Sherpas: The Invisible Men Of Everest

Often overlooked and rarely adequately rewarded, Nepal ’s ‘people of the east ’ have been helping adventurers up Mount Everest for a century, but at what cost?

- James Draven

“I remember looking up at the mountain and seeing a landslide heading towards me. Without being dramatic, I accepted that I was going to die.”

Ryan Colligan, a 31-year-old film editor from Kent, is telling me about his experience at Tengboche, Nepal, as he returned from Everest Base Camp in April 2015, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake triggered an avalanche that killed 22 people, the biggest tragedy in Mount Everest’s history.

“Ten minutes earlier I’d been taking a photograph of my partner, Evie, in front of a painted rock face, before meeting my friends in a teahouse on stilts. Now the teahouse walls had crumbled and everybody was fleeing in terror, and the rock mural where we’d been standing was buried under a landslide. The ground shook like a cornering Tube train as we ran towards our Sherpa guide, Pemba, who assembled our group amid the chaos, and led us back down the trail, which was in places no more than mud and debris, bounded by sheer drops. The air smelled of upturned soil.

“Pemba lived in Lukla and I knew he was anxious to get back to his family, but he stayed with us in Namche Bazaar for four nights, waiting for the aftershocks to die down before guiding us back past collapsed villages. Throughout, Pemba had our best interests at heart and ensured we were safe.”

There are many such stories of high altitude heroism associated with the Sherpa, an ethnic group native to Nepal. These tales stretch back to Western adventurers’ first Everest expeditions

in the 1920s; but it was Tenzing Norgay who brought the Sherpa people to the attention of the world, as part of New Zealander Edmund Hillary’s successful 1953 expedition team.