After 22 years of climbing the slopes, Everest no longer holds many secrets for her. Mountaineer Lhakpa Sherpa has just completed her tenth ascent of the 8,848-metre giant, making her the woman to have climbed the “roof of the world” the most times. Thursday, May 12, she reached the summit at 6:30 a.m. via the south face, thus beating her own record. And it’s not the only one. Lhakpa Sherpa is also the first Nepalese woman to have conquered Everest in the year 2000 by coming down alive. And for good reason, all the Nepalese women who preceded her lost their lives there.
Lhakpa Sherpa has no role model, she often says she doesn’t want a master or guide, and it’s been like that since she was little. A priori, she is 48 years old, but she does not know her date of birth. She was born in the family home, in the village of Balakharka in Nepal, at a time when the inhabitants did not celebrate birthdays. And, from adolescence, she wanted to climb. Her brothers were porters, so she wanted to follow them, “Cit was in the 80sshe told Climbing Magazine, no girl did that, but I wanted to compete with the boys, prove to everyone that I could carry heavy loads and above all earn my own money. So that’s what I did“.
For years, she has multiplied the round trips to base camps, always wiping the same remarks, go home, stay home, “SIf I had listened to them, she said, I would be growing potatoes with my fifteen children.“What does it matter, by dint of training, Lhakpa Sherpa completes her first ascent, she becomes a guide, goes on expeditions, marries a mountaineer but she dreams of elsewhere, of something else and she leaves to settle in the States United, “Jhoped for a better life, in a free country.” A dream that was cut short: no better life but food tickets, odd jobs in the supermarkets and a husband who becomes violent and whom she decides to leave.
A 48-year-old Nepali woman scaled Mount Everest for the 10th time on Thursday, breaking her own record for the most summits of the world’s highest mountain by a female climber, her hiking company said. https://t.co/7ByvqqYMt9
— CNN (@CNN) May 16, 2022
Two years ago, she returned to Nepal with her three children, became a guide again and embarked on this 10th ascent which she has just completed. Lhakpa Sherpa will probably climb again, but her next goal now is to be able to send her daughters to university, pay for their studies, offer them that famous better life she has been chasing after since she was a child.