It’s cold today – very cold. The high temperature along Utah’s Wasatch Front is supposed to hover somewhere around twenty degrees Fahrenheit, but we won’t see that until late this afternoon. This early February morning the temperature is in the single digits. And it’s gray. The inversion has left a thick haze of pigeon-colored smog hanging in the air that obscures the top half of the mountains and gives the whole valley a claustrophobic feel, like all of Salt Lake City has buried itself under a drab wool blanket.
As I board the train headed north into the city, there is a familiar man sitting toward the front of the car. This is the first time I have noticed how small he is. His frame seems slight and standing he is maybe five-foot-four, tops. He looks comfortably mismatched in his olive green pants, blue parka and a bright red beanie pulled over his ears. His tea-colored skin and hard lines give away the fact that he didn’t grow up in the privilege that Americans are accustomed to, but his ethnicity isn’t easily placed. At first glance one might assume he was Mexican, but there is a long look to his face that could place him from Asian descent. This is the first time I have seen him with a mustache, and the silver accents at the corner of his mouth make him look older than his fifty years.
The kid sitting next to him doesn’t give him a second glance. He has a cigarette behind his right ear and gauged earrings stretching holes in his ears that he could fit his little finger through. His daypack has a partially visible patch that says “X-treme” and I have to think to myself that this kid literally doesn’t know extreme when he sees it.
Had the skater kid looked closer, the clothes may have given Apa away. His parka is a Marmot jacket – probably $800 at any of the ubiquitous outdoor skiing and camping stores in the valley, his socks are high-tech neoprene – specially engineered to insulate and wick the perspiration away from your feet to keep them warm and dry. But it’s his beanie that is the real clue. It has a small black embroidered logo that says “Sherpa Gear” on the front. He didn’t purchase any of them himself, of course. He earned them. They were gifts from sponsors who were willing to outfit him in the hope that their logo would be visible in the photos or video that news crews and documentary filmmakers took of him.
Apa isn’t Mexican either. In fact he’s from the other side of the world, geographically as far from Mexico as you can get. He is Sherpa, a small ethnic group living in the mountains of Nepal famous for trekking Westerners to the top of the highest mountain in the world: Mount Everest. Apa knows the mountain well. He has stood on its summit seventeen times - more than any other man on earth. Four of those ascents were without oxygen, a feat considered suicide by anyone who hasn’t spent most of their life at elevations that would make most of us light-headed just to visit. As Apa says, “I would not recommend it.”
No one on the train would ever guess that the slight-framed man at the front of the car spent an afternoon last May lounging on folding canvas chairs on the southern face of Everest, having lunch with famed mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary at 17,000 feet while avalanches crashed down the impossibly massive cliffs of the South Col in the background. It was the last time Hillary, the first man to ever make it to Everest’s 27,000-foot summit, would ever visit the mountain. When “Sir Edmund” died earlier this month, and news organizations around the world needed a quote to eulogize him, they called Apa.
I met Apa through work. In the spring of 2007, Brett Prettyman, the Tribune’s outdoors editor told me that Apa and his brother in law, Lhakpa, who also lives in Salt Lake City were planning an Everest expedition. The two of them make a formidable pair. Lhakpa holds the record for the fastest Everest round-trip to the summit and back down in just under 11 hours - about two weeks faster than the average Westerner. All the other summits they have between them were for other people, hauling gear up the mountain to set up the four camps along the 10,000 ft. elevation gain for climbers to bivouac and acclimate before making the next stage. The average adventurer will go up to one camp, stay as long as they can at that elevation and then return to base camp to give their bodies a rest from the strain of the low pressure and lack of oxygen then hike up to the next stage, acclimate there and do the process all over again. Most Sherpas don’t have the acclimation issue. Some villages in the Nepal highlands are as high as the highest peaks in the continental United States. Living at that altitude gives them a 14,000-foot advantage.
The trek they were planning this time was for them, for all Sherpas, really. Despite the fact that a Sherpa can make the trip from base to camp IV, the highest camp before the summit, six to ten times for every time their clients stay there, and it is the Sherpas who run the rope to the summit that keeps a reckless client from blowing off the ice-packed trial up the South Col, traditionally – and quite arrogantly - it is the trek’s captain that takes the credit for conquering the mountain. This time there would be no client. Theirs would be the first all-Sherpa expedition up Everest. Money from sponsors would be donated to provide healthcare and education for Sherpa children. The names in the record books would be Sherpa names. The expedition crew had already been aptly named the SuperSherpas and the only westerners on the trip would be their physician, Roger Kehr and the base camp coordinator, Jerry Mika.
We were doing a special site online that would track the expedition’s progress from Salt Lake City to Katmandu and then from base camp to the summit of Everest. Every day Roger and Jerry would send dispatches from base camp for us to post online. The dispatches were short for the most part because a satellite connection from the middle of the Himalayas isn’t cheap, but Jerry still managed to send us photos of the expedition regularly. The dizzying maze of the Khumbu ice fall, the massive walls of granite that make up the southern face of Everest and the small tent city of more than 600 adventurers that planned to climb to the top of the world in the small window of favorable conditions in May, between the unbearable winter cold and the summer winds and storms, seemed as close as Timpanogos peak, that I see out my living room window, when I opened my e-mail every morning.
Apa has only been in the country a couple of years. On one of his expeditions, he was the lead Sherpa for Brian O’Connor, the son of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, on his expedition to summit Everest. The two men formed a bond during the expedition and afterwards, O’Connor offered to sponsor Apa’s oldest son’s college education in the United States. Apa pulled his family up from its roots in the Himalayan highlands and moved them to America. Jerry Mika was working for Sherpa Gear at the time and approached Apa to represent the company at the annual Winter Outdoor Retailer’s Show in Salt Lake City, so the family moved to Utah and Apa’s son enrolled in the University of Utah.
Apa now works in an injection molding factory in Salt Lake. The owner, an avid outdoorsman himself, hired him with the understanding that Apa would sometimes be absent through April and May, when he books excursions to climb the mountain where he is truly at home.
Apa is planning another expedition this spring. It will be his eighteenth – four more than any other man alive. He hasn’t told his wife yet because, he says, she worries too much. According to Apa, she thinks he is going as a base camp coordinator and will stay at the foot of the mountain, but something tells me she knows him better than that. Anyone who talks to Apa about Everest can’t help but be infected by his enthusiasm. His weathered face becomes animated as he talks about the other Sherpas, excited when he describes navigating the ice falls like working a giant puzzle and grave when he talks about those who have been lost to the mountain. He’s disturbed by the lack of respect of the new climbers, but encouraged by the efforts now to protect Everest now that environmentally friendlier eco-expeditions are in fashion.
As we rock along on the train, a young med student is sitting across the aisle and after the “X-treme” kid gets off the train, he moves over to meet Apa. Turns out, his sports medicine class spent a few weeks studying Apa. As part of the SuperSherpas expedition, Apa and Lhakpa went through a barrage of tests at the University of Utah to study their legendary endurance, lung capacity and blood oxygenation levels. The information is now apparently used in medical classes as the upper limits the human body can achieve under normal development.
As Apa gets off the train, I wish him well on his upcoming expedition. He gives me a slight bow and a modest smile before he steps into the crowd on the platform and disappears completely behind a large man with a bright red Utes jacket.
May 22, 2008: Brett Prettyman runs to my desk to tell me that Apa Sherpa just sent him a dispatch from Everest. After a night of perfect weather and starry skies, Apa’s crew pushed from camp IV to the summit and secured his place in history – again.
A cheer goes up as Prettyman finishes reading the short, matter-of-fact account. No one who has met him can be unaffected by the amazing reserves of endurance and tenacity in this small and humble man – including a room full of jaded journalists. And everyone is elated to hear that he made it safely back to base camp.
Apa has already mentioned off-handedly that he would like to complete twenty summits. Just don’t tell his wife.