Few expeditions up Mount Everest would succeed without the help of the Sherpas. But their contribution has been largely overlooked. Most Sherpas spend four months every year away from their families assisting expeditions. "Europeans don't want to show the help they get from us. They want to pretend they did it all by themselves," complains one. Despite 80 years helping foreigners scale Everest, they still don't understand the lure of climbing. "This is our work but they have to spend a lot of money to climb the mountain. It's crazy.
View Sherpas Burden - Nepal. Video hosted on Youtube. The Sherpa are an ethnic group from the most mountainous region of Nepal, high in the Himalaya. In Tibetan shar means East; pa is a suffix meaning 'people': hence the word sharpa or Sherpa. Sherpas migrated from eastern Tibet to Nepal within the last 500 years. A female sherpa is known as a "sherpani".
The term 'sherpa' (the preferred spelling with a lower case first letter) is also used to refer to local people, typically men, employed as porters or guides for mountaineering expeditions in the Himalayas. They are highly regarded as elite mountaineers and experts in their local terrain, as well as having good physical endurance and resilience to high altitude conditions. However, a sherpa is not necessarily a member of the Sherpa ethnic group.
Most Sherpas live in the eastern regions of Nepal Solu, Khumbu or Pharak. However, some live farther west in the Rolwaling valley and in the Helambu region north of Kathmandu. Pangboche is the Sherpas' oldest village in Nepal, and is estimated to have been built over 300 years ago. Sherpas speak their own Sherpa language which in many ways resembles a dialect of Tibetan. They traditionally are traders and farmers, cultivating their high altitude fields of potatoes, barley, wheat and buckwheat. Some live near Namche Bazaar. The Jirels, native people of Jiri, are ethnically related to the Sherpas. It is said that the Jirels are descendants of a Sherpa mother and Sunuwar (another ethnic group of the eastern part of Nepal) father. In India, Sherpas also inhabit the towns of Darjeeling and Kalimpong and the Indian state of Sikkim. The 2001 Nepal Census recorded 154,622 Sherpas in that country, of which 92.83% were Buddhists, 6.26% were Hindus, 0.63% were Christians and 0.20% were Bön.
The most famous Sherpa is Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary for the first time in 1953. Two Sherpas, Pemba Dorjie and Lhakpa Gelu, have recently competed as to who can climb Everest from Basecamp the fastest. On May 23 2003 Dorjie summitted in 12 hours and 46 minutes. Three days later, Gelu beat his record by two hours, summitting in 10 hours 46 minutes. On May 21 2004 Dorjie again improved the record by more than two hours with a total time of 8 hours and 10 minutes.
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