Nepalese climber Kami Rita Sherpa yesterday reached the top of Mount Everest for the 27th time, reclaiming the record for the most summits of the world’s highest mountain.
“He successfully reached the summit this morning guiding a Vietnamese climber,” said Mingma Sherpa of Seven Summit Treks, his expedition organizer.
Nepal is home to eight of the world’s 10 highest peaks, including the 8,849m Everest, and welcomes hundreds of adventurers each spring, when temperatures are warm and winds are typically calm.
Photo: AFP
Earlier yesterday, British guide Kenton Cool reached the world’s highest point for the 17th time, extending his own record for the most summits by a non-Nepalese.
Meanwhile, a 46-year-old Moldovan climber died on the mountain the same day — the fifth fatality of the season.
Authorities have issued 478 Everest permits to foreign climbers this year, the US$11,000 fee part of total costs for a summit ranging from US$45,000 to US$200,000.
Since most need a guide, more than 900 people — a record — are to try to summit this season, which runs until early next month.
The 53-year-old Kami Rita Sherpa had held the overall title since 2018, when he ascended Everest for the 22nd time, passing the previous mark he shared with two other Sherpa climbers, both of whom have since retired.
On Sunday, Pasang Dawa Sherpa, 46, tied the record by reaching the top for the 26th time.
A guide for more than two decades, Kami Rita Sherpa first summited in 1994 when working for a commercial expedition.
Since then, he has climbed Everest almost every year, several times leading the first rope-fixing team to open the route to the top.
“These records were made not with an intention to make them, but during my work as a guide,” Kami Rita Sherpa said last month as he headed to base camp.
Dubbed “the Everest man,” Kami Rita Sherpa was born in 1970 in Thame, a village in the Himalayas renowned as a breeding ground for successful mountaineers.
Growing up, Kami Rita Sherpa watched his father and his brother don climbing gear to join expeditions as mountain guides, and was soon following in their footsteps.
In 2019, he reached the summit twice in the span of six days.
Kami Rita Sherpa’s client yesterday was reportedly Chinh Chu, a Vietnamese billionaire who made his fortune in finance, while Cool guided Richard Walker, executive chairman of British supermarket chain Iceland Foods, to the top.
Nepalese guides, usually ethnic Sherpas from the valleys around Everest, are considered the backbone of the climbing industry and bear huge risks to carry equipment and food, fix ropes and repair ladders.
Cool, 49, first climbed Everest in 2004, and his 16th ascent last year gave him the sole record for the most summits by a non-Nepalese climber, but he said then that he was “surprised” by the attention.
“In reality, it’s not that amazing,” he said, pointing out that many Sherpa guides had stood on the peak more often than he.
“People go: ‘It’s a world record.’ It’s not a world record,” he said. “It’s just that I happen to hold the non-Sherpa record, for whatever that is worth, which in my mind, [is] not very much.”
The Moldovan climber died at Camp 4, said Expedition Himalaya, which arranged his permit.
“He felt unwell at South Col, and despite many attempts to provide him aid he passed away,” the company said.
Three Nepalese climbers died on the mountain last month when a block of glacial ice fell and swept them into a deep crevasse as they were crossing the treacherous Khumbu icefall as part of a supply mission.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS