Two Everest Records Fell 42 Minutes Apart, on the Same Mountain, in the Same Morning

At 9:30 in the morning on 17 May 2026, a 52-year-old woman who grew up in a Nepali village where girls were not allowed to attend school stood on the summit of Mount Everest for the eleventh time — more than any other woman in history. Forty-two minutes later, on the same wind-scoured ridge, a 56-year-old guide from Thame stood there for the thirty-second time — more than any human being has ever stood on top of the world. Neither of them is done climbing.

Kami Rita Sherpa was born on 17 January 1970 in Thame, a stone-walled Sherpa village in the Khumbu below Everest, where his father was among the first professional mountain guides after Nepal opened its borders to foreigners in 1950. He began working Everest expeditions as a young man, hauling loads and helping in the base camp kitchen from 1992. Two years later, on 13 May 1994, he stood on the summit for the first time. He has been going back most years since.

Kami Rita's record has not run in a straight line. Nepal issued no Everest permits at all in 2015, the year an earthquake-triggered avalanche killed 19 people at Base Camp, or in 2020, when the government closed the mountain during the first year of the pandemic. In seasons when the route stayed open, he sometimes summited twice within a few weeks — guiding one group up, descending, then turning around for a second rotation with the next. Thirty-two summits across thirty-two years is not one climb a year. It is a career spent almost entirely above 5,000 metres, absorbed into whichever season Everest allowed.

Lhakpa Sherpa's path ran further from the mountain before it circled back. Born in 1973 in Balakharka, a Makalu-region village where girls were not permitted to go to school, she disguised herself as a boy as a child to get work as a porter near Everest Base Camp. Her first summit, in 2000, made her the first Nepali woman to reach the top of Everest and return alive — the first Nepali woman to summit at all, Pasang Lhamu Sherpa in 1993, died during her descent. Lhakpa kept climbing through the 2000s, moved to the United States in 2002, and worked as a dishwasher at a Whole Foods in Hartford, Connecticut, while raising three children largely on her own. She reached her 10th summit in 2022, the first woman to do so, and the 2024 documentary Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa introduced her story to an audience that had mostly never heard of her. Her eleventh summit this May extended a record she has now held for more than two decades.

What this means for trekkers

You do not need to attempt the summit to walk in their footsteps. The standard route to Everest Base Camp passes within a few hours' walk of Kami Rita's home village of Thame, and the shorter Everest View Trek reaches the same Sherpa villages — Namche, Khumjung, Thame — without the altitude risk of Base Camp itself. We have run treks in this valley since 1998, with NMA-certified guides who have spent their working lives in exactly the terrain Kami Rita and Lhakpa have made history in. Their records will keep climbing. So, most years, does everyone we send up that trail.

Source: The Kathmandu Post, corroborated by CNN and Al Jazeera.

Cover photo: Arjay Neyra via Pexels (Pexels License).