They called him Snow Leopard – Adventure Diary

Ang Rita Sherpa last climbed Everest on May 23, 1996. together with Göran Kropp, a few days after the disaster that claimed the lives of eight climbers. It was Ang Rita’s tenth Everest summit and the veteran mountain guide did not use bottled oxygen to ascend to the summit that day. This was not a big problem for him. Ang Rita also did not use bottled oxygen during any of his nine previous summit ascents, including his first. His 10 summits of Everest without supplemental oxygen (during the ascent) are a world record; Ang Rita also holds the world record as the only person to climb Everest without oxygen in winter.

It was as if he had been made to climb the highest mountain in the world.

He was born in 1948 in the mountain village of Yillajung, Nepal, to farmer parents. Ang Rita did not go to school because there was none available for him. Back then, he tended yaks in mountain pastures and transported goods to Tibet, gazing at the surrounding, snow-covered, impossibly high peaks.

At age 15, with no other means of earning income, Ang Rita left farming to work as a porter and help support his family. His first job was as a low-altitude porter serving mountaineers ascending Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest peak in the world. But soon after starting, a young Ang Rita was hired as a high-altitude porter for a climb, up to Dhaulagiri Camp III, situated at a crushing lung of 24,280 feet. Ang Rita made the trip without mountaineering training or equipment, including proper footwear.

Ang Rita realized that she had a natural talent for high altitude climbing. He wasn’t the only one. The mountaineers he worked with on that climb were so impressed by his confident ascent and bravery that they began calling him “snow leopard.”

“I felt that now I am a mountaineer willing to climb big mountains”, Ang Rita He later wrote about the experience.. “My success in reaching Camp III in Dhaulagiri made me feel that I can secure mountaineering as my profession in the future.”

For years, however, the sirdar, or expedition leaders who assigned porter duties, restricted him to lower elevation jobs, as he was still a teenager and a novice porter. The snow leopard bided its time, bowing its head and working, just as it put aside its ambition, waiting for its opportunity to advance towards the mountains. Surely, at that moment he already had his sights set on Everest.

After 15 years strictly as a porter, Ang Rita took on guiding duties and began helping mountaineers climbing Everest. On May 7, 1983, while working for a German-American climbing team, Ang Rita ascended to the summit of Everest, climbing without supplemental oxygen. It was his first time on the roof of the world and he rose breathing only the rarefied air that nature provides at 29,000 feet, an astonishing achievement. American climber David Breashears later recalled sharing bottled oxygen with Ang Rita while they slept at Camp IV before their summit push, although he did not use it while climbing. Breashears was clear, however, that he tells this story simply to clear up any misconceptions, not to diminish Ang Rita’s feat.

“I can’t think of a stronger climbing partner or Sherpa that I have more respect for than Ang Rita,” Breashears wrote.

Ang Rita kept returning to Everest. A year after his first ascent, Ang Rita ascended a new route to the south ridge. In December 1987, he made his winter effort to the summit, climbing again without oxygen, becoming the first and only person to climb in the brutal conditions of winter without bottled oxygen. During that expedition, Ang Rita and a Korean climber he was working with became lost and disoriented not far from the summit, at about 8,600 meters. The two men spent the night exposed to the elements, performing aerobic exercises to avoid freezing to death.

Still, Ang Rita continued to rise.

In addition to his 10 summits on Everest, Ang Rita climbed Dhaulagiri four times and Cho Oyu four times. He also summited Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world, and considered a much harder ascent than Everest, in winter and without oxygen.

“He defied science and human physiology,” Ang Tshering, former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association and a former associate of Ang Rita, said of the snow leopard.

After his promotion in 1996, Ang Rita hung up his boots.

“I now feel that I cannot live the life of an active mountaineer as I have for the past 15 years,” he wrote, although he expressed his desire to climb Everest again. For one reason or another, he never did.

Retired from high-altitude guiding, he and some fellow Sherpas started their own trekking company, a considerable feat for this man who grew up herding yaks, uneducated and barely able to write his own name when he began his high-altitude career.

Ang Rita was the most famous Sherpa after the legendary Tenzing Norgay, although his career was much longer and more extensive. According to Explorer’s Web, Norgay never embarked on a mountaineering expedition again after his historic ascent of Everest. Ang Rita built a career in mountaineering when most Sherpas were simply loading barriers, working anonymously in the background, witnessing the exploits of wealthy mountaineers. None of whom could match Ang Rita’s record for high altitude climbing breathing only with the power of their own lungs. Some of whom Ang Rita saw succumb to the deadly height.

“On several occasions in my life I have felt very sad when there were moments of fatal accidents that claimed the lives of my fellow mountaineers,” he wrote. “But I have always consoled myself by thinking that this is the life of a mountaineer.”

The snow leopard had three sons, a daughter and eight grandchildren. One of his sons, Karsang Namgyal Sherpa, died after returning from the summit of Everest in 2012.

His record for the number of Everest summits completed without bottled oxygen will likely persist long into the future. Sherpas who work in the mountains, and therefore make the most climbs, must now use oxygen for the safety of their paying clients. It is difficult to imagine anyone other than a Sherpa repeating the snow leopard’s feat.

Ang Rita died in September 2020, next to her daughter, in Kathmandu. The porter who was once told he had to remain a low-altitude worker until he proved himself breathed more on his own at over 29,000 feet than any other person who ever lived.