{"id":21781,"date":"2015-11-22T11:40:56","date_gmt":"2015-11-22T18:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/?p=21781"},"modified":"2016-03-29T06:04:44","modified_gmt":"2016-03-29T12:04:44","slug":"sherpas-make-a-statement-with-their-own-climbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/22\/sherpas-make-a-statement-with-their-own-climbs\/","title":{"rendered":"Sherpas Make a Statement with Their Own Climbs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Kami<\/a>There is a change\u00a0happening in Nepal. The Sherpas, \u00a0long thought\u00a0of as only in support of western climbers, are now doing their own climbs. This article I wrote\u00a0for Outside Magazine’s <\/a>website Outside Online <\/a>looks at some recent developments.<\/p>\n

——————<\/p>\n

Since well before Tenzing Norgay Sherpa made the first ascent of Everest in 1953 with Sir Edmund Hillary, Sherpas have been an essential part of Nepal\u2019s climbing culture\u2014typically as the guys supporting Westerners rather than the leaders of their own expeditions. But that appears to be changing.<\/p>\n

In May 2014, the Nepalese government opened 104 new peaks for climbing as a means of encouraging Western tourists to visit during a year when Everest, due to a deadly ice collapse onto the Khumbu Icefall, had shut down. (One of the peaks was even named after a 73-year-old American climber, who attempted a first ascent on it<\/a> earlier this month.) But the peaks aren\u2019t calling just to paying members or sponsored pros\u2014they\u2019ve enticed a few intrepid young\u00a0<\/strong>Sherpas as well.<\/p>\n

In October, Nima Tenji Sherpa, Tashi Sherpa, and Dawa Gyalje Sherpa\u2014all hailing from Nepal\u2019s Rolwaling Valley, an area just east of the Khumbu Valley, and the site of\u00a017 of the newly opened peaks\u2014made history<\/a> with first ascents on three 20,000-foot-plus\u00a0mountains in three consecutive days. A week later, another Sherpa, Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, who owns Dreamers\u2019 Destination guide service and is also from Rolwaling, completed a solo first ascent<\/a> of the 21,933-foot\u00a0Chobutse.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the size of the mountains that is noteworthy\u201420,000 feet is a walk in the park for most professional Sherpa guides\u2014but the fact that these men decided\u00a0to climb simply for the thrill, and perhaps the notoriety, of claiming a first ascent. That\u2019s a stark departure from the mores of traditional professional Sherpa climbers, who only started pursuing summits after British and Swiss\u00a0explorers arrived in the early part of the 20th century offering cash in exchange for help up the mountains. Those early generations of Sherpa guides viewed the mountains as the bed of the gods and didn’t climb for personal enjoyment. For decades, Westerners ran the commercial climbing industry in Nepal.\u00a0<\/strong>Many young local climbers\u00a0are now claiming the mountains as their own.<\/p>\n

“We are hoping, as young climbers, to take climbing in Nepal to a new level,\u201d Dawa Gyalje told Alpinist Magazine<\/em><\/a> in an interview earlier this month. \u201cAll of us have climbed much bigger mountains but always with foreign climbers. We want to show that we are not just porters on the mountain, climbing only for our livelihood, but we are interested in climbing because we enjoy it, too.”<\/p>\n

“We are the young generation of Sherpa climbers but we are looking to the future of Nepal and Sherpas also,” he added<\/p>\n

This shift has been brewing for almost a decade, as local climbers have\u00a0received\u00a0boarding school educations that their older relatives never had financial access to\u2014partly due to the money commercial climbing brought to the Khumbu, Rolwaling, and Makalu regions. They\u2019re also receiving climbing lessons through programs like Khumbu Climbing Center, led by American alpinist Conrad Anker, and pursuing guide certifications just as stringent as those held by\u00a0Western guides. These climbers\u00a0have been quick to point out the discrepancies in pay between Western guides, who make between $10,000 and $20,000 per expedition, and Sherpa guides, who typically make about $4,000 per expedition. For them, the path to breaking out of Nepal\u2019s deep poverty is clear: they want to become lead guides and build their own guiding companies.<\/p>\n

Case in point: three years ago,\u00a0brothers\u00a0Mingma Sherpa and Chhang Dawa Sherpa, both in their late 20s,\u00a0joined with Tashi\u00a0Sherpa to start\u00a0Seven Summits Treks<\/a>, which has since become a successful guiding company. To gain credibility, the brothers became the first Sherpas to summit the world\u2019s highest mountains, the 14 mountains over\u00a08,000\u00a0meters, a feat only 34 people have completed. During the 2014 season, they led 98 members on Everest (before the\u00a0Icefall\u00a0collapse that shut down the mountain). By comparison, the average Western company leads ten-to-15 members per year. By not using expensive Western mountain guides and reducing overhead and other expenses, they were able to offer an Everest climb for $30,000, less than half of the most expensive Western operators, which charge roughly $60,000 per member<\/a>. (Budget outfitters have become more common,\u00a0drawing criticism from some western outfitters for contributing to\u00a0a crowded mountain<\/a>\u00a0and not having stringent enough requirements for members.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that commercial climbing in Nepal is in for some significant changes. Exactly what changes will come remains unclear, but one thing is: this new generation of Sherpa guides is staking a claim on the future of climbing in Nepal.<\/p>\n

\u201cNepal is always known for home of climbing and Sherpa are the real heroes behind the success but they remained behind always,\u201d wrote Tashi Sherpa, on his blog<\/a>, shortly after his three-day, three-peaks\u00a0expedition\u00a0last month. \u201cNow Nepalese climbers are capable of competing globally but it is rarely heard about Nepalese Alpinist. So this is a step for us to represent ourselves with changing profession into our hobby.\u201d<\/p>\n

Click here to read the full\u00a0art<\/a>icle<\/p>\n

Climb On!<\/p>\n

Alan<\/p>\n

Memories are Everything<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a change\u00a0happening in Nepal. The Sherpas, \u00a0long thought\u00a0of as only in support of western climbers, are now doing their own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Sherpas Make a Statement with Their Own Climbs. There is a change happening in Nepal. The Sherpas, long thought of as only in support of western climbers, are now doing their own climbs. This article I wrote for Outside Magazine's website Outside Online looks at some recent developments.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climbing-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21781\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alanarnette.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}