Who the Sherpa are — origins of the "people of the east"
The word "Sherpa" turns up constantly in Himalayan climbing news. What is less commonly known outside the climbing world is that Sherpa is not a job title — it is the name of an ethnic group.
Sherpa (Sherpa) means "people of the east" in Tibetan. The Sherpa are a Tibetan-origin people who once lived in eastern Tibet and migrated across the Himalaya into Nepal during the 17th and 18th centuries. They settled mostly in the Solukhumbu region at the southern base of Everest. After generations of living at altitudes from 3,000 to 4,000 m and above, the Sherpa have developed distinct physiological traits suited to low-oxygen environments.
Through the 19th century, Sherpa livelihoods centred on high-altitude herding and trade with Tibet. Mountains were where they lived and what they worshipped — not something you climbed. Their relationship with climbing only began in the 20th century, when foreign expeditions started arriving in the Himalaya.
The porter era — the invisible backbone of Himalayan climbing
In the early 20th century, when British and other European expeditions started pushing onto the highest peaks of the Himalaya, they began hiring Sherpa as porters — recognising at once that these were people whose bodies were already at home at altitude.
On the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s onward, Sherpas were the people who actually moved the enormous quantities of supplies up to the high camps. Over time, the strongest of them moved beyond pure load-carrying and were trusted with running the porter operation as the sirdar (head Sherpa) — effectively the field operations lead of the expedition.
And yet, in this era, the Sherpa were almost never treated as expedition members. They were hired labour. They took on the most dangerous work at altitude, and credit for the summit belonged, by unwritten convention, to the foreign climbers.
Tenzing Norgay — the man who made the first ascent of Everest
Any honest history of the Sherpa runs through Tenzing Norgay (1914–1986). Born in Solukhumbu, he started working as a porter for British Everest expeditions in the 1930s and built up an unmatched body of experience on the mountain.
In 1952 he joined a Swiss expedition and reached around 8,599 m — the highest any human had ever been at that time. Then, on 29 May 1953, as part of the British expedition led by John Hunt, he stood with the New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary on the summit of Everest, completing the first ascent of the highest mountain on Earth. It was his seventh attempt on Everest.
Asked for the rest of their lives whether Hillary or Tenzing had stepped on the summit first, the two of them stuck to the same answer: that they had arrived together. When Tenzing died in 1986, Hillary was the only non-Sherpa at his funeral.
What Tenzing's achievement actually did was show the world that the Sherpa weren't porters — they were world-class climbers. A turning point. He came to be called "Tiger of the Himalayas," and after the climb spent the rest of his career building the support side of Himalayan climbing and pushing for the recognition of Sherpa climbers within the industry.
The cost no one talks about — one in three Everest deaths
You cannot tell the story of the Sherpa contribution without telling the story of the cost.
Roughly one in three of the people who have died on Everest has been a Sherpa. Fixing ropes, setting ladders across crevasses, ferrying supplies to the high camps, hauling oxygen — most of the genuinely dangerous work on the mountain is done by Sherpa climbers.
On 18 April 2014, a massive avalanche tore through the Khumbu Icefall just above Base Camp, killing 16 Sherpa guides in a single morning — the worst single-day death toll in Everest's history. They were the rope-fixing team out ahead of everyone else.
For most Sherpa climbers, high-altitude climbing is not adventure. It is work — dangerous work done to support a family. Whether the wages they receive are anything like commensurate with the risks they take has been an open argument in the industry for decades.
The elite-climber era — Sherpa as the headline name
Since the 2010s, the position of the Sherpa in the climbing world has shifted dramatically. No longer just the support team — Sherpa are increasingly the elite climbers chasing the records themselves, and the names being printed on the front pages.
Kami Rita Sherpa — 31 ascents of Everest
Kami Rita Sherpa (born 1970) comes from Thame in Solukhumbu — the same village as Tenzing Norgay. He started working on Everest as a porter at the age of 12 and made his first summit in 1994. He has been going back ever since, and in May 2025 made his 31st ascent of Everest, extending his own world record. His total number of 8,000 m peak summits stands at 42.
Nirmal Purja and the first winter ascent of K2
In January 2021, an all-Nepali team led by Nirmal Purja made the first winter ascent of K2. K2 (8,611 m) is the second highest mountain in the world and, with its history of high fatality rates, has long been known as the Savage Mountain. No one had ever climbed it in winter before, and the team's success put Nepali climbing ability in front of a global audience.
Nima Rinji Sherpa — all 14 of the 8,000 m peaks at 18
In 2024, Nima Rinji Sherpa — then 18 — completed all 14 of the 8,000 m peaks, becoming the youngest person in history to do so. Nima Rinji has said openly that the point, for him, was to show the next generation of Sherpa climbers that they could step out of the assumption that their role was support — and stake out a place as world-class athletes in their own right.
The Sherpa who once carried the loads for the foreign climbers are now the ones rewriting the records. Some climbing journalists have begun to suggest that the future of significant high-altitude records will be set, in effect, by Sherpa climbers.
Summary
The history of the Sherpa is essentially the history of Himalayan climbing. A relationship that began as portering in the early 20th century reached its first great turning point with Tenzing Norgay on Everest in 1953, and in the 21st century has evolved further still — into the era of Kami Rita, Nirmal Purja, and Nima Rinji.
What is easy to forget, behind the headlines, is how much of the cost has been paid by Sherpa lives. Fixing ropes, moving supplies, keeping clients alive — Himalayan climbing does not function without the invisible work. The next time you see a Himalayan climbing story, it might be worth holding in mind not just the name of the summiteer, but the people who made it possible to be there at all.