So there’s something I never understood about Sherpas in the Himalayas. They lived right near these massive mountains for millennia. For whatever reason, they decided never to summit them. Then along come some Westerners and decide to do it. So the local experts become this professional/ethnic class of hired help, assist Westerners in attaining their fame, and from there on keep being these second class helpers. It’s very strange to me…
1. Any idea why they never made it to the peaks themselves? No need/interest? Technical or logistical limitations (oxygen tanks, for example?)
2. Once interest/fame/money/etc. became associated with all this, why did they continue to be second class to all of it? I get that maybe in the mid-twentieth century racist attitudes and policies kept it that way, but I feel like even today it’s the same thing: Western European leads the way, Sherpas are only their help.
History is rife with examples of colonists using local help for things, or importing second-class help from somewhere else, but this situation always seemed unique to me. The locals were the experts here. Why were they never front and center (for technical reasons and/or social), and still aren’t? This would be to me like someone arriving on a Pacific island, inhabited by master canoers, looking out at another island clearly visible and reachable by them, and then telling them, “hey, let’s go there.”
UPDATE- ok, found lots of useful information here:
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-Sherpas-usually-get-credit-for-climbing-Mount-Everest
In: 7
Nepal controls the more popular and easier to climb face of the mountain and tourists are not allowed to summit without a Sherpa guide. This is a significant chunk if Nepal’s economic activity, so they’re very protective of it.
Now as for why the locals never bothered to summit the mountain themselves? It’s dangerous and expensive to do so, so it’s really only worth the trouble if some wealthy jackass from far away is paying you 900 times your normal salary to do it.
This related response, off the Quora article I linked in OP, was particularly interesting:
“Related
Is it possible that some of the Sherpa people have already ascended Everest even before Edmund Hillary, but just not on the record?
I do not think it’s possible that any Sherpas climbed Everest before the advent of Western expeditions, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, they didn’t have the equipment.
That’s not just oxygen. We now know that Everest can be climbed without oxygen – although it was 25 years between Hillary and Tenzing’s first ascent with oxygen and Messner and Habeler’s ascent without. It took a lot of experience of the mountain to work out whether it was even physiologically possible.
But I think that more important than oxygen is modern cold weather gear. Look at the photos of the first ascents of any of the 8,000ers and one common factor is that the climbers have down jackets. Invented by Eddie Bauer in 1936, down clothing is still the dominant form of mountaineering gear nearly 100 years later. Synthetics are finally getting closer, but the warmth-to-weight ratio of down is almost impossible to beat.
The Sherpas didn’t have access to down clothing until Western expeditions brought it to Nepal.
Secondly, there are two cultural aspects. Sherpa culture regards Himalayan peaks as the abode of gods and many of them are sacred. Some have never been climbed – ascents of Ama Dhablam stop short of the summit, holier peaks such as Kailash are completely off limits. Sherpas typically insist on a ceremony before each Everest expedition to propitiate the gods of the mountain.
It wouldn’t have occurred to Sherpas to climb the mountain.
Conversely, mountaineering is – to a first approximation – the invention and pastime of European men. In the mid 1800s, gentlemen of leisure decided to start climbing mountains, and they consistently found that there was no record of anyone having climbed mountains before them.
And that brings us to the strongest reason: economics.
There were two significant details in that last paragraph: the fact that mountaineering started in the mid-1800s, and that it was started by gentlemen of leisure.
The industrial revolution created the phenomenon of leisure, of a class of people who had the time and money to travel the world and try new things. Prior to that, people were far too busy growing crops or raising animals.
And the same was true in the mountainous parts of the world. While we occasionally find evidence of earlier high altitude exploits, it is in places like the Andes, where the Incas were a very successful civilisation with significant food surplus and leisure time (and who already lived at high altitude). In most places with mountains, the people who lived there were too busy eking out a living to bother with fripperies like going up mountains.
Bagging a peak would take months (in the Himalayan spring), carried a high risk of death and didn’t feed your family.
Why would anyone do it?
The Sherpas only got involved in climbing when rich Westerners turned up and paid them to do so.
Once it made economic sense to do it, Sherpas turned out to be very good at it. That’s not surprising: they live at high altitude all their lives, are used to hard physical labour at altitude and they have genetic adaptations that help them acclimatise.
But there’s nothing to suggest that they would have tried it without being paid. And even today, Sherpas climb almost exclusively as paid members of the expedition. Very few of them make enough of a living away from the mountain that they can pay to climb rather than be paid.
EDIT:
I forgot a rather obvious but very important reason: logistics.
Climbing an 8,000er takes time, even for a well-acclimatised person. Adapting to 5,000m is one thing, but adapting to altitudes above that takes time. When you read about a high speed attempt on Everest that only took a couple of days, that’s only talking about the culmination of a months-long expedition. The climbers involved will have spent weeks adapting to the altitude and scoping out the route before returning to Base Camp to make their high speed ascent.
You can’t cheat physiology, and that means spending time on the mountain.
Time means supplies. Whatever your route, you need to bring enough food with you to last the trip, you need fuel to boil water, you need shelter and warmth at night. And whichever way you cut it, that means you need a supply pyramid. The early Western attempts were huge logistical exercises, but even the modern Alpine-style ascents need significant quantities of gear brought to and up the mountain: that’s the whole reason that there’s an industry employing Sherpas as porters (and the reason some of them have become guides and multiple-time summiters is that they’ve built up valuable experience on the mountain as porters first).
The point being: you can’t climb a really big mountain without a ton of stuff and help to carry it. Any realistic attempt on Everest would have involved not just the climbers but a significant portion of a village’s able-bodied folk and an appreciable amount of their food and cloth for the season. The idea that something like that could have happened and not become a major part of local folklore just doesn’t seem plausible – and yet we don’t seem to have any stories along those lines.”
First, there’s no point to climbing Mt Everest. It’s too tall for anything above a certain height to be useful and to climb it, you need like perfect conditions, which are rare.
Second, Sherpas are in better shape than the majority of the climbers and they make money from climbing, which is in sharp contrast to anyone who climbs it today.
It’s a job
in a region that’s economically challenging
you gotta feed the wife & kids, aight?
Climbing a mountain like Mount Everest would be would be extremely dangerous and difficult without modern technology. If you are a native person 500 years ago just trying to survive, there’s no reason to go up there.
The only people who ever did mountaineering have always been rich people with cushy enough lives to want to seek out danger and risk. I love mountaineering, but it’s always been a sport for the idle rich since its birth in the 1800s. Why the hell would a farmer or shepherd or carpenter in *any* country go throw his life away like that? He’s got a family to support and work to do!
But where there’s money, there’s people willing to strive for it, and the Sherpa people live right next to a constant stream of people who will pay for help climbing mountains.
In the himalayas, European climbers initially hired indian porters, usually in Darjeeling, because India was an easy entry point for British and their allies. Some Sherpa porters joined them when they got closer to the mountains. After a generation or two of big expensive climbs coming through, the Sherpa people built up a generation of porters with significant experience, and they slowly moved from “load carriers who can go higher than base camp” to skilled and respected climbers in their own right.
Still, this took time, and rich British people have never been known for being egalitarian. Into the 1980s and 90s, paid guiding companies increasingly hired Sherpa guides, but the truly best-in-the-world climbers, and the ones with the *capital* to run guide companies, were still Europeans. Building up the knowledge of leading complex expeditions, and the money, takes longer than building up individual climbing skills.
By now, most guide companies are owned and run by Sherpas, and while there are still western companies, they’re a small percentage taking small groups and charging 10x more for it. Today, 99% of guides are Sherpas, and they’re better climbers than 95% of everyone else on the mountain. The Sherpa people, and Nepalis more broadly, own the himalayas now.
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