Apa Sherpa

Apa Sherpa was born on January 20, 1960, in Thame, a small farming village in the Khumbu region of northeastern Nepal, a few days' walk from the base of Mount Everest ^[1]. Thame sits at roughly 3,800 meters and has produced several of the most accomplished climbers in Everest history, including Tenzing Norgay, who made the first confirmed ascent of the mountain with Edmund Hillary in 1953. Growing up in that valley, Apa was surrounded by men who earned their living on expeditions, and the trade shaped his prospects from childhood.

His father, a yak herder, died when Apa was around twelve years old, leaving him to help support his mother and siblings ^[2]. He had hoped to continue his schooling and once thought of becoming a doctor, but the family's poverty forced him out of the classroom. Like many boys of the Khumbu, he began working as a porter, carrying supplies for trekking groups and climbing expeditions along the trails of the Everest region. The loads were heavy and the pay modest, yet portering was one of the few reliable sources of cash income in the high villages.

That interrupted education stayed with him. Decades later, Apa repeatedly said that no child in Nepal should have to abandon school to carry loads for foreigners, and the regret became the founding idea behind his charitable work ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Apa Sherpa before the fame finds a familiar Khumbu story: a bright student pulled from school by necessity, who turned the only work available into an extraordinary career.

Through the 1980s Apa worked his way up from portering to expedition kitchen work and then to climbing duties on the mountain itself, learning rope work, load carrying at altitude, and the rhythms of the Everest climbing season ^[1]. In 1985 a glacial lake outburst flood from Dig Tsho tore down the Bhote Koshi valley and destroyed property in the Thame area, an early and personal encounter with the instability of Himalayan glaciers that he would cite often in later years when speaking about climate change ^[3].

His first summit of Everest came on May 10, 1990, when he reached the top as part of an expedition that included the New Zealand guides Rob Hall and Gary Ball as well as Peter Hillary, son of Edmund Hillary ^[1]. Apa was thirty years old. The climb established him as a strong summit climber rather than only a load carrier, and expedition leaders began requesting him by name.

From that point the summits accumulated at a remarkable pace. He returned to the top of the mountain nearly every year through the 1990s and 2000s, usually working as a sirdar, the head climbing sherpa responsible for organizing the Nepali staff, fixing ropes, and shepherding paying clients through the most dangerous sections of the route ^[4]. By the mid 1990s he already held the record for the most Everest ascents, and each subsequent climb extended his own mark.

The core of Apa Sherpa achievements is the summit record itself: 21 ascents of Mount Everest between 1990 and 2011, all by the standard South Col route from Nepal, a total recognized by Guinness World Records as the most at the time of his retirement ^[5]. On May 11, 2011, at the age of 51, he stood on the summit for the twenty-first time as leader of that year's Eco Everest Expedition ^[4]. The record stood until fellow Nepali climber Kami Rita Sherpa surpassed it in 2018 ^[5].

Several of his climbs carried a purpose beyond the summit. In 2007 he took part in the SuperSherpas expedition alongside Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, a climb organized to highlight the skill and contribution of Sherpa climbers, who had long done the hardest work on Everest while foreign clients received most of the attention ^[6]. From 2008 onward he led the annual Eco Everest Expeditions with the Kathmandu-based operator Asian Trekking, climbs that combined guiding with cleanup work, bringing down tons of accumulated garbage, discarded oxygen bottles, and other debris from the mountain's upper camps ^[3].

He also dedicated later ascents to drawing attention to the shrinking glaciers of the Himalaya. Apa spoke publicly about the changes he had witnessed over two decades on the mountain, including bare rock and ice appearing where snow had once covered the route, conditions that made sections of the climb more hazardous ^[3]. In 2012 he completed a roughly 120-day traverse of Nepal's Great Himalaya Trail with Dawa Steven Sherpa, walking about 1,700 kilometers across the country to document the effects of climate change on mountain communities and to promote trekking tourism in remote districts ^[7].

Apa married Yangjin Sherpa, and the couple raised their children first in the Khumbu and later in the United States ^[2]. For most of his climbing career the family lived in Thame, where the income from expedition work went further than almost any other employment available in the region, but where every climbing season also meant months of risk on the mountain.

In 2006 the family moved to Draper, Utah, in the Salt Lake City area, after supporters helped arrange the relocation ^[2]. The move was driven in large part by education: Apa wanted his children to have the schooling he had been denied. Even after settling in Utah he returned to Nepal each spring for several more Everest seasons, commuting between a suburban American life and the highest workplace on earth.

Among climbers and in the press he became known as Super Sherpa, a nickname that reflected both the summit record and his reputation for calm reliability at extreme altitude ^[6]. People who worked with him described a quiet, modest man who rarely dramatized his climbs and who spoke of Everest less as a personal quest than as a job that fed his family ^[4].

After his twenty-first ascent in 2011, Apa announced his retirement from climbing Everest, saying he had promised his family he would stop while his record and his health were intact ^[4]. He was in his early fifties and had spent more than two decades making annual journeys through the Khumbu Icefall, statistically the most dangerous section of the mountain for Sherpa workers.

Retirement shifted his energy to advocacy and philanthropy. In 2010 he had established the Apa Sherpa Foundation, based in Utah with operations in Nepal, to improve education in the Everest region so that young Sherpas would have choices beyond high-altitude labor ^[2]. The foundation has supported schools, teachers' salaries, and hot lunch programs for students in Khumbu villages, including in his native Thame area ^[2].

He continued to speak internationally about the risks borne by Sherpa climbers, a subject that gained wide attention after the 2014 Khumbu Icefall avalanche killed sixteen Nepali expedition workers, and about glacial retreat in the Himalaya ^[3]. His life and the pressures on the Sherpa community were examined in the 2018 documentary film Loved by All: The Story of Apa Sherpa, produced with the Canadian outdoor company Sherpas Cinema ^[8].

Any Apa Sherpa biography ends up being a history of modern Everest seen from the Nepali side of the rope. His 21 summits demonstrated, in the plainest arithmetic, that the most accomplished Everest climbers of the commercial era were the Sherpa professionals who fixed the ropes, carried the loads, and guided the clients, not the foreigners whose names filled the headlines ^[6]. The record he set in 2011 was eventually broken, fittingly, by another Sherpa from the same tradition, Kami Rita, and the climbers who now hold the leading ascent totals are overwhelmingly Nepali ^[5].

His second legacy is educational. By turning his fame into a foundation focused on schools in the Khumbu, Apa reframed the question that had defined his own youth: whether a child in a high Himalayan village must choose between a classroom and a porter's load ^[2]. Basic Apa Sherpa facts, the birth in Thame in 1960, the first summit in 1990, the record twenty-first in 2011, tell only part of the story; the argument he made with his later life was that the next generation should not need to repeat it.

He also helped change how the world talks about the mountain itself. Through the Eco Everest cleanups, the Great Himalaya Trail traverse, and years of interviews about thinning ice on the routes he knew better than anyone, Apa made a working climber's testimony part of the public record on Himalayan climate change ^[3]. Few people have seen Everest as often, or described its transformation with as much authority.