The Queen of Everest Trains While Working at Whole Foods

Desperate for work, she took a job cleaning houses and eventually moved the family into a small apartment. Occasionally clients heard her last name and asked if she had relatives who climbed the big mountains. Her cousin and brother had both followed her into the business and were now leading their own expedition agencies, so she’d nod politely and keep her accomplishments to herself.

Eventually, she started washing dishes in the commercial kitchen of a Whole Foods branch. Co-workers gradually learned of her story because she would sometimes leave town to guide foreigners up Mount Everest. The money she earned went toward her daughters’ college savings.

In 2022, she quit her supermarket job to try her 10th summit, a hallowed number in Everest mountaineering akin to 500 home runs or 3,000 hits in baseball. Thirty-four men had achieved it. Twenty-six of them were Nepali of Sherpa descent, including Babu Chhiri, and Lhakpa wanted to shatter one more Himalayan glass ceiling.

As usual, she had no sponsors. Lack of sponsorship deals is not a new issue in women’s climbing, and if she were going to successfully summit the mountain, she would need to do so with her own funding.

When a three-day weather window opened in May, it seemed that all of base camp had mobilized for a summit push. “Everybody has a dream to reach the summit, but there is only one rope,” Lhakpa said, “and there were so many traffic jams.”

She passed 26,000 feet at around 10 p.m., and kept climbing into the death zone above 26,247 feet, where the chances of succumbing to high-altitude pulmonary edema or high-altitude cerebral edema — both of which can be deadly — rise with each passing hour. Lhakpa was breathing bottled oxygen, but those canisters only last so long.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/sports/lhakpa-sherpa-everest.html