The Best American Sports Writing 2014(109)

Steck and Moro have blamed Mingma Tenzing’s initial pique on his exhaustion and frustration after working for two days in such extreme weather and his embarrassment over the fact that they were climbing so quickly, without Sherpa help. “He’s a leader, he’s losing face,” Steck said. “It’s the worst thing that can happen in Asian culture.”

“The fixing team is the best of the best, the Sherpa A-team,” Simonson said. “These are proud men. They see themselves as every bit as good as anyone out there. Clearly, they felt disrespected and got really worked up over it. You go to a man’s house and disrespect them, and, well—this is their house.”

Steck and Moro, by climbing alpine style, may appear to be self-sufficient, but they use the fixed ropes and ladders in the icefall, and they rely on porters to help establish their comfortable, well-appointed camps on the lower parts of the mountain. While they make videos for their sponsors of themselves hiking up to base camp in trail shoes and carrying only day packs, somewhere outside the frame Sherpas are lugging their batteries and cheese. This occasionally irks the Sherpas, whose indispensability is integral to their economic well-being.

Steck, like many others, has tried to view the incident in the light of the wider predicament of Everest: overcrowding, money, and, as a result, uneasy relations between Sherpas and Westerners, as well as between professionals and commercial operators. He considers himself to have been an accidental catalyst.

This year, on the Nepal side, there were almost 400 foreigners with climbing permits, and more than 400 Sherpas. An infamous photograph last year of a seemingly endless conga line of climbers trudging up the Lhotse Face via the fixed line conveyed the extent to which the mountain had become a circus. Last week, the wait to climb the Hillary Step, the last difficult pitch before the final summit ridge, was more than two hours.

Everest has evolved into a seasonal society dominated by the interests of the commercial guiding companies, which for the most part are owned and operated by foreigners. Clients pay as much as $110,000 apiece to be led up Everest. The companies in turn contract with the Sherpas, as porters, cooks, and mountain guides. A large portion of the clients’ fees goes to bureaucrats in Kathmandu rather than to the Sherpas. They observe the foreigners with their luxury accommodations at base camp, their satellite phones and computers, and they know enough to wonder whether they’re being gulled. If it’s their house, how come they’re not the ones who get to run it? The younger generation, in particular, may be less inured than their forebears to the paternalism inherent in the relationship with the mikarus, or “white eyes.” Walter Bonatti, the great Italian alpinist, suggested that the early conquest of the Himalayas was a kind of colonialism; if so, this may be the era of postcolonial blowback.





Melissa Arnot, whom Steck credits with saving his life, called in from base camp last week. A few days before, she and Tshering Dorje Sherpa, with whom she is climbing this season, had made it to 27,000 feet before high winds turned them back. (No one summited that day.) Arnot’s goal this spring had been to summit twice; she was planning to head back up after a few days of recuperating at base camp. (Three days later, she made it.)

Arnot had been staying with Steck, Moro, and Griffith at Camp 2. The day they went up the Lhotse Face, she went down to the IMG camp and listened in as tempers flared over the radio. She is certain that Simone never challenged anyone to “fucking fight.” “Nothing Jon, Ueli, or Simone has said has been inaccurate,” she said. “It’s all really sad. They were treated like criminals for doing nothing. The apology that’s owed is one for the violence. They were forced to leave, ostracized, and their reputations were battered. The commercial expeditions owe them an apology.”

She went on, “These other accounts are embarrassing, claiming that Simone and Ueli and Jon are racist and classist. It’s a bold and arrogant statement to make about people you don’t even know.”

She said that one Sherpa who had been a friend now refused to look at her. Still, she added, “I don’t think this is a rift between Westerner and Sherpa, or part of an underlying racial and cultural divide. This is a fight between boys on the slope.”





A few days later, I spoke on the phone with Dawa Steven Sherpa, the expedition leader for Asian Trekking, which is owned by his family and is one of just a few Nepali guiding companies. He is 29. His father is Sherpa, his mother is Belgian. He had helped arrange the base-camp meeting after the incident at Camp 2.

Dawa was in base camp on the day of the melee, but was in constant contact that day via radio with his two Sherpas on the fixing team. They too say they heard Moro say “fucking fight,” but Dawa allows that their English isn’t perfect.