The Sherpa Who Climbed Everest 10 Times — Without Ever Breathing Bottled Oxygen

On 22 December 1987, a Nepali climber named Ang Rita Sherpa stood on the summit of Mount Everest in the dead of winter, in jet-stream winds and temperatures that can fall below -60°C, breathing nothing but the same thin air every trekker on the trail below was breathing at 5,000 metres less. No one had ever done it before. Nobody has repeated it since.

He was born on 27 July 1948 in Thame, a stone-walled Sherpa village at 3,800 metres tucked into a side valley above Namche Bazaar — a village so small it is easy to miss on the main Everest Base Camp trail, yet it has produced an outsized share of the world's great high-altitude climbers. Ang Rita grew up herding yaks and working as a porter on trading expeditions into Tibet, joining his first mountaineering expedition as a load-carrier at just 15. Nobody, least of all him, was thinking about world records. He was thinking about work.

To understand why this record has stood for almost three decades, you need to understand what "without oxygen" actually costs a body at 8,849 metres. Above roughly 8,000 metres — the zone climbers call the death zone — air pressure is about a third of what it is at sea level. The overwhelming majority of Everest's successful summits have been made breathing bottled oxygen, which effectively lowers the altitude a climber's body experiences. Climbing without it, as Ang Rita did every single time, means the brain and muscles are working on a fraction of the oxygen they need, decision-making slows, frostbite risk climbs, and the margin for error all but disappears. Doing that once in perfect spring weather is a serious mountaineering achievement. Doing it ten times — and once in the brutal, wind-scoured stillness of a Himalayan winter — is why his peers nicknamed him the "Snow Leopard."

Ang Rita never climbed for celebrity. Nepal in the 1980s and 90s had nothing like today's guiding industry — no Instagram, no sponsorship deals, no global mountaineering press following every rotation up the icefall. He climbed as a working high-altitude guide, ferrying loads and fixing lines for foreign expeditions who often had no idea they were being led by a man about to set a record nobody would touch. His climbing family became one of Everest's most storied: his eldest son Karsang summited Everest nine times before dying on an expedition in 2012, and his second son Chhewang has summited five times himself. Three generations of one Thame family have spent a combined tens of thousands of hours above 8,000 metres.

Source: The Kathmandu Post

Cover photo: 8Percent Media via Pexels (Pexels License).