He Summited Everest 21 Times — More Than Anyone Alive When He Stopped. Then He Moved to Utah and Started Giving Away an Education Instead.

Apa Sherpa climbed to the summit of Everest 21 times between 1990 and 2011 — more than anyone else on Earth had ever done when he finally stopped. He did not retire to write a memoir about the mountain. He retired to a quiet suburb of Salt Lake City and started raising money to keep Nepali children out of the job that made him famous.

Growing up in Thame — the same high, wind-scoured Khumbu village that has produced several of Everest's most decorated guides — Apa started working as a porter as a teenager, the standard route into Nepal's climbing industry: carrying loads first, then training as a guide, then, if you survive long enough and climb well enough, leading Western clients toward the summit itself. He reached the top for the first time on May 10, 1990. He kept going back, nearly every spring, for 21 years.

By the time of his 21st and final summit, on May 11, 2011, Apa held the record outright. Guide Phurba Tashi Sherpa matched it at 21 in 2017, and Kami Rita Sherpa broke both their marks with a 22nd summit in May 2018. Kami Rita has since pushed the record to 32 — Travel Himalaya Nepal covered that climb separately. But for more than two decades, the number to beat on Everest was Apa's.

From the Khumbu to Utah — and back, every year

Apa moved his family to the United States in 2006, settling in Draper, a Salt Lake City suburb, years before he stopped climbing — meaning several of his later record-building seasons involved flying back to Nepal from Utah each spring. He retired from climbing in 2011, holding a record most assumed would stand for a generation. It did not: Kami Rita, guiding for the same generation of Kathmandu-based operators, broke it seven years later.

In 2012, Apa founded the Apa Sherpa Foundation from that same house in Utah. Its mission is direct: fund schooling for Nepali children so that becoming a high-altitude porter or climbing Sherpa is a choice, not the only option available. Apa has put the foundation's purpose simply: 'Without an education, we have no choice.' He has also spent years as a visible voice on climate change on the mountain, taking part in Eco Everest Expeditions focused on the Khumbu Icefall's retreat, and warning that a shrinking snowpack could make Everest a harder, more dangerous climb for the generation of Sherpas coming up behind him.

What this means for trekkers

Apa's story is a useful corrective to how outsiders often picture 'Sherpa' — not a fixed rank on the mountain, but a career with its own arc, risk and eventual exit, the same as any other. Every trekker who books an Everest Base Camp trek or a summit push on Island Peak is walking through the same villages — Thame, Khumjung, Namche — that produced Apa, Phurba Tashi and Kami Rita alike.

Source: Apa Sherpa Foundation; Encyclopaedia Britannica

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