’s tallest mountains. Another American woman, also guided by a Sherpa, was climbing separately in pursuit of the same record.

But on Oct 7, avalanches broke loose on Mount Shishapangma in Tibet. Both pairs of climbers were killed.

Lama’s death was the latest in a series of tragedies to shear his family tree of siblings. In 2021, Norbu Sherpa, the oldest of the four mountain-climbing brothers, ended his life after a love affair went wrong. And last May, Phurba Sherpa, the second oldest, died during a rescue mission on Mount Everest.

The last remaining brother, Pasdawa Sherpa, learned about Lama’s death after returning from an expedition to the world’s seventh- and eighth-highest mountains.

For three days, Pasdawa travelled by foot, bus and plane to Lama’s apartment in Kathmandu. He knelt before his brother’s Buddhist altar, eight candles flickering above. Marigolds and a ceremonial cloth surrounded a portrait of Lama, grinning in an orange snowsuit.

Pasdawa closed his eyes and prayed for his dead brothers. He said he prayed for himself, too. He would have to persevere in the only life he knew.

“I will keep climbing mountains,” Pasdawa said. “I have no other options.”

A Sherpa’s burden

This is what a Sherpa does: He lugs heavy packs and oxygen cylinders for foreign clients. He cooks and sets up camp. He navigates through snowstorms and clears piles of trash. He wakes before dawn and spends hours driving metal pickets into the ice so a rope line can protect foreign climbers. He trudges past icefalls where bus-size slabs have buried other Sherpas in frozen graveyards. (On the mountain, he is usually a he; female Sherpas don’t tend to work as guides.)

Compared with the client, a Sherpa spends far more time in the so-called death zone: elevations above 8,000 meters, where human cognition slows without supplemental oxygen and altitude sickness can quickly turn fatal.

Walung, the village in northeastern Nepal where Lama and his brothers grew up, has produced about 100 expedition guides over the past couple of decades.

Of those 100, 15 have died on the job, locals said.

The high mortality rate highlights the inequity of a life-or-death sport. Roughly one-third of the more than 335 people who have died on Everest are Sherpas. Yet their expertise earns them wages that, while high by local standards, are only a fraction of what most of their clients shell out for their expeditions.

Nepal’s mountaineering industry, a crucial money earner for an impoverished country, caters to those willing to spend upward of US$100,000 (RM471,500) to summit a single Himalayan peak in luxurious style. Almost all are foreigners. In recent years, their numbers have surged, as have logjams at high-altitude choke points and icefalls, increasing the chance of accidents. Some expedition leaders also believe that climate change is leading to unpredictable weather patterns, increasing the risk of deadly avalanches.

During last year’s spring climbing season at Mount Everest, the Nepali government issued permits to 478 foreigners, the most ever. Eighteen people, including six Sherpas, died on the mountain, another record.

Nepal issued more than 900 permits for its mountains this year, including 421 for Everest, earning more than US$5mil (RM2.4bil) in royalties according to an AFP report.

This year, eight people were confirmed dead in their quests to summit Mount Everest, while three – a British climber and two Nepali guides – have been listed as missing and presumed dead.

Climbing out of poverty

Whenever he could, after his exploits – 37 summits of the world’s tallest mountains by the time he died – Lama would return home to Walung, an isolated hamlet in northeastern Nepal. Walung sits in a high-altitude valley below barley and millet fields, where shaggy yaks graze, hunched against the cold.

As the second-youngest child, Lama was dispatched to the local monastery, which could be counted on to feed an extra mouth. There, he picked up the name Lama, given to monks of the Tibetan Buddhist faith.

At the time, Sherpas who became professional mountaineers mostly came from another part of northeastern Nepal. But in the early 2000s, a climber from Walung, Mingma Sherpa, became the first South Asian to summit the world’s 14 tallest mountains. (Most Sherpas use the surname Sherpa, but that does not mean they are related.)

Mingma and his three brothers eventually started Seven Summit Treks, which now organizes about a third of all Everest expeditions. Mingma hired most of his guides from Walung.

Lama’s oldest brother was too old when the climbing craze began in the village. But the four other brothers joined Seven Summit Treks, turning the company into a true Walung fraternity. Lama, who had given up the monkhood and married, joined the mountaineering industry about a decade ago.

In 2019, Lama and his three brothers entered the Guinness World Records when they climbed Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain. In a photo taken at the summit, the siblings smiled, each in a bright suit, the air light with their exhilaration.

Breaking records, as Lama did, means substantially more earning power. An average summit earns a guide less than US$4,000 (RM18,860); an 8,000m mountain can bring about US$7,500 (RM35,362). Lama, because of his 14-peak achievement, was poised to make about US$9,700 (RM45,736) per climb, some of the highest fees a Sherpa can command. Still, it is far less than what a top foreign climber can raise through endorsements – and Sherpas’ jobs involve more danger.

The family of a guide who dies is now entitled to an insurance payout of about US$11,250 (RM53,048), far more than the few hundred dollars on offer before.

A doomed ascent

At first, there is white snow, blue ice and dark rock. In an instant, gravity, spurred by wind and the tiniest of disturbances, transforms frozen matter into a deadly force. Avalanches thunder, and then they smother.

Shishapangma, in Tibet, is considered the easiest of the 14 peaks. Still, nearly one in 10 climbers dies attempting its ascent. On Oct 7, Lama was guiding Rzucidlo, one of two American climbers making the attempt. Ahead of them were Anna Gutu and her guide, Mingmar Sherpa. With uncertain weather ahead, other climbers retreated. The two Americans and two Sherpas persevered. The women had just this mountain left before a chance at the American 14-peak record.

Separate avalanches claimed each pair.

The rivalry between the two Americans was so intense that it may have spurred them to dangerous heights, other climbers said.

At the start of the 2024 climbing season, Seven Summit Treks ordered Pasdawa, Lama’s youngest sibling, to work as a guide on the same mountain where Lama had died.

A Shishapangma excursion will earn him about US$3,000 (RM13,800) , Pasdawa said. For the men of Walung, especially those like him who had to leave school after just a couple of years, there are only two jobs: farming and mountaineering.

There is another reason, though, for Pasdawa to travel to Shishapangma: to recover the body of his older brother, one of the world’s greatest mountaineers.

In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, to which the Sherpas adhere, the dead should be cremated at home. Only then, after the purification of flames, can their souls reincarnate.

But as May drew to a close, Pasdawa was still waiting for his visa to Tibet.

Now the spring climbing season has ended. Along with Rzucidlo, his brother is still out there somewhere on the mountain, frozen in his orange snowsuit. — ©2024 The New York Times Company

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.