Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day

by Zuckerman, Peter

  But critics called her “a woman on the Go.” They dismissed her as reckless, swept up in a publicity stunt. Only a handful of mountaineers had managed to climb every 8,000-meter peak, and it had taken Reinhold Messner, widely considered the greatest of all, more than sixteen years to do it. Kolon Sport couldn’t wait that long, so the sportswear giant paid Go to replicate the feat in a quarter of the time. Unlike Messner, however, she was using support climbers and bottled oxygen—and simultaneously modeling a clothing line.

  Setting aside his crush on Ms. Go, Pasang tried to evaluate a K2 attempt on its own merits. He sought out his father for advice. To Pasang’s surprise, Phurbu Ridar saw the climb as a lucky break. True, Pasang could be killed, but Phurbu thought that was unlikely, especially if a beautiful woman were involved. And how could Pasang go into commerce when the Maoists were still halting commerce? If mountaineering was to be his career, he should make it his career, especially while he had no wife or children to hold him back. Pasang should not only load-carry on K2, Phurbu advised, but also shoot for the summit. When Phurbu had attempted K2’s North Ridge in 1994, he’d put his clients’ success above his own, staying in camp and boiling water as other men climbed to the top. He regretted being passed over. Pasang should have no regrets. A K2 conquest would make the family proud, and it would pay the bills for a year.

  Furthermore, Phurbu noted, four of Pasang’s cousins would be on the Korean team. Tsering Lama was like Pasang—in his twenties and unmarried. His other cousins were leaving families behind. Jumik Bhote had a wife who was eight months pregnant and expecting to give birth while he was away. “Big” Pasang Bhote had two toddlers. Ngawang Bhote, the team cook, also had a wife and daughter, but K2 was too profitable for any of them to pass up.

  Nearly convinced, Pasang went to Big Pasang’s house to see what his older cousin had to say. Big Pasang endorsed the expedition, reminding Pasang that K2 meant $3,000 for each of them, plus tips and a summit bonus. As Big Pasang spoke, his wife Lahmu boiled tea. She remained quiet but kept glancing up at the summit certificates proudly fastened above the rice sacks in the kitchen. Mountaineering had provided her children with a good home. Its walls were plywood and the floor was dirt, but a tarp and corrugated tin roof kept rain out, and her toddlers, Dawa and Nima Yangzom, always had enough to eat. Pasang could tell she was supportive of the plan.

  He found himself nodding in support of it, too. “Everyone was saying I should go,” Pasang recalled. “They said I’d lose my chance, and it meant so much money.”

  If Pasang doubted whether he had made the right choice, his concerns evaporated when he and his cousins met the rest of the Korean team in the lobby of the five-star Hotel de l’Annapurna in Kathmandu. The hotel features a massage parlor, four restaurants, a casino, and an underground shopping center. It promises in its brochure to “treat guests like gods.”

  Shy and unsure what to say, Pasang shook hands with the two Koreans he knew, Ms. Go and Mr. Kim. He nodded to other team members and slumped down on a leather couch. He filled out forms, including an insurance document from Highland Sherpa Trekking that amortized his life at $7,500. Ms. Go passed out team bumper stickers. For reasons no one explained, the Koreans called their expedition The Flying Jump.

  As the Koreans talked among themselves, Pasang wasn’t sure what they were saying, but he liked sitting among such affluent foreigners. The hotel’s opulence impressed him. Globes dangled from the ceiling, emanating rose-colored light. Orchids in water bowls purged cigar smoke from the air. Buddhist tangkas adorned the walls. Mesmerized by their maze of red and gold paint, Pasang daydreamed until a waiter interrupted him. The man bowed and poured him a glass of chilled mango juice.

  When the Korean team dismissed Pasang, he headed toward the glass door. It swung open spontaneously, before he could touch the massive brass handle. Pasang stepped into a wall of noise and traffic. Beside him, a doorman bowed. “Namaste,” he said, as he did to all the guests, and offered to carry Pasang’s duffel to a taxi.

  Is he talking to me? It was beyond confusing. All his life, Pasang had been the one to bow, pour tea, open doors, lift bags. That’s what people known as sherpas were expected to do, he thought: Serve. Hotel de l’Annapurna, the most luxurious place he had ever entered, showed him another kind of life. Yes, Pasang decided, his father was right. K2 was a golden opportunity. He couldn’t overlook the prospect of earning $3,000 in eight weeks, but K2 could give him something he valued more. Respect.

  Once he conquered the Savage Mountain, Pasang thought, nobody would consider him a stupid villager. Nobody would think of him as a baggage handler. Maybe he would have the chance to spend more time with powerful people like the Koreans. Maybe he’d drink mango juice again in places like the Hotel de l’Annapurna. Maybe the world would treat him as kindly as the doorman had.

  In the driveway, Pasang turned around. He wanted to thank the doorman, but the words would not come out. He was too stunned to speak. Feeling like a prince, he strode out of the five-star hotel and into the chaos of the city.

  “After K2, I thought, I’ll no longer be treated like a Bhote.”

  4

  The Celebrity Ethnicity

  Mountaineers use sherpa, with a lowercase S, to describe a high-altitude load carrier, and the word is often applied commercially to anything that helps people get around. Haul your terrier in the Sherpa Dog Carrier. Brace your belly with a Baby Sherpa Maternity Belt. Stow your bibs and burp cloths in the award-winning Alpha Sherpa™ or Short Haul Sherpa® diaperbag. “It’s no mystery how this pack got its name,” reads the promotional website for the Evo-Sport Sherpa Rucksack. “The Sherpa is built to carry all your gear, and you won’t feel a thing.”

  Many ethnic Sherpas tolerate the stereotype because it promotes their skill and unique genetic advantage. The people of the Tibetan Plateau, including Sherpas, have lived at high altitude for at least eleven thousand years, and physiological evidence suggests that they are well adapted to oxygen deprivation. Compared with other groups studied, often acclimatized Caucasian men, Sherpas are more resistant to illnesses and brain damage exacerbated by the thin air, and they sleep more soundly and demonstrate remarkable endurance at high altitude.

  What explains their advantage? Contrary to one popular theory, it’s not a high red-blood-cell count. Compared with Caucasians, Sherpas actually have fewer red blood cells per liter of blood. Nor is the difference explained by diet, acclimatization, metabolism, iron-deficiency, or environmental factors. At sea level, Sherpas have such a low red-blood-cell count that they are technically anemic, but, curiously, they don’t show symptoms. Overall, Sherpas require as much oxygen as anybody else, but they have less of it dissolved in their blood.

  Scientists initially found this puzzling. Red blood cells ferry oxygen around the body, and other populations well adapted to altitude, such as the Quechua and the Aymara of the Andean highlands, have veins teeming with red blood cells. How do Sherpas manage with less at a much higher altitude than the Andes?

  Probably by circulating blood faster. Sherpas have wider blood vessels. They breathe more often when at rest, providing their blood with more oxygen to absorb, and they exhale more nitric oxide, a marker of efficient lung circulation. There is also a genetic explanation. Sherpas’ red-blood-cell count stays low because of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 2-alpha, a gene that regulates response to low oxygen and turns on other genes. In addition, Sherpas have inherited a dominant genetic trait that improves hemoglobin saturation, allowing their red blood cells to soak up more oxygen. Sherpas’ thin blood, in turn, may prevent the sort of clotting that crippled Art Gilkey on K2.

  This genetic advantage only enhances the Sherpa mystique. Lowlanders clutching the Lonely Planet guide are convinced they want to hire “a sherpa,” even if they don’t know what a Sherpa is, and, after three generations of gathering tourist dollars, Sherpas now rank among the richest and most visible of Nepal’s fifty or so ethnicities. They didn’t start out that way.

  Anc
estors of the oldest Sherpa clans originated in the Kham region of Tibet. In the thirteenth century, Mongols, with their catapults and fast-riding archers, conquered much of Central Asia, and besieged Khampas fled to the Tibetan interior. In the sixteenth century, Muslims from Kashgar invaded Tibet from the west, displacing the Khampas again. Fleeing on foot, they migrated across the Himalaya to a region south of Everest known as the Khumbu. During the journey, they began to call themselves sharpa (people from the east), and their new Nepali homeland became Shar Khombo. Several immigrant waves followed. Some were driven from Tibet by famine, disease, and war; others moved to establish trading outposts. These newcomers, from various regions and social classes, assimilated into existing settlements or built their own, creating more clans. Steep passes isolated the villages, and unique cultures evolved. With language, for instance, dialects varied by as much as 30 percent—enough to produce misunderstandings and jokes, but not enough to qualify as separate tongues.

  Despite the harsh geography, Sherpas from different clans traded and intermarried. The naming system they developed still causes mass confusion. According to custom, an individual’s primary name is one of seven weekdays. Boys and girls born on Monday go by Dawa; Tuesday babies are Mingma; for Wednesday, it’s Lhakpa; Thursday, Phurbu; Friday, Pasang; Saturday, Pemba; Sunday, Nima. Surnames aren’t used, and phonetic transcriptions to English vary. When filling out legal forms, most Sherpas put their weekday as their first name and Sherpa (or the female version, Sherpani) as their last. Occasionally the clan name—such as Chiawa, Lama, or Lhukpa—substitutes for Sherpa.

  The system works in a close-knit village. In a city, it’s dysfunctional. Thousands of Sherpas in Kathmandu have identical names. Phonebooks are useless, and it’s impossible to find someone by casually asking around. Gossipers must provide elaborate descriptions of the person they wish to malign. Nicknames abound, but they’re inconsistent. A growing number of Sherpa parents are giving their children individualized names, but the naming convention may never resemble anything as varied as the Western system.

  Making matters more confusing, primary names can be altered or scrapped based on events in a child’s life. If a baby falls ill, the parents may change his name to Chhiring (long life), to confound the evil spirits. If a child dies, the parents may switch a sibling’s name to something inconspicuous like Kikuli (puppy), so evil spirits will overlook her. Parents might also turn to a Buddhist lama for a new name provided by divine inspiration. Long before he conquered Everest, Tenzing Norgay went by Namgyal Wangdi, but the rinpoche of Rongbuk Monastery determined that the child was the reincarnation of a rich and devout man. The rinpoche thus renamed him “wealthy follower of religion.” Chhiring received Dorje (lightning bolt) as his second name. It must have seemed appropriate for a child who set the hills ablaze.

  Sherpas can receive virtue names as well, often those of saints. They combine with the primary name to bestow special attributes. Chhiring’s wife, Dawa, received Da Futi (blessings to conceive a son). Pasang’s cousin received Lahmu (a protector of temple gates). Virtue names also describe an individual. To distinguish a daughter from a mother with the same name, the child might acquire Ang (young). A Sherpa who gave a rousing speech might become Lhakhpa Gyalgin (courageous orator). Sometimes the same Sherpa goes by different names depending on context. When addressed by his lama, Chhiring goes by Dorje. When pronouncing his name for Tibetans, he says Tsering.

  Sherpas also identify with one of roughly twenty clans that reflect ancestry. Children receive their father’s clan name. Sherpas are supposed to avoid romantic entanglements with members of the same clan or anyone from their mother’s clan going back three generations. And just as names such as Rockefeller have cachet in the West, some Sherpa clans, such as Lama, are top drawer. Others, such as the Bhote clans, are considered alien and second class—impostors who aren’t ethnic Sherpas at all.

  So what defines a Sherpa? When Europeans first encountered them in the nineteenth century, the Sherpas introduced themselves as sharpa, which was interpreted as Sherpa. The word resurfaced in the 1901 Darjeeling census, which classified Sherpas as one of four types of Bhotias, or Tibetans. Nepal’s most recent census considers Sherpas to be a self-reported ethnicity, so anyone can claim to be one.

  Sherpas from the oldest and wealthiest clans, living near Everest, would prefer a narrower definition. Just as colonial families who arrived on the Mayflower claim some special distinction, many old-clan Sherpas claim to be the only authentic members of the ethnicity. Tibetans, they argue, whether living in Tibet proper or in villages in Nepal, do not deserve the Sherpa identity, nor do those who have recently assimilated into Sherpa villages. Pemba Gyalje, a member of the Dutch K2 team, hails from the Solukhumbu region settled by the earliest immigrants. As he put it, “We are true Sherpas.”

  Chhiring prefers a broader definition. He belongs to the Kyirong clan, which suggests that his father’s ancestors were part of a later immigration wave from the village of Kyirong in Tibet. His village of Beding hosts a mix of clans ranging from ancient to upstart. A Sherpa, he says, is anyone who can convince the established Sherpas that he deserves to be one. Good faith is cultivated by living in Rolwaling, adopting a clan name, following the clan-marriage rules, and speaking Rolwaling Sherpi tamgney language.

  Pasang, from the Upper Arun Valley, uses the most inclusive definition, which disregards ethnicity. Sherpa is a job description, he maintains, so anyone who works on a mountain qualifies. He may favor this interpretation because old-clan Sherpas would never recognize Pasang as part of their ethnicity. To them, he is a Bhote, now and forever.

  Bhote, pronounced BOE-tay, stems from Bhot (Sanskrit for “Tibet”), and the Bhotes in Hungung observe many Tibetan customs. With marriage, for instance, the Bhotes of the Upper Arun Valley, like other Tibetan tribal groups, traditionally practice bride abduction. When Pasang’s cousin Lahmu Bhoteni was fourteen, the groom’s brothers secured permission from her father, seized her in the night, and dragged her to the wedding. This break from her paternal household may have been ritualized, but it was hard on the bride. “I was miserable for years,” Lahmu said. It took a long time for her resentment to wear off. “When I was twenty-three,” she added, “I finally realized I loved my husband.” Sherpa marriage rites, by contrast, are public-relations campaigns. Before betrothal, a Sherpa couple consults all stakeholders—families and gods—and gets a horoscope cross-check. Sherpas widely consider the Bhote approach, which is less common nowadays, a brutal and primitive practice.

  Another breach, according to Sherpas, is the Bhote practice of blood sacrifice. Bhotes of the Upper Arun occasionally stray from Buddhist precepts and slaughter animals as large as yaks, pulling out entrails to read divinations. In Pasang’s village, the carcass is offered to Surra, a deity who occupies Makalu’s eastern spur. God by day, demon by night, Surra charges through the Arun Valley on a black horse and drags a banner jangling with human hearts. Local Buddhist lamas have been unable to tame him. Sherpas say he causes epidemics, but Bhotes believe the opposite—that Surra heals the sick—so they make sure he gets all the offal he can eat.

  Citing this sacrificial slaughter, some Sherpas describe Bhotes as bloodthirsty barbarians. Sherpas, competing with Bhotes for mountaineering jobs, popularized the use of the term Bhote for “yokel” in Nepali slang. According to a popular saying in the Sherpa villages near Everest, every Bhote “has two knives: one in his boot, which he can draw quickly to stab you in the stomach, and another in his waistband to stab you in the back when you embrace him.”

  But the sharpest knives are reserved for foreigners. Both Bhotes and Sherpas hate how they used to be described by outsiders, and the terms are still politically charged. Well into the twentieth century, Western mountaineers were calling both groups coolies, an offensive word that means “unskilled laborer” and, in some contexts, “slave.” Now Western mountaineers use sherpa or Sherpa-climber, which conflates a job description with an ethnicity, frustratin
g ethnic Sherpas who want to distinguish themselves from Bhote competitors. Pakistanis use high-altitude porter, or HAP, but sherpas working in the Karakorum reject that term because it includes the word porter, and in Nepal, porters don’t climb. Nepal’s government now promotes the term high-altitude worker.

  Despite these ethnic and linguistic tensions, coexistence is the norm among high-altitude workers. As Sherpas and Bhotes vie for the same jobs, they still befriend each other, worship the same gods, and intermarry. The life of Tenzing Norgay illustrates this duality: The man who made the Sherpas famous wasn’t one, at first.

  One of Time magazine’s most influential people of the twentieth century was born in a yak-herder’s tent in Tsechu, a pilgrimage site in the Kharta region of Tibet—a three-day walk from Pasang’s birthplace. Tenzing Norgay was the eleventh of fourteen children, one of only six who survived infancy. His parents, Kinzom and Mingma, subsistence herders of Ghang La, sent Tenzing to a monastery so he could learn to read, but monasticism didn’t suit the boy. When a Buddhist lama beat him with a stick, Tenzing quit.

  At age seven, Tenzing got a glimpse of his future. In the spring of 1921, the legendary British mountaineer George Mallory pitched several camps in the Kharta region to explore Everest’s north side. During his four-month reconnaissance, Mallory spent a halcyon month in the grazing lands of Ghang La. Spreading money around, he hired local scouts and bought yak butter and cream from herders at Ghang La and Dangsar, where Tenzing’s family stayed. Mallory would die three years later below the summit of Everest, but Tenzing never forgot the hobnailed boots that his expedition left behind.

  Mountaineering was the least of Tenzing’s concerns in the 1920s. His family leased the herd they cared for, and one day the yaks erupted in lesions and died, likely during the 1928 pandemic of rinderpest disease. Tenzing’s father couldn’t repay his debts or support his six children in Kharta, so the family migrated across the border, possibly to Thame or Khumjung, villages in the Sherpa heartland of the Khumbu.