Will climbers have to brave Everest without Sherpas?

The second-highest mountain on Earth is so remote, and so hard to climb, that it has never had a commonly accepted name. Even today, it is best known by the surveyor’s mark assigned to it in the mid-19th century: K2. Its treachery is part of mountaineering lore. The famous climber George Bell called K2 “a savage mountain that tries to kill you”. For every four people who make it to the top and manage to descend alive, one dies trying.

When Maya Sherpa decided to climb K2 in 2014, her family thought she had gone mad. Maya had been guiding climbers up the higher Himalayas for over a decade – among only a handful of women from the Sherpa people, an ethnic group native to the mountain range, to do so. She was the first Nepali woman to stand atop several peaks and had twice climbed Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on Earth. After she had found out she was pregnant with her daughter, who was born in 2010, she had stopped working. Yet, as she confessed to me this summer in a café in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, “when you start climbing, you get addicted.”

Following months of preparations, Maya and two other female Sherpa climbers finally made their ascent of K2 on July 26th 2014. Following 16 hours of climbing – including up the notorious Bottleneck, a slender gully of ice, snow and rock that is, at certain points, as steep as 80 degrees – they became the first Nepali women to stand on its summit. “I wanted to prove that you can continue to climb even after giving birth. I wanted to set an example for women, and for mothers. I wanted to test myself,” Maya told me.

Growing up, Maya noticed that trekking and climbing guides were making enough money to haul themselves out of the poverty that often plagues mountain communities. When she was 21, she became a guide herself. Now, aged 46, she is the president of the Everest Summiteers Association, which lobbies the government for better pay and a more robust support system for workers. Climbing Sherpas are particularly worried about climate change, which they see as an existential threat to their livelihoods.

One Sherpa explained that the Hillary Step, a notorious notch in the rock face below Everest’s summit, “used to be solid ice, but now a lot of it is rock” – making it more difficult for climbers to find purchase. “It’s getting warmer,” confirmed Maya, “and the mountain is getting more dangerous.”

The death rate for Everest ascents has remained around 1% for the past few decades. Still, 2023 was one of the peak’s most lethal seasons on record, with 18 people confirmed dead. From the early 20th century until 2011, the death toll on Everest hit double digits in only three seasons, yet this past decade has seen five years in which ten or more climbers have lost their lives.

Even accounting for the steady rise in tourists climbing Everest since the 1990s, these numbers are worrying to Sherpas. According to the Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA), over the past 15 years the number of individuals registered as mountain workers has decreased by a fifth, to just under 13,000 people today. (Most, but not all, are ethnically Sherpa.) Although these jobs are well paid by Nepali standards, some have left the profession to work in construction and hospitality, or have moved away from the Himalayas entirely. Most Sherpa climbers encourage their children to go to university and find alternative careers. If this exodus intensifies, explained Dipendra Gurung, from the NMA, “the future of mountaineering in Nepal is in danger.”

These changes were clear in a conversation I had with Roos Dawa, Maya’s 13-year-old daughter, at the café. “I’m happy she’s a climber,” she told me between mouthfuls of cheesecake. “But I’ll also be happy if she leaves and does something else.” Roos slipped her hand into her mother’s. “Because it’s dangerous. When she’s climbing, I worry about her, and I miss her.” Roos likes painting mountains – but she has no interest in climbing them. She wants to become an architect instead.

Maya is one of approximately 150,000 Sherpas living in Nepal. Thanks to genetic mutations from centuries of living at breathtaking altitudes, they tend to absorb oxygen more efficiently than most people. Although only a few thousand Sherpas make mountaineering their living, they have evolved into such elite climbers that “sherpa” has become a metonym for high-altitude mountain workers. (In its uncapitalised form, “sherpa” refers to anyone who helps paying clients during expeditions – securing ropes and routes across dangerous terrain, carrying heavy loads, setting and packing up camps, serving meals and providing basic medical support.)

Sherpas moved into Nepal from eastern Tibet (their name is Tibetan for “east-people”) more than 500 years ago. In search of a beyul – a sacred valley hidden and sanctified by the founder of Tibetan Buddhism as a refuge from the corrupt world – they found the uninhabited, windblown valleys of Solu-Khumbu. (Maya, like most climbing Sherpas, grew up near here.) By the late 19th century Sherpas were working as mountain porters elsewhere in the Himalayas – but not on Khumbu’s peaks, which were considered the abodes of deities and, above a certain altitude, off-limits to humans.

The first British assaults on Everest in the early 20th century bewildered the Sherpas. Many Sherpa climbers employed on George Mallory’s doomed expedition in 1924 believed the British to be treasure hunters. But by the end of the decade, Sherpas had realised that mountaineering presented them with a business opportunity that they could align with their religious dogma. They came to believe that the goddess who lives on Everest would bestow wealth and good fortune on them for undertaking these perilous climbs. Even today, Sherpa crews perform a ritual puja, or ceremonial worship, at the beginning of each expedition to win her blessings.

As Sherpa involvement in the glamorous new industry grew, so did their discontent with their pay and working conditions. Before the British Everest expedition of 1953 had even set out from Kathmandu, Sherpa climbers on the team, having been made to sleep on the floor of a garage, urinated outside the British Embassy in protest. Sherpas started to organise and won bargaining power over how foreign expeditions were conducted. In 1972, they went on strike over inadequate equipment; the German expedition leader was forced to charter a helicopter to Kathmandu, fly back to Europe and return with extra gear in order to convince them to budge from Base Camp.

Most Sherpas went uncredited for their mountaineering feats, though a few – like Tenzing Norgay, who, along with Edmund Hillary, was one of the first people to reach the summit of Everest – became celebrities. Even so, Tenzing was often stereotyped in the Western media as Hillary’s loyal, hardworking native companion, rather than as a core contributor to the expedition’s success.

Still, Sherpas continued to be attracted to a lucrative – and thrilling – profession. Today a single trip up Everest can pay around $6,000, nearly five times as much as the average annual income per head in Nepal (for comparison, a private in the Nepali army is likely to make between $2,500 and $3,000 a year). The Sherpas who routinely work on Everest can only participate in a maximum of two expeditions a year – each is typically a two-month job that requires workers to prepare camps and routes before paying clients even show up. Some have snagged endorsements which pay for their gear, from brands such as North Face and Rolex.

But it is impossible to separate Sherpas’ work from the catastrophes that lurk around every mountain saddle. According to the Himalayan Database, a record of mountaineering in the Nepali Himalayas, of the approximately 962 mountaineering deaths in the country since 1922, at least 250 have been those of ethnic Sherpas.

The feared Khumbu Icefall, through which all expeditions trying to summit Everest from Nepal must pass, writhes above Base Camp, a viscous river of ice and snow. Every day it moves around a metre down the side of the mountain, caving unexpectedly into a maze of crevasses. Colossal seracs – building-sized masses of tottering ice – threaten to topple without warning. Crossing the icefall demands speed, grit and luck, particularly for sherpas and “icefall doctors” – the elite mountain workers, almost all of whom are Sherpa, responsible for guiding climbers safely over the chasms.

On April 18th 2014 a group of sherpas, who were preparing routes for customers before the climbing season had officially begun, ran out of luck: a 14,000-tonne serac in the icefall calved and detonated like a bomb. Blocks of ice the size of trucks battered the ground, burying alive 16 mountain workers, 13 of whom were Sherpa, and seriously injuring at least a dozen more. Families of the dead sherpas were each supposed to receive a $10,000 payout from the state’s compulsory life-insurance scheme (though some have claimed that they have not been paid all the money they were owed). The families were also issued an additional $400 for funeral costs – compensation they felt was derisory.

Mountain workers gathered at Everest’s base camp to protest. They called for the government, which regulates the climbing industry, to increase payouts for dead workers, and to guarantee full pay to sherpas if expeditions were called off, given that they cannot turn to other jobs at short notice. They also wanted a say in how revenue generated by tourism should be spent. Hundreds of sherpas went on strike, resulting in the cancellation of the 2014 climbing season.

Politicians eventually agreed to some of the strikers’ demands, increasing the life insurance compensation to $15,000. Yet many Sherpas told me that this sum was inadequate and insulting – even more so because it has not been adjusted for inflation in the decade since. “[It’s] nothing for dying!” said Maya.

Nepal’s government makes millions of dollars from tourism. Any foreigner who wants to climb Everest must pay $11,000 for a permit, in addition to thousands in other fees; it’s estimated that the government makes about $3m annually from the permits alone. Tour companies, which usually charge between $75,000 and $100,000 per person, cater to the creature comforts of recreational climbers. One firm promises “phone calls, internet, battery recharge, laundry, alcoholic beverages, bottles and canned beverages, speciality coffee or bakery items, drinks etc,” plus “unlimited bottles of oxygen for each member and four bottles for each climbing Sherpa”. (All of which, needless to say, is hauled up by sherpas.) Today, even people with little or no experience at high altitudes can achieve a feat that took Tenzing Norgay seven attempts to accomplish.

Although the small group of Sherpas who work regularly on Everest expeditions are paid well by local standards, many feel that they haven’t benefited from the growth in tourism to the degree that the government and private companies have. They often still lack retirement funds, evacuation coverage and proper health insurance, and some must badger the ministry of tourism to receive the “summit certificates” that mark successful expeditions. These documents are important, since they effectively operate as job references for future employers. “I climbed Everest so many times, but it was difficult even to get summit certificates from the ministry,” said Da Nuru Sherpa, 44, who was part of the expedition in 1999 to locate George Mallory’s body. “Foreign climbers get them easily, but the government doesn’t care about us.”

Da Nuru now lives in Colorado, where he works in the kitchen of the Sherpa House Restaurant and does occasional landscaping jobs. His visa was sponsored by an American expedition leader – a common route for climbing Sherpas looking to leave Nepal. After the avalanche in 2014, “my kids worried about me,” Da Nuru said. He explained that he had climbed some of the Himalayas’ highest peaks on over three dozen occasions. “But Nepal has no opportunities, no respect for me.” Many Sherpas share his frustrations. “Our government”, said Maya, “is making money selling the mountains, so why don’t they think of the people working on those mountains?”

Famous climbing Sherpas, by virtue of their success, often move to Kathmandu, where they can educate their children in preparation for well-paid but less dangerous occupations. But for many Sherpas, working as mountain guides and porters remains the only way out of poverty. Public education in remote areas is ropy, and most Sherpa children drop out after secondary school. For these lesser educated or poorer Sherpas – and increasingly, members from other ethnic groups – the rewards of mountaineering supersede its risks.

Furi Sherpa, a 40-year-old guide who has taken clients up the Himalayas twice a year for the past 15 years, admitted that “Sherpas don’t usually climb Everest for fun. Almost all are climbing for money.” Furi only became a high-altitude mountain worker so he could raise his two children in the capital. “As a parent, well, I’m ok if they climb Everest once or twice. Not professionally.” He shrugged. “I have to do it, it’s my job. But I don’t want my kids to do it. All Sherpa parents want their kids to do something else.”

Almost all the Sherpa climbers I spoke to felt that the most pressing danger to their profession was the effect of climate change on the Himalayas. Ultimately, “the Sherpa way of life is weather-dependent,” explained Tenzing Chogyal Sherpa, 30, a glaciologist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu. He has conducted research showing that the Khumbu glacier is dwindling at an alarming rate. A recent ICIMOD report has found that glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas could lose four-fifths of their current volume by the end of the century, increasing the risk of landslides, floods and droughts.

Tenzing is the grandson of Kanchha Sherpa, 91, the last surviving member of the 1953 expedition. Since the 1970s, after his grandmother lost two sons to Everest, members of Tenzing’s family have discouraged their children from becoming mountain workers. “Sherpas who can afford to quit the profession have been doing so for years,” he told me.

He hopes that better education and a tourism industry that “prioritises the well-being of mountain workers and Sherpa communities” will help improve the opportunities available to every young Sherpa. “This is what [Edmund] Hillary wanted when he built the Khumjung School,” Tenzing pointed out – the first school in the Khumbu region for Sherpa children. “Sherpas from there don’t just climb mountains; they go on to do all kinds of things.” (Alumni have become doctors, army officers and high-ranking diplomats.)

Maya Sherpa had a more romantic perspective. “If the Sherpas don’t want to work on mountains in the future, maybe Himalayan mountaineering will go back to how it was a hundred years ago,” she said, as we watched Roos play fetch with their dog Lucy in her garden. “Only serious climbers who love Everest will attempt it. Others can’t do it like us,” she shrugged. “Climbing is in our DNA.”

Maya is ambivalent about her own future as a climber. Sometimes, she thinks of quitting; other times, she can’t imagine doing anything else. More than one climber she knows has left the job in frustration, only to return because they find themselves craving the high. “You know it’s crazy,” she whispered, gazing at the faraway hills, “but you still want to do it.” ■

Sudipto Sanyal is a writer based in Bangalore