National Geographic - UK (2022-02)

MANY NEPALI

MOUNTAINEERS

HAD BEEN PART

OF GROUNDBREAKING

CLIMBS, BUT NO

ALL-NEPALI TEAM

HAD CLAIMED

A HISTORIC

FIRST ASCENT

ON ITS OWN.

M

INGMA G. STANDS five feet nine

inches, tall for a Sherpa. He’s 33,

broad-shouldered, and often wears

his hair in a thick mop extending

past his collar that is vaguely remi-

niscent of a 1970s rocker. He tends

to look people in the eye when he

speaks and has a way of cutting directly to the

point that seems to add weight to his words.

He grew up in Rolwaling, a narrow valley west

of Everest. It’s far from the bustling Khumbu

Valley, yet Rolwaling has produced some of

the most renowned Sherpa mountain guides.

Mingma G. grew up listening to his father and

uncles, all of whom worked as guides, tell tales

of Mount Everest around the kitchen stove on

cold winter nights. The stories they told weren’t

so much about the foreign mountaineers who

flooded Nepal each spring as they were about

homegrown heroes such as Pasang Lhamu

Sherpa, who in 1993 became the first Nepali

woman to summit Everest and died on her way

down, and his first cousin Lopsang Jangbu

Sherpa, who assisted climbers during the 1996

disaster made famous by the book Into Thin Air

and then tragically died four months later.

In 2006, when Mingma G. was 19, his uncle

took him on his first expedition to Mansalu. The

next year, Mingma G. summited Everest while

working for a French outfitter, and by 2011, he

was organizing and leading his own expeditions.

Those were difficult years. From 2001 to 2008,

Nepal was gripped by a violent Maoist insur-

rection, and many international mountaineers

stayed away. Competition to guide the few who

dared to come to Nepal was intense.

In the winter season of 2019-2020, Mingma G.

cobbled together his own attempt to claim the

first winter summit of K2 with three paying cli-

ents. Life at Base Camp—which at 16,272 feet

sits nearly 1,800 feet higher than Mount Whit-

ney, the highest point in the continental United

States—was itself a severe trial. “If we washed

our clothes, then it takes more than a week to

get it dry unless we dry them on gas heater or

stove,” he wrote to mountaineering journalist

Alan Arnette.

After arriving at Base Camp, Mingma G.

caught an upper respiratory infection and had to

withdraw from the expedition. But it wasn’t long

before he began thinking about trying again.

And then COVID-19 struck. Tens of thousands

of guides, porters, and cooks were out of work

especially near the top, which means that any

mistake is magnified to near-fatal consequences.

Trip over your crampons or clip into an unsecured

line by mistake, and it’s unlikely you’ll stop falling

before hitting the glacier thousands of feet below.

Because the margin for error is even further

reduced in winter, success, or really survival,

comes down to logistics—planning for the worst

conditions and nightmarish scenarios. Colossal

peaks, such as Everest and K2, are rarely climbed

in a single linear push. Rather, teams generally

move up and down the mountain, acclimatizing

to higher altitudes while setting up a network

of fixed ropes and camps stocked with critical

gear, such as oxygen bottles, tents, and ropes. In

recent years, the notion of a faster, lighter style

of alpinism has prevailed, but K2 in winter calls

for an old-school group effort: Individuals must

haul several heavy loads over dangerous terrain.

It demands old-fashioned teamwork.

A CLIMB FOR HISTORY 87