The First Sherpa to Climb to the Top of Mt. Everest (1954) | Hacker News Reader

The First Sherpa to Climb to the Top of Mt. Everest (1954)

newyorker.com

81 pointspaulette44944 comments

Something morbid that comes to mind when I see something about Mt. Everest:

“There Are Over 200 Bodies on Mount Everest, And They’re Used as Landmarks”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-are-over-200...

Well results of extreme popularity (so that total noobs from ie California or China would show up in base camp, paid for full expedition with personal sherpa, and start asking how this weird alpinism equipment like crampons should be used), extreme environment due to altitude killing your brain and rest of body well below 8000m and Nepal's leniency on climbing permits.

Thus you have repeated stories of big egos bagging popular peaks, ie part of 7 summits, who simply refused to turn back even after hours of pleading by their personal sherpas due to their poor state, and they simply collapse up there. The mentality of 'pushing through the pain' which gets you to finish marathon fast will kill you up there. People don't understand what it means to have mental capacity at 10% and barely be able to slowly walk and keep balance, while doing life & death decisions where 1 wrong step can kill easily.

Also its extermely hard to bring a body down, they say its around 20 well-faring people per body. As per stats you basically have high risk of 1 death by bringing 1 dead body, so its rarely done.

Not all of these 'landmarks' have same story, some were good seasoned professionals with bad luck, but most have some trivial, or stupid mistakes attached to them and refusal to turn back. Even though most die on the way down, the seed for it is planted in slow ascent.

I am pretty sure this is well known, but just to be 100% sure - in elite/professional alpinism circles, going up Mt. Everest via 2 standard routes by throwing bunch of money around as part of huge 300-500 group gains 0 respect, quite a lot of contrary and puts you firmly in 'rich fool' bracket. Sherpa community deserves help, but this is very bad (since its super selective to few individuals in vast region who take all the profits) and very very dangerous way of improving livelihoods.

/rant

Love the writing style of this article. Simple sentences, evenly paced, plain yet descriptive. It's an article about class, and does a great job of showing without telling. Workman-like in the best possible way.

NASA has a good approx of the route taken that day, the final push to the summit took 5hrs. Wonder with the lines up there today if it might take much longer. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/8396/edmund-hillary...

I’m a pretty serious hiker. A few days ago I got an ad from an Everest tour guide. In the photo was a queue of 350 people within arms length of each other. The idea of doing Everest is awesome, but it’s so heavily commoditised that I feel it would suck all the joy out of it for me personally. Good on the people who can look past that though.

Modern day Tenzing's last name is Norgay but in this article it's Norkay. I wonder when the change occurred and why...

Edit: part of the article hints at the answer, "when Tenzing Norkay, or Tenzing Norkay Sherpa, came to Darjeeling in 1933, he was treading a well-worn path. This is the way he has decided to spell his name—he now has business cards—but a European anthropologist who knows Tibetan says that “Tenzin Norgya” would be a better phonetic rendering, and that an accurate transliteration would be “bsTan-aDzin Nor-rGyas,” the capital letters representing the stresses."

Sherpas are Tibetan, and romanizing Tibetan is notoriously difficult because the modern pronunciation diverges wildly from the writing and there are many dialects to boot. “bsTan-aDzin Nor-rGyas" is the Wylie transliteration, which represents the script accurately and is useful for scholars, but completely unpronounceable to the lay reader.

Sherpa's are also Nepalese and it's typically a last name (occupation). And I thought (could be off) that most of the Sherpa's on Everest are nepalese?

Their language is "Tibetic" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetic_languages

I recommend The Conquest of Everest it's a documentary with footage from Hillary and Tenzing's climb. It's on Netflix (where I live at least).

I just saw a short video of one of the basecamps completely full of trash.

To get one tent to your last stage before attempting the summit, 70 tents are brought (or so I understand). First base your tents are full of other tents, oxygen bottles etc to get you to the next base. That one has fewer tents holding fewer supplies. After a handful of iterations, you've spread $100000 of gear over the mountain so you can have that one chance at a summit.

The mountain is huge, but it adds up.

Like the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation, but with tents instead of fuel?

Slightly more like the Jeep Problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_problem

Found the clip:

https://twitter.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1663454524118560768

Using sherpas is cheating yourself out of reality. Normalising using sherpas is a display of deep corruption.

I dont know this topic, but why is this "deep corruption"?

Imagine summiting the highest mountain, while being physically carried, as being socially acceptable and widespread. is it to a benefit or to a harm for the idea of summiting? Corruption is unnecessary dimensions added to the thing, which destroy and devalue its essence.

This is highly subjective. It's worth phrasing it as such.

>Imagine summiting the highest mountain, while being physically carried, as being socially acceptable and widespread. is it to a benefit or to a harm for the idea of summiting?

It is lame and sucks, but it isnt corruption, right?

They are corrupting the sport of alpinism.

Modern alpinism, as pioneered by the likes of Messner, is quite recent. Heck Norgay and Hillary were among the first travelling light, everyone else before them had expeditions rooted in colonial tradition. Compared to those, people being carrid up Mt. Everest are actually travelling eith almost nothing. And they manage to get up that summit, by paying Sherpas more than anyone else before that.

Not defend the practice, it is pathetic, but it is hardly corruption since it is clear people being carried up hardly qualify as alpinists to begin with.

So, you are generally advising against the use of local guides? And propose to cut the sherpas out of the considerable Mt. Everest business all together? Why?

Is that what the poster is saying? No, and you know it. Just call it for what it is: assisted climbing. The persons didn't climb the mountain in a sense of the sport, they were assisted.

You can't claim you ran a marathon if you hitched a ride along the way.

Some kind of purist attitude? Marathon runners run the whole way, but a community of support accompanied them for years beforehand (and on the actual route!)

Likewise, nobody is using a sedan chair to get to the summit. Everybody walks every step of the way?

Well, not everyone. Sally Pittman was short roped for a few hours by a Sherpa. But still an achievement for her to reach the top. So your overall point is well taken.

> Some kind of purist attitude?

Absolutely! That is what sports, exploration and alpinism is about. People who had others to carry their stuff do not deserve to be mentioned together with those who climb by their own force.

I've always found it ridiculous reading articles about this or that adventurer who conquered a mountain or peak, or the local alpinist who's back from climbing Everest - then as a side note "by the way, some sherpas carried all his/her stuff".

I'm from a society where stolen valour is the norm, not the exception. For any accomplishment there will always be persons from certain families or a certain political party put forward and given all the merit and glory in media for the accomplishment, while those who actually did the work are to stay in the shadows and be quiet.

Last year I watched the documentary "14 Peaks" where Nepalese led by Nirmal Purja where setting some mountaineering records as climbers, and they were extremely bitter for the lack of recognition, which I fully understand. Corruption is the right word.

The really disgusting bit is not the favt of being carried up a mountain, it is the neglect of giving the local guides the credit they deserve. Last time i bothered to look, Sherpas held all Everest records: number of succesfull ascents, speed, you name it.

That Sherpas, just to pick prominent example as locals in other regions share the same fate, don't get the recognition they deserve is not the people going on paid expeditions. It also the press and media not giving them credit. Basically all succesfull Himalayan expeditions, before Messner started to go full solo, relied on Sherpas or other local groups. Not properly mentioning those incredible mountaineers has a long tradition. One extended, too a much lesser degree, to guides from former Russia (looking at ypu, Krackauer). The Chinese alpinists, and to a lesser extent the Indians as well, defy that fact somewhat by virtue of simply being rich.

The Sherpas also get paid a fraction (maybe 20%) of what the Western guides get paid. Although to the Sherpas it is great pay and a coveted job.

>> normalizing using sherpas is deep corruption

Said OP. I was not aware that climbing Mt. Everest was followijg some competitive sports rule set.

As others pointed out, people being carried up there are rightfully ridiculed by the alpinist community. Using Sherpas is a way that local communities can actually benefit a little bit from rich people's tourism. I don't see anything wrong with that.

There is also the question of using supplemental oxygen. Which I guess is the equivalent of running a marathon without stopping for liquids or gels.

Yeah, climbing one of those mountains without oxygen is hardcore. Doing it solo is certified badassery.

The problem is not Everest but the people who don't know anything about climbing. Anyone (pretty much) can get up that mountain if they have a large enough convoy of people carrying everything the "climber" needs. Climbing is what you make of it.

Altitude changes and general health of the climber will also determine if they get up the mountain... or back down the mountain. Money doesn't guarantee a successful ascent/descent.

But your chances get much better, especially on the ascent leg of the trip!

Eh, not anyone. You have to be in decent shape, have some climbing experience, not be afraid of heights crossing those scary icefall ladders, and have a huge tolerance for discomfort to make it to the top. The low oxygen levels that high are no joke. I would argue running an ultra-marathon is a far easier feat.

Note how I wrote large "enough" for the sake of argument, i.e. this could theoretically be a team of 1000's of people and a budget of many billions. Money can't buy everything, but for an ascent of Everest it can buy a lot.

You can apply this to anything, though. I hope you don't drive a car because that's cheating yourself out of the reality of walking and carrying your own load. Walkers frown at cyclists. Cyclists frown at drivers. There's no doubt someone out there who is disappointed that you don't do your own plumbing. Hiring a plumber is cheating yourself out of reality.

It's not that I don't agree with it being lame, but chasing some kind of "reality" is just as lame too. Should you summit without oxygen too? Without a map? On your own? At what point does it become "real"?

Without Tenzing Noragy, GM OSN, Sir Edmund Hillary wouldn't have made it. In fact, Norgay is the one you see in the only photo on the summit. He himself was not familiar with the operation of the camera. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Norgay_s...

What a ridiculous statement. They both needed each other, it was a mutually supporting effort. However in saying that, Hillary could have theoretically made it to the summit without Norgay (who would have died of asphyxiation if he tried the same).

Tenzing saved life to Ed, maybe more than once, but specifically once Ed made a careless jump over crevasse in lower parts of the mountains and started falling into it. If you saw photo of both together you must see Ed was almost twice the weight of Tenzing, so quite an effort to catch and save him.

There were some less-than-stellar reactions in media and politics, west mostly ignored Tenzing, in India Ed was ignored completely. You are right, they both needed each other and I think after coming down they knew pretty well how much luck they had to just survive this (ie climbing Hillary steps barely 100m below summit, must have been extreme... now there are permanent ladders installed by Chinese expedition, often a choke point where people get frostbites from long waiting to pass up or down)

...Norgay (who would have died of asphyxiation if he tried the same)

What makes you think that? Many Sherpas climbed Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen because of their genetic uniqueness. In fact, one did it even 10 (ten!) times without bottled oxygen. Lot of other Sherpas can do the same.

https://omgnepal.com/ang-rita-sherpa-climbed-everest-10-time...

I'm not sure if this is the same guy, but a Sherpa bivouacked overnight at the summit with no oxygen, just to show it can be done. Well, this was word of mouth from a "Khumbhu doctor" (pro route-setter for the Khumbhu ice falls) when I was in the region years ago. The guy he was talking about had summited multiple times, and set all kinds of unofficial speed records for ascent + descent, but was kind of off the radar because he was on the worker side of the industry, not the sponsored climber side.

False equivalence as those summits were achieved after climbing aids like ladders were placed on the third step and other difficult parts of the ascent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com