She's the Only Nepali Woman Certified to Guide You Up Everest — It Took Her 8 Years to Earn That Right

In October 2024, Dawa Yangzum Sherpa stood on the summit of Shishapangma, an 8,027-metre peak in Tibet — the 14th and final eight-thousander on her list. It made her the first Nepali woman ever to climb all fourteen. She was 34 years old, and by then, the eight-thousanders were almost the less remarkable of her two records.

Start with the harder record. IFMGA — the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations — certifies the small pool of guides qualified to lead clients on any terrain in the world, rock, ice or ski, anywhere on Earth. It takes years of technical training and exams across multiple disciplines. Nepal produced its first IFMGA guides only in the 2010s, almost all of them men. Dawa Yangzum, born in a Sherpa village in the Rolwaling valley, started the certification process in 2013. It took her four years; she qualified in 2017, the first Nepali woman to do it.

What this means for trekkers

Everest and its neighbouring giants are still, in most people's imaginations, a story about men — Hillary and Tenzing, Messner, the long list of 'first man to...' headlines that fill mountaineering history. Dawa Yangzum's career has quietly rebutted that, one summit at a time, and her guiding work is arguably the more consequential part of it. Since 2019 she has led National Geographic's own scientific expeditions on Everest, not as support staff but as the guide responsible for the whole team's safety.

Nepal's mountaineering industry has long been criticised, fairly, for how little of the credit and money reach the Sherpa guides who do the hardest and most dangerous work of any expedition. Dawa Yangzum's story doesn't erase that imbalance, but it punctures one part of it: the assumption that the industry's top qualifications and biggest records belong only to foreign climbers or Nepali men. She holds one of the rarest professional certifications in mountaineering and a completed 14-peak list only a few hundred people on Earth can claim — and she got there from a Sherpa village in Rolwaling, not a foreign guiding school.

If her climbs make you want to see the mountains she grew up in, without the eight-thousander price tag or risk, treks to Everest Base Camp, Makalu Base Camp and the Manaslu Circuit all pass through the same Sherpa and Gurung communities that produce Nepal's elite guides, with plenty of chances to hear their stories firsthand.

Cover photo: Dmitry A. Mottl via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).