Documenting The Sherpa Mountaineers, Finally

They are collectively the world's greatest climbing community but have largely been ignored till recently. A book now details their greatest achievement and the indispensability of summiting the world's tallest mountains

- Murali Menon

Most of us have this idealised view of Sherpas as tough, committed, welcoming mountain guides who've helped mountaineers conquer numerous towering mountains in the Himalayas, especially Everest. Their real story though has several other dimensions, say Kathmandu-based journalist Pradeep Bashyal and social science researcher Ankit Babu Adhikari, whose recently-released book, Sherpa: Stories of Life and Death from the Forgotten Guardians of Everest, is an intimate account of the Nepalese ethnic group who are crucial to mountaineering in the Himalayas.

Every climbing season, for example, a team of icefall doctors, which consists of highly skilled Sherpas, create and maintain a route across the treacherous Khumbu Icefall on Everest. They do that across dozens of mountains that are popular with mountaineers across Nepal. Take Sherpas out of the equation and there would be no guided mountaineering expeditions - at least from the Nepal side.

Bashyal and Adhikari's deeply researched book tells the story of the first-generation climbing Sherpas from the 1930s and 1940s, whose history spans key geographies, including Khumbu, Rowaling, and Darjeeling, and brings into focus the modern generation descendants who are no longer content with being invisible men on Everest. Here's what we learned from the book and from a chat with its authors.