Meet the Man Who Has Stood on Top of Everest 32 Times — More Than Anyone Alive

On the morning of 17 May 2026, a 56-year-old man from the Sherpa village of Thame walked onto the summit of Mount Everest for the 32nd time. No one else in the history of mountaineering has come close. Kami Rita Sherpa was already the record holder — he has now broken his own world record seven times since 2018, and he shows no sign of stopping.

The numbers are hard to grasp. Everest carries real, well-documented risk for anyone who attempts it, and most professional climbers who summit it once consider it the achievement of a lifetime. Kami Rita has done it three dozen times across three decades, through earthquakes, avalanches and the pandemic season that shut the mountain down entirely in 2020.

He did not start out as a mountaineer. Born in 1970 in Thame — the same Khumbu village that produced Tenzing Norgay's climbing generation and several other Everest record-holders — Kami Rita began working on the mountain as a porter at 12, then as a Base Camp cook's assistant from 1992. His first summit came in 1994, at 24. It would be another 23 years before he tied the existing world record of 21 summits, shared with Apa Sherpa and Phurba Tashi Sherpa, in May 2017 — and one more before he broke it outright in May 2018.

He has worked for three different expedition operators across his career — Alpine Ascents International until 2018, then Seven Summit Treks, then Himalayan Glacier Adventure & Travel Company from August 2019 — the kind of job-hopping that's normal for any in-demand professional, except this one happens 8,849 metres above sea level.

What this means for trekkers

2026 was, by his own account, among the most crowded seasons he has climbed. Nepal issued a record 494 Everest permits for the March-May window this year, after China closed its northern Tibet route and pushed nearly all traffic onto Nepal's southern side. On a single Wednesday in May, 274 climbers reached the summit — the most ever in one day from Nepal. Kami Rita, who has more perspective on crowding than anyone alive, was blunt about it.

For a would-be trekker, none of this changes the trek most visitors actually come to Nepal for. Kami Rita's 32 summits happen above Base Camp, on the technical route through the Khumbu Icefall and the death zone — territory reserved for permitted climbers with oxygen, ropes and a full support team. The vast majority of visitors to the Khumbu never go near it; they walk the same valleys, past the same monasteries and yak pastures, to Everest Base Camp itself at 5,364 metres, a trek that needs no climbing skill and no summit push.

What his record really puts in perspective is who makes Everest work. It isn't the climbers whose names end up in headlines — it's guides like Kami Rita, and the wider Sherpa community of Khumbu, who fix the ropes, carry the loads, staff the lodges and get everyone else up and down safely, season after season. His 32 summits are less a stunt than a career: three decades of a Thame porter doing, better than anyone else on Earth, the job his village has done since long before Everest had a name on a Western map.

If watching that mountain from below is more your speed, our own NMA-trained guides — many from the same Khumbu villages Kami Rita comes from — lead treks to Everest Base Camp, Island Peak and Mera Peak each season, past Thame on some of the quieter routes.

Cover photo: Vlvescovo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).