Outdoor Guide
You may have to pause your career for circumstances beyond your control but if you keep your dream alive, you might be able to resume your path of interest.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
LS was one of 11 children born to a shepherd and a homemaker in a village of Nepal. Her family couldn’t afford shoes for every child. “We had no television and no phone. I used to spend my day watching sheep and birds,” recalls LS.
CHILDHOOD THOUGHTS OF AN ADULT CAREER
The town where LS grew up was located at the base of several of the mountains within the range known as “The Alps”, containing some of the tallest mountains in the world. LS spent many hours on the slopes of Mount Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak at 27,825 feet. “I could see Mount Everest from my village,” notes LS.
CHALLENGE – PARENTAL DISAPPROVAL
Stuck at home, LS would escape the disapproving glare of her mother by venturing into the mountains barefoot and alone. When she returned, her worried mother often warned her that if by some miracle she weren’t eaten by a snow leopard, nobody would ever wish to marry her.
Fortunately, LS’ father appreciated her mental and physical strength. One spring, he sent her up above Makalu’s base camp to collect the spring lambs and yak calves before snow leopards found them. There she bumped into Sherpa men in technical clothing with ropes and ice axes, preparing to climb the mountain. She vowed to become one of them, even though Sherpa women were not offered those jobs at the time.
“I promised myself that I would reach the top of Everest one day,” LS recalls quietly vowing to herself.
EDUCATION
Pursuant to local custom and family tradition, only the family’s boys were sent to school.
FIRST CAREER JOB
LS started as a ‘porter’ at age 15, carrying heavy loads up steep mountains and within two years, was promoted to a ‘kitchen boy’ (ironically since she is a girl). But the male title illustrates LS’s unusual career path. For her new job, LS hiked and climbed all day, set up the kitchen tent and peeled onions and garlic for hours on end before serving guides and their clients, earning about $50 per month.
ASK FOR A PROMOTION AND YOU MAY GET IT!
About 10 years after becoming a porter, LS approached the future Deputy Prime Minister of her country (Nepal), the daughter of the current Prime Minister, with a pitch to fund the first Nepali-women-only Everest expedition. Following government funding approval, the seven-women team, known as the “Daughters of Everest”, began their journey in May of that year.
CHALLENGE – RISK OF INJURIES AND FATAL ACCIDENTS
On the day the team was scheduled to reach the summit of Mt. Everest, six of them were unable to proceed due to altitude sickness. LS went on to become the second Nepali woman to reach the summit and the first to make it back to base camp safely. (A female Nepali had reached the summit 7 years earlier but had died on her descent.)
The very next year, LS summited Everest again, less than three weeks after her mountain climbing guide mentor had slipped into a crevasse around the second base camp and died.
It was not the last time she would lose friends on the mountain.
LS was there in 2014 when a block of ice the size of a building sheared off Everest’s western slope. The resulting ice avalanche wiped out a Sherpa team. Sixteen died.
In another unfortunate event, LS was resting at the first camp when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck a year later, triggering several avalanches. The deadliest one swept through base camp, killing 22 people that day. Half were Nepali.
“I’ve lost many of my heroes, many of my best friends,” says LS.
CAREER DETOURS TO AWAIT AN OPPORTUNITY TO RETURN
LS’ climbing career took a turn when she married and moved to the United States, where together the husband and wife ran a roofing and painting business. LS was most comfortable doing the hard work: climbing ladders with shingles piled high on one shoulder, tearing apart old roofs and piecing together new ones. But her husband became abusive so she took her two daughters and fled to a local shelter, where they stayed for eight months.
Desperate to earn money to support herself and her daughters, LS took a job cleaning houses and eventually moved the family into a small apartment. Occasionally clients heard her last name – “Sherpa” is a name famous among mountain climbers – so she would nod politely and keep her accomplishments to herself.
LS took a job washing dishes in the commercial kitchen of a national grocery store chain. Co-workers gradually learned of her story because she would sometimes leave town to guide foreigners up Mount Everest, at the invitation of her cousin and brother, who had followed LS into the business and were now leading their own expedition agencies.
The money LS was earning from both the grocery store and guiding mountain climbers was enough to cover the living expenses for her family (not including her separated husband) and to add toward her daughters’ college savings.
Eventually LS found that she could earn more than the two part-time jobs by concentrating on being a mountain climbing guide full time. So, she quit the supermarket to try reaching the Mount Everest summit for the 10th time, which is the career sports equivalent in baseball for 3,000 hits or 500 home runs. Only 34 men ever achieved 10 summits; 26 of them were Nepali of Sherpa descent. LS wanted to shatter one more Himalayan ‘glass ceiling.’
CHALLENGE – LACK OF SPONSOR INTEREST TO SUPPORT A CAREER
As usual, LS had no commercial sponsors for her efforts. Lack of sponsorship is not a new issue in women’s climbing. If she were going to successfully summit the mountain again, she would need to do so with her own funding.
CHALLENGES FOR OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES – WEATHER AND CROWDS
When a three day weather window opened, it seemed that all the base camps had mobilized to push to the summit. “Everybody has a dream to reach the summit, but there is only one rope, “ LS said, “and there were so many traffic jams.”
LS passed 26,000 feet 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 (swelling, typically in hands and feet, when the heart cannot pump efficiently) – both of which can be deadly – rise with each passing hour. LS was breathing bottled oxygen, but those canisters only last so long.
When word of LS’ summit push reached base camp, her followers participated in a Hindu ritual to pray for her safe passage. LS had a walkie-talkie to communicate the exact moment she reached the summit (6:30 a.m.) but reaching the summit is only the halfway point in the overall adventure because the climber must still survive the return descent.
With 200 climbers coming up behind LS, she couldn’t afford to linger long. Out of food and water and utterly exhausted, her anxious mind trying to convince her to sit down and rest, LS fought that deadly impulse time and again by focusing on wanting to return to take care of her children.
She made it back to base camp and her children safely! Though her accomplishments were well publicized within the ‘climbing press’, sponsors still did not come calling. LS arrived back in the U.S. with no job and bills to pay. Her former grocery store employer had no job openings for several months so she had no choice but to clean houses again.
CAREER SATISFACTION
Despite her many career detours, LS didn’t consider that the world was treating her in any negative way. When her grocery store job opened up again, LS was already visualizing another spring season in the Himalayas, this time hoping to bring both her daughters to base camp, along with a team of girls from all over the world.
“I hope to bring 20 daughters – to teach them climbing skills and show them that all girls can climb mountains,” said LS. “If you work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are, to be able to achieve success by helping others find they can do things they and others thought were impossible.”
This career story is based on an article written by Bhadra Sharma and Adam Skolnick, published 1/31/23 by the NY Times.
