Flying Off Everest (4 page)

When he wasn’t working on the family farm, Lakpa liked to spend his free time riding his uncle Dawa’s horse. It was a red, useful animal. And, like all of the beasts of burden in Chaurikharka, it was allowed to roam free through the village because there are no fences. On account
of this, the horse would often wander where it was not supposed to go—namely, into the forest. It was during these wanderings that Lakpa and Kili—Lakpa’s older cousin by more than ten years, and Dawa’s son—would be sent to retrieve it. The two boys, easily finding the red horse nibbling blithely on the green undergrowth nearby, would then ride it as fast as they dared bareback into town. It was Lakpa’s first taste of speed, of which he never tired.

It was also during these early years that Lakpa and Kili’s climbing careers started—on a boulder in the middle of a potato field. The large, black-gray stone, located on Uncle Dawa’s farm, was only a few minutes’ walk from Lakpa’s family’s house. One side of the boulder, gently sloping toward the ground, allowed even a child to simply walk to the top and back down again. The opposing side of the massive rock, however, formed a steep, textured wall nearly 20 feet high and required some technical climbing skills to surmount. Uncle Dawa, an experienced mountaineer and professional high-altitude worker who has been on expeditions all over the Himalaya, including Everest, bored holes into the top of the boulder with a hand drill. He placed three bolts into the rock and then promptly showed the two boys their first climbing anchor, using local hand-braided ropes. It wasn’t long until all the young boys in the village were spending the dying light of each day climbing Uncle Dawa’s rock, barefoot, with old retired climbing harnesses no longer seen as safe to use for Dawa’s paying clients.

It was all good fun for the children, but it wasn’t just for fun. Few things are for children in Nepal. Climbing is big business in the Solu-Khumbu, and nearly all of the children who started climbing on Uncle Dawa’s rock knew that they too would one day work in the mountains as sherpas, climbing for their livelihood, Kili and Lakpa included.

Although the term
sherpa
with a lowercase
s
is typically used by mountaineers as a job description for someone who carries loads at altitude for a fee,
Sherpa
is also an ethnicity—like Arab, Anglo-Saxon, or Aztec.
Originating in the Kham region of Tibet and traditionally devout Buddhists, ancestors of the oldest Sherpa clans were eventually run out of their homelands in the thirteenth century by confrontational, catapult-wielding Mongols. And then again in the sixteenth century by a group of similarly disgruntled Muslims, finally settling down beneath the shadow of Everest in the remote Solu and Khumbu Valleys of Nepal. Immigrants continued to flow out of the mountains from the north, driven from Tibet by famine, disease, war, the usual—all of whom gradually assimilated into the Sherpa community, creating even more clans, each with its own unique culture and, oftentimes, dialect.
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Nepal’s most recent census in 2011 actually considers Sherpa to be a self-reported ethnicity. That is to say, any Nepali can claim to be one. The same census also notes there are approximately 102 different ethnicities within Nepal that speak about ninety-two different languages among them, not including the myriad different dialects of each language.

According to the 2011 survey, there are approximately 150,000 self-proclaimed Sherpas in Nepal who, even at this generous estimate, make up less than 1 percent of the country’s total population. And despite the common use of the term
sherpa
to describe nearly everyone working as a porter or guide in the Himalaya, very few of them actually serve as porters or guides, unless, of course, they live near Everest. The desire of foreigners to come and climb the tallest mountain in the world, and their seemingly inexhaustible willingness to spend a lot of money while doing it, has become a reliable cornerstone of the Solu-Khumbu Sherpas’ economy—the other being potatoes,
^†
which are not nearly as lucrative, or deadly.

Since foreigners first started climbing in Nepal in the late nineteenth century, over 174 climbing sherpas have died while working in
the country’s mountains. At least as many sherpas have been permanently disabled by rockfalls, frostbite, and altitude-related illnesses like stroke and edema while on the job. According to a July 2013 article in
Outside
magazine, “A sherpa working above Base Camp on Everest is nearly ten times more likely to die than a commercial fisherman—the profession the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rates as the most dangerous nonmilitary job in the United States—and more than three and a half times as likely to perish than an infantryman during the first four years of the Iraq war.”

The Khumbu climbing boom, as it were, started over 100 miles to the east in Darjeeling, India, in the late 1800s, when Sherpas began migrating there to look for jobs. The first British mountaineering expeditions headed to Mount Everest in the early twentieth century—traveling through northeast India and Tibet, because Nepal was closed to foreigners until 1949—hired Sherpas to carry their things. It was to become an enduring standard for every future climbing expedition in the Himalaya. Even today.

Originally tasked with toting the enormous amount of supplies needed—or that was thought to be needed—for the early military siege–style expeditions, which tended to measure their equipment in tons rather than pounds or kilograms, let alone ounces, the Sherpas quickly proved themselves exceedingly practical, strong, and apparently more than willing to suffer horribly for what the Europeans considered a small amount of money. They carried eighty-plus-pound loads up to 18,000 feet, without complaint. They slept outside in subfreezing temperatures under boulders. Some of the women brought their babies while working, carrying loads for the foreign climbers. Their employers commended them for being “cheerful,” regardless.

After a failed attempt on Everest in 1922, the British climbing legend George Mallory, who would later lose his life on the upper slopes of Mount Everest, reported to a joint meeting of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club that the greatest
lesson learned from the expedition that year was that the Sherpas “far exceeded their expectations.” They carried loads to 25,500 feet, he reported. Some three days in a row. Seven Sherpas also died in an avalanche on the North Col to learn this lesson. They were Everest’s first recorded fatalities—the first of many more to come, for both the Sherpas and the foreigners.

Lakpa’s father, Nima, who worked in the mountains during the climbing season, wanted to give his son another career option, however. And so he convinced a generous foreign client he often guided to pay for his son’s education in Kathmandu. With only one year of rural schooling behind him, Lakpa abruptly found himself plucked from the mountains, put on a small, bone-rattling plane, and deposited swiftly in a boarding school surrounded by over a million people and a thick cloud of smog.

It proved to be an unstable place for the young Lakpa, in more ways than one.

Placed inconveniently near one of the world’s most active fault lines, where the Indian subcontinent collides violently with Asia, Kathmandu was first razed by the movements of the earth’s crust in 1253, then again in 1259, 1407, 1680, 1810, 1833, 1860, and once more in 1934. Tens of thousands died. And the next major quake will likely be worse than all of them.

The off-white haze hanging over Kathmandu is also a threat, but less sporadic. Smoke and soot, which billow up from the city’s myriad brick factories, buses, cars, trucks, motorcycles, and scooters—cradled by an amphitheater of mountains—linger, even at night. People walking on the labyrinth of narrow, busy streets—flooded by, in addition to motorized vehicles, bicycles, cows, chickens, dogs, food carts, street children, and beggars—can be seen wearing surgical masks to help filter the grit of the air from their lungs. Those who don’t cover up cough black phlegm.

Lakpa spent the next eight years in the city attending boarding school, where he learned to read, to write, and to like beer, cigarettes, and motorcycles. He was allowed to return to his family’s farm in Chaurikharka for one week every year. He liked beer, cigarettes, and motorcycles, but not school. After failing his final exams in tenth grade, he left school for good and returned to the mountains, without any idea as to what to do next. “I had no plan,” he admits. “None.”

Lakpa’s cousin Kili, meanwhile, had become a highly skilled climbing sherpa, working for one of Nepal’s largest mountaineering outfitters, Equator Expeditions. Knowing his younger, educated cousin didn’t have a career plan, he volunteered to teach Lakpa the basics of mountaineering: how to put on crampons, tie knots, and camp at altitude in the Himalaya without freezing to death, all while guiding on an “easy” nearby, nontechnical, 20,075-foot mountain rising up from the Khumbu Glacier called Lobuche East. Lakpa, as it turned out, proved to be a faster learner in the mountains than he was in the city, and he caught on quick. The only problem he encountered was on the summit, where an acute case of altitude sickness—a blinding headache that “made lights flash in my eyes,” he says—nearly immobilized him. This, of course, did not dissuade him from venturing back into the mountains.

Not long after climbing Lobuche East, Kili took Lakpa to 20,305-foot Island Peak, another “trekking mountain,” on which Lakpa had no difficulty and proved to be a valuable member of the expedition, namely by making the clients laugh. His infectious, broad grin never left his face the entire trip. He would often crack jokes and was caught singing happily to himself regularly—he still does. “It’s what I do when I’m happy,” he says.

Kili continued to hire Lakpa as an assistant on the lower peaks of the Himalaya, which in turn gave Lakpa a source of income outside of the family farm. “I climb for work, not for fun,” Lakpa is quick to point out to Westerners who ask him if he enjoys mountaineering. “Climbing is not fun,” he says plainly. As if it were obvious. “Climbing is hard
work.” This is always followed by a deep, booming, open-mouth laugh. “I do not climb for fun. Climbing is my job.”

In 1998 Kili started his own mountaineering outfitter in Kathmandu called High Altitude Dreams (HAD). He sent Lakpa with a group—again as an assistant—to climb his first “technical” mountain—22,349-foot Ama Dablam, a sharp, fearsome-looking, ice-covered mountain near Mount Everest in eastern Nepal. The next year, Lakpa was sent by HAD to his first training course with the Nepal Mountaineering Association, so he could officially become certified to work at altitude in Nepal. It was a one-month course. In 2000 Lakpa was sent to another month-long tutorial to receive his “advanced” certificate. From these courses he learned, mainly, “how much I didn’t actually know about mountaineering,” he says. And it was at this time that he had his first opportunity to work on Everest, which he promptly declined.

Kili had offered him a job working as a high-altitude porter for an upcoming Everest expedition—the highest-elevation and highest-paying sherpa gig in the world. Lakpa could earn more than a year’s wages in just two months, if he said yes. It was a lucky break in many respects, because he didn’t have the level of experience typically required to work on Everest—and Lakpa, after his various safety trainings, knew this. He determined it would be too dangerous, for him and the client, so he politely turned his cousin Kili down.

Lakpa spent three more years working as an assistant on trips up shorter peaks in the Himalaya before finally agreeing to climb on Everest, contracted through High Altitude Dreams to work with the American 2003 Everest Treks 50th Anniversary Expedition Team; it was led by a thirty-nine-year-old American real estate investor from Auburn, Massachusetts, named Paul Giorgio. The trip went well, and Lakpa found himself standing on the roof of the world for the first time on Monday, May 26, 2003, at 5:57 a.m. Giorgio, an avid Boston Red Sox fan, left a black-and-white picture of New York Yankees legend Babe Ruth, “to beat the curse of the Bambino,” he says (it
seemed to work).
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Lakpa would eventually return to this spot three more times.