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Sherpa Fame and Notoriety
Everest View Hotel - Monday, April 3, 2000

DISPATCHES

Berg

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Good Morning Mountain Zone, it's Monday morning and I'm calling you from the deck of the Everest View Hotel. I'm sitting here looking at the astounding view, as Phil said as we walked up towards the Everest View this morning, 'Everest finally looks bigger than everything else.'

We first viewed it at the bottom of the Namche Hill or in the lower part of the Namche Hill. Now we're up looking across at the Thyangboche Monastery where we'll be later this afternoon. Right up at the south face of Lhotse, the big Lhotse-Nuptse ridge and of course that big, imposing triangle behind with the plume coming off the summit of Everest — beautiful morning. We've enjoyed sitting here in the sun, sipping some tea in a rather bizarre location, now nearly 30-year-old Everest View Hotel still sort of seems a little out of place when you show up and usually kind of a hotbed of inactivity — not much goes on here. But we always enjoy stopping by, especially on a clear day like this for a view.

As we move up to Thyangboche, I'll keep you posted. We're going to visit yet another monastery. The visit to Thame was great and I'm going to be uploading some images from that, but Thyangboche of course is the famous one and we'll give you and update from there.

Very much still focused on the expedition and the activity now that we've gotten away from Namche Bazaar we hear less. The one thing I'll comment on this morning is one of the things that will be going on this year is the efforts of Nepalese, specifically mostly Sherpas, who are doing their own climbs with their own sponsorship. This is a trend that's been going on for a few years now and I find it really great. You'll remember my dispatches two autumns ago from Kathmandu when I was at the airport waiting for the return of Kagzi when he set the record of 20.5 hours for an ascent from the South Col to the summit of Everest. Babu Tshering is going to attempt that same feat today or attempt to beat Kagzi's record this year, and also there is a group of Nepalese Sherpani and other women climbers that are going to be attempting an ascent this year.

It is great to see these guys go for the recognition and the notoriety for their climbing on their own merit...that they're getting in on this. I mentioned Apa, he's of course going for what is either his 10th or 11th summit. Ang Rita a few years ago...you know his name because he was the guy from Thame that first began to get those repeated summits that the climbing world first noticed and eventually the rest of the world. I remember in 1983 when my friends Gerry Roach and Peter Jameson returned from their successful Everest summit; I believe it was May 7, 1983. They came back; they has gone to the summit with Larry Nielson who climbed Everest without oxygen — first American to do so. This fellow named David Breashears who had this kind of newfangled kind of video camera and was working for ABC was on the summit with those guys that day and this guy they kept talking about this really strong Sherpa named Ang Rita and it was Ang Rita's first summit.

Ang Rita's great success through the '80s became very well known to those of us in the climbing world, but was still really unacknowledged anywhere else. Of course he made far more trips to the mountain than he was able to summit on. He worked virtually every season and eventually got a number of summits. But then he disappeared actually for awhile in the late-'80s and we learned that there had been a [Unintelligible] going on out in Thame and Ang Rita had actually gone to prison for a little while, Sherpas call it going inside and he was down at Solu at the department of corrections institute you might say. When we came here in 1990 for that American, Everest, Lhotse Expedition we were really happy to hear that Ang Rita was out and in fact on the Nepal Army summit team and in late-April that year did in fact go to the summit with four other climbers in that team. As you might guess after that, Ang Rita has received the recognition back in Kathmandu and in the Nepalese government and eventually around the world that he deserved. Now he's climbed Everest 10 times and he's a national hero. It's great to see these guys get the credit they deserve as climbers, as people with the kind of skill and dedication that the Western world's known about for a long time. Rather than just people that do it for some money and survival in a hard world.

Normally when we stop in when we stop in Thyangboche, as I'll be doing this afternoon, I'll stop and see Nima a woman who runs a lodge there has been a friend of ours through many years of trekking to Base Camp and expedition life. She was a cook for my first trip to Everest actually in 1989. No one gets to see Nima today because she's on that climbing team of Nepalese women I mentioned. So it is pretty cool to come up here and see that these guys are getting on their own in country sometimes with foreign sponsorship, but often within Nepal sponsorship to do their own mountaineering in their own terms, seek their own fame and notoriety. It comes with all the ensuing controversy and the varying opinions and comments you get when you do this stuff anywhere in the world. But it is great to see these folks doing their own deal and as the season goes on reports about some of these trips and going to be some of the things I'm going to be most interested in and we'll pass that stuff along.

— Wally Berg, Alpine Ascents Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent

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