You may not be able to climb Everest like Lhakpa Sherpa, the subject of a new Netflix documentary — but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a good look
Ed Grenby - 23 July 2024
If I should die on the slopes of Mount Everest, it will be from eating too many deep-fried Mars Bar pasties. Not the most glorious end, perhaps, but a pleasant one (they taste surprisingly good) – and a valuable reminder that there are ways of tackling the world’s highest peak that don’t involve great danger, hardship or even any climbing.
Watch Mountain Queen: the Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, new on Netflix this week, and you’ll see a tale of true heroism. Sherpa was the first Nepali woman to summit Everest and get back down again, remains the only woman to have conquered the peak ten times, and has achieved these feats while somehow also being a single mum of three, working in a grocery store in Connecticut in the US. But in fact Everest is accessible to almost anyone – even a keen consumer of nougat-and-caramel products like me.
True, you’ll have to be happy with Everest Base Camp instead of the summit itself, but the flip side of that is that you’ll need no climbing expertise: Base Camp, on a plateau at the foot of the mountain itself, can be achieved with just a week or two’s walking and, OK, a few hill-climbs, but nothing you wouldn’t find in the Chilterns. And these days you can do it in relative comfort, too, thanks to high-end tour operators entering the market (try 360-expeditions.com or elegant-resorts.co.uk/adventure-boutique).
Book with one of these, and your options are flexible. On my trip, in a group of six, ranging in age from 33 to 64, we overnighted in sometimes unheated Sherpa teahouses, ate simple rice and beans for pretty much every meal, and took our chances with the long-drop toilets. (If you think that doesn’t sound high-end, bear in mind that most tourists trekking this route are camping under canvas – and that everyone has guides and porters to carry their bags.)
However much/little you spend, a glimpse of Everest remains the height of exclusivity: with no road or runway within a week’s walk, the only way to Base Camp is the medium-to-hard way, on two legs, so you’re in the most select of clubs. And not everyone who sets out on the fortnight-odd round-trip makes it to Base Camp (altitude sickness stops many who try to do it too fast, though it isn’t dangerous as long as you heed the warnings and stop climbing). Even if you dropped out on day one, however, you’d still have experienced something special: flying in from the Nepali capital, Kathmandu, means landing at one of the world’s more white-knuckle airstrips, in the mountain town of Lukla, already high among the god-like Himalayas.
Image: Sacred monkey family on railing with prayer flags at Kathmandu Swayambhunath temple
At first, we’re hiking five hours a day, climbing only gently, stopping frequently for tea, worrying more about our tans than our blisters, and staying nights in perfectly pleasant little teahouses – more youth hostel than hotel, but with hot showers and decent beds. Day four is a rest day, in the last real town we’ll see – Namche Bazaar – then day five takes us up to around cloud level, and the only real signs of civilisation henceforth are Buddhist stupa domes and prayer wheels: spin them and a bell tolls, signifying that your blessing has ascended to heaven. Coloured prayer flags are everywhere, fluttering encouragingly in the gentle wind.
By day seven, the teahouses have no hot water, and are heated from one little stove burning dried cakes of yak dung because we passed the treeline days ago. And by day nine, the thin mountain air is making it hard to catch my breath: I’m too puffed even to mutter a “Hi” to other trekkers, let alone the traditional Nepali “Namaste” greeting (which translates as “I worship the lotus flower within you”. That, as Tony Hancock might have put it, is half a lungful).
Day ten gets us to Gorak Shep, the highest village in the world, and an optional extra two-hour climb up a mountain called Kala Patthar. It’s the best place for non-mountaineers to get a view of Everest’s summit, so it’s optional in the same way as the Acropolis is optional on your first visit to Athens. And it’s the highlight of my trip, seeing Everest’s peak sparkle in the last rays of the dying sun, before it paints the mountain’s immense western face a parade of reds, oranges, yellows, bronzes, coppers and rose-golds. (After which the stars – more than I’ve ever seen anywhere else – turn it platinum.)
Next day is Base Camp itself: quite an anticlimax, with nothing there but rock if you arrive outside the season for summit attempts. Nothing, anyway, but rock… and a massive sense of achievement.
It makes the four-day hike back down to Lukla seem like you’re walking on air; I feel, if I’m honest, like a hero. I may not be beating Lhakpa Sherpa to any summit records; but I’d like to see her put away as many celebratory Mars Bar pasties as me.
If I should die on the slopes of Mount Everest, it will be from eating too many deep-fried Mars Bar pasties. Not the most glorious end, perhaps, but a pleasant one (they taste surprisingly good) – and a valuable reminder that there are ways of tackling the world’s highest peak that don’t involve great danger, hardship or even any climbing.
Watch Mountain Queen: the Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, new on Netflix this week, and you’ll see a tale of true heroism. Sherpa was the first Nepali woman to summit Everest and get back down again, remains the only woman to have conquered the peak ten times, and has achieved these feats while somehow also being a single mum of three, working in a grocery store in Connecticut in the US. But in fact Everest is accessible to almost anyone – even a keen consumer of nougat-and-caramel products like me.
True, you’ll have to be happy with Everest Base Camp instead of the summit itself, but the flip side of that is that you’ll need no climbing expertise: Base Camp, on a plateau at the foot of the mountain itself, can be achieved with just a week or two’s walking and, OK, a few hill-climbs, but nothing you wouldn’t find in the Chilterns. And these days you can do it in relative comfort, too, thanks to high-end tour operators entering the market (try 360-expeditions.com or elegant-resorts.co.uk/adventure-boutique).
Book with one of these, and your options are flexible. On my trip, in a group of six, ranging in age from 33 to 64, we overnighted in sometimes unheated Sherpa teahouses, ate simple rice and beans for pretty much every meal, and took our chances with the long-drop toilets. (If you think that doesn’t sound high-end, bear in mind that most tourists trekking this route are camping under canvas – and that everyone has guides and porters to carry their bags.)
However much/little you spend, a glimpse of Everest remains the height of exclusivity: with no road or runway within a week’s walk, the only way to Base Camp is the medium-to-hard way, on two legs, so you’re in the most select of clubs. And not everyone who sets out on the fortnight-odd round-trip makes it to Base Camp (altitude sickness stops many who try to do it too fast, though it isn’t dangerous as long as you heed the warnings and stop climbing). Even if you dropped out on day one, however, you’d still have experienced something special: flying in from the Nepali capital, Kathmandu, means landing at one of the world’s more white-knuckle airstrips, in the mountain town of Lukla, already high among the god-like Himalayas.
Image: Sacred monkey family on railing with prayer flags at Kathmandu Swayambhunath temple
At first, we’re hiking five hours a day, climbing only gently, stopping frequently for tea, worrying more about our tans than our blisters, and staying nights in perfectly pleasant little teahouses – more youth hostel than hotel, but with hot showers and decent beds. Day four is a rest day, in the last real town we’ll see – Namche Bazaar – then day five takes us up to around cloud level, and the only real signs of civilisation henceforth are Buddhist stupa domes and prayer wheels: spin them and a bell tolls, signifying that your blessing has ascended to heaven. Coloured prayer flags are everywhere, fluttering encouragingly in the gentle wind.
By day seven, the teahouses have no hot water, and are heated from one little stove burning dried cakes of yak dung because we passed the treeline days ago. And by day nine, the thin mountain air is making it hard to catch my breath: I’m too puffed even to mutter a “Hi” to other trekkers, let alone the traditional Nepali “Namaste” greeting (which translates as “I worship the lotus flower within you”. That, as Tony Hancock might have put it, is half a lungful).
Day ten gets us to Gorak Shep, the highest village in the world, and an optional extra two-hour climb up a mountain called Kala Patthar. It’s the best place for non-mountaineers to get a view of Everest’s summit, so it’s optional in the same way as the Acropolis is optional on your first visit to Athens. And it’s the highlight of my trip, seeing Everest’s peak sparkle in the last rays of the dying sun, before it paints the mountain’s immense western face a parade of reds, oranges, yellows, bronzes, coppers and rose-golds. (After which the stars – more than I’ve ever seen anywhere else – turn it platinum.)
Next day is Base Camp itself: quite an anticlimax, with nothing there but rock if you arrive outside the season for summit attempts. Nothing, anyway, but rock… and a massive sense of achievement.
It makes the four-day hike back down to Lukla seem like you’re walking on air; I feel, if I’m honest, like a hero. I may not be beating Lhakpa Sherpa to any summit records; but I’d like to see her put away as many celebratory Mars Bar pasties as me.