Commercialization of Everest brings opportunity, pressure to Sherpas carrying the weight of climbing season
Everest, Earth's highest mountain, needs no introduction. At 29,032 feet, it sits not only at the top of the world, but at the top of countless bucket lists. Forty thousand people trek to Everest Base Camp in Nepal every year. This past spring, we joined them – hiking for 10 days, sometimes on all fours, often barely breathing. And we could not have done it without the Sherpas. Indigenous to the Everest region, Sherpa is an ethnic group, a last name and a job description. Often cast as "superhuman," they are the porters and guides who risk their lives to help others reach the summit - with little recognition. Our guide, Nima Rinji Sherpa, is part of a new generation hoping to change that…
High in the heart of the Himalayas sits Lukla, one of the most dangerous airports in the world.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: You see how short that is…
Cecilia Vega: It's incredible. It doesn't look very safe.
Where the short, unforgiving runway is carved into the edge of a cliff, there is no margin for error.
It is the start of what will be a 10-day trek to Base Camp - at 17,598 feet elevation.
We meet our porters, who strap 800 pounds of our camera gear to their backs and heads before setting off on the trail.
Nima Rinji Sherpa, the youngest person to summit the world's 14 highest mountains, has trekked up this mountain more times than he can count. A veteran, who is just 19.
We began our journey dodging animals at 9,337 feet. Prayer wheels, believed to send blessings with every turn, mark the way.
Out here, you learn the mountain etiquette quickly. When you hear the warning bells, you get out of the way — fast. Porters, often overloaded with almost twice their body weight, rule the fast lane.
All in, it will be a 50-mile trek and 8,261 foot climb to Everest Base Camp, an ungraceful uphill grind. We've spent months training for it, studied the route, and yet… nothing prepares you for this…
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Just look down.
Cecilia: Nope, I am not… I am not looking down, don't talk. Oh God. Oh! It's windy. I do not like this at all.
Another suspension bridge dangles 45 stories above a roaring gorge below.
Cecilia Vega: You can't be scared of anything if you do what you do.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Of course, you are scared but you have to balance it in a way that you can be confident you know when you do things.
Cecilia Vega: What do you tell yourself when you get scared?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Just trying to calm myself down and just realize who I am.
With every step, we move deeper into Sherpa country and closer to the shadow of Everest.
Cecilia Vega: Is there a spiritual connection to Mount Everest?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: I think if there is no Everest, we will still be farming, we'll still be looking after the yaks, the goats. And the mountain has given us, like a meaning to life I think.
Cecilia Vega: Mount Everest has given the Sherpa people a meaning.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Yeah
Almost 150,000 Sherpas live in Nepal - less than 1% of the country's population. Renowned for their endurance, they thrive where oxygen is scarce. Among them, one name rises above all.
Cecilia Vega: Did you grow up learning about Tenzing Norgay?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Yes. We had to learn about him
In 1953, Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa from Nepal, guided Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand on the first ever summit of Everest. It was among the most defining moments of the 20th century.. And yet while it cemented Hillary in history, Norgay's contribution was largely overlooked.
Cecilia Vega: What does he mean to the Sherpa people?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: I think it was because of him, like, who made the Sherpa a brand today. And, for me, he was always a very big motivation just to understand that, okay, maybe we can also be someone like him.
Today, Nima is chasing the recognition that once eluded his idol. It doesn't hurt that he comes from mountaineering royalty. His dad holds the record as the youngest person to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen. His uncles were the first brothers to conquer the world's 14 highest mountains. We are in good hands as we arrive into Namche, at 11,300 feet. Here, we meet Nima's uncle, Mingma Sherpa, a former yak farmer who started as a porter, earning a dollar a day carrying loads for foreigners.
Mingma Sherpa: I come to Kathmandu, carry the load, by porter, 30kg, 70kg. I show off the people, "I am strong." I carry, like, 90kg, too.
Cecilia Vega: Almost 200 pounds.
He climbed, literally, to the ranks of Sherpa guide – a top job reserved for the strongest and most skilled.
Mingma Sherpa: Every step is d- do and die. Every step is maybe we are alive or not alive.
Cecilia Vega: Every step is that dangerous?
Mingma Sherpa: Yeah. It's dangerous. Sometimes, it's nighttime work. Sometimes, it's avalanche. But our goal is summit.
In 2009, Mingma and his brothers started their own company, Seven Summit Treks, responsible for nearly a third of all Everest expeditions. Now, they want to prove that Sherpas are more than indispensable guides to Western climbers. And they are banking on Nima to show that Sherpas can be climbing stars, too.
At 16, while most teenagers his age were in a classroom, Nima was doing this: climbing into what's known as the death zone: that's when the altitude is above 26,000 feet and the body's organs begin to shut down, minute by minute. For his first summit – in 2022, Nima climbed - and recorded on his way up - Nepal's Mount Manaslu.
Cecilia Vega: So that first climb, how hard was it? Don't say, "Easy."
Nima Rinji Sherpa: It was hard. But every second, I was excited, because I never knew what, what I was going to see after 10 meter. Of course, the main problem that I had was I had a lot of muscle cramps. And I– I think it's mostly because I was too young for my age to start at that time. I was sleeping at night, I had some pain in my lungs, some pain on my heart. But for some reason, I don't know why, I kept wanting to go up. And I never felt like I was going to, not summit.
Even in the face of avalanches and serious injuries, it took Nima just two years to scale all of the world's 14 tallest mountains. The previous record-holder did it in nine years.
Cecilia Vega: What does it take to do this?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: There has to be a lot of-- meaning. Why do you want to do it? And because many times, the mountains will start to question you, "Why you are here?"
Cecilia Vega: The mountains question you?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: The mountain question you, because when you go to Everest, you can feel the energy that you are so small. At that time, you have to have a really-- like-- like, a iron heart to know why you are here. You cannot say, "I'm just here for fun." You cannot. That's the worst thing that you can convince yourself.
Cecilia Vega: So why are you there?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: I was on a mission to finish all the 14. And I knew I-- I belong in this industry. Everyone has their own reason. And the reason has to be really big that you don't - you don't give up.
Despite the achievement, big brands never offered endorsements, the way they have for Western mountaineers who reach summits.
Cecilia Vega: Do you think the fact that you haven't received any of those endorsements has to do with where you're coming from?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Maybe, yes, because of that. But I know my time is going to come. I don't want to rush.
Cecilia Vega: It sounds like the same, deliberate, considered approach you take to those mountains, the one you've taught us walking up these—these mountains.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Yes.
By day five, it is a battle between our lungs and gravity…
Cecilia Vega: You feel it in your legs. You said push off the poles, right?
Cecilia Vega: You're not out of breath, I am.
We are at 13,500 feet elevation…
Cecilia Vega: F*** me
At this point, our inner thoughts are no longer being held in…
Cecilia Vega: This is really hard. They can catch me on the camera taking a break, I don't care.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: It just looks close but there is another…
Cecilia Vega: More stairs. I have to emotionally prepare.
Cecilia Vega: It gets a lot harder?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Final way to Phortse.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Steep. Cecilia: Very steep. You're used to it.
After eight hours of trekking, we arrive in Phortse, the remote village where Nima trained to become a mountaineer.
We are welcomed with ceremonial scarves, a symbol of honor and respect, and greeted by Nima's mentor, Conrad Anker, one of America's top mountaineers – who returns to this village each year.
Cecilia Vega: What a beautiful home you have. Wow. It's just breathtaking, literally breathtaking.
Conrad Anker: Warm up on this wall here.
Anker opened the Khumbu Climbing Center in Phortse in 2003 to provide Sherpas with specialized technical training to improve safety on high-altitude expeditions.
Nima graduated top of his class.
Conrad Anker: We would show up in fancy gear and all the best stuff. And we would see our staff there with worn-out gear or not the proper gear – and then not having the technical knowledge. And for me it was eye-opening.
Cecilia Vega: Is there an inequity between Western climbers and Nepalese climbers.
Conrad Anker: Oh, yeah. And it's not just sponsors. It's the value of what they do. I mean a Western climber dies. And this is the community rallies up. And there's fundraising. And yet for the Nepali climbers, it's not recognized in that same sense.
After a night in a teahouse, we leave Phortse behind. Our porters are already lined up the mountainside, as we begin the push toward 14,500 feet, taller than most mountains in the United States.
We are just 10 miles now from Everest Base Camp, but we cannot go on without a stop that has become tradition for Nima before he summits: a 600-year-old Buddhist monastery, where we receive a blessing meant to keep us safe.
The monks tie a thin coord around our neck - a simple thread to protect us on the mountain.
We are ready for Everest.
Once viewed as a near impossible feat in the most brutal conditions achieved only by the most daring, climbing Mount Everest has shifted from a symbol of ultimate adventure to something mere mortals can accomplish - and take a summit selfie to prove it. Today, Everest is a booming, multimillion-dollar, high-altitude industry, with guided climbs fetching six-figure sums. Base Camp has become a tourist destination, as we learned when we made the trek in May. The commercialization has brought wealth and opportunity to the Sherpas of Nepal, but also pressure, as they carry the weight of the climbing season.
It is peak Everest season – that narrow window in May when the weather holds just long enough for climbers to make their move up to the top of the world.
We have been walking for eight days, and are now crossing a critical threshold when the body begins to falter.
As we gain altitude, every breath delivers less oxygen. In extreme cases – when the brain swells and lungs fill with fluid – severe altitude sickness can be fatal.
It's why we don't take the easy way up in a helicopter. The body needs the slow ascent to acclimatize.
The hillside ahead is covered in memorials for those who never made it back from Everest's summit. One in three deaths on Everest is a Sherpa. In 2023 alone, 18 people died - the most in one year - so high up, their bodies are almost impossible to recover.
Our guide, Nima Rinji Sherpa, the youngest climber to summit the world's 14 highest mountains, knows this all too well.
Cecilia Vega: It seems like death is inevitable in what you do.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: I have seen many people—pass away. And, yeah, it's always—it's always there. And—but you believe that you're not going to die.
Cecilia Vega: You use death almost as a motivator?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: You have to be more careful when you're in the mountains - because every time you go, you are so energized, and you feel like nothing is going to happen to you. And then when you see someone pass away or – you know, then you feel like, "Okay, this is – this is real."
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Final day of the trek.
Cecilia Vega: Yeah we did really well so far.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: I'm very emotional, about to cry. But…
Cecilia Vega: Don't say that.
Today is the first time we'll be touching 5,000 meters – 16,404 feet – to be exact. Even up here, in this glacial valley, Nima is a celebrity.
This high up, besides the tourists, it's you, the yaks, and the altitude… that crushes your chest.
Cecilia Vega: It'll take me about 12 days to get up this hill.
We're mere hours from Base Camp…
Cecilia Vega: It's gotten much colder.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Tonight, maybe minus 15
Cecilia: Minus 18?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Maybe
Cecilia Vega: Oof. That's brutal.
Our porters, who carried all our gear up this mountain, have already made it to Base Camp and are heading back down, and on to their next job.
Cecilia Vega: Look at them, they're running down the mountain. I'm barely making it up and they're coming back down already. This is amazing.
This is the final approach, less a trail than a passage to where the high Himalaya begins.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Just, you can see now, Base Camp.
Cecilia Vega: There it is. We did it.
After 10 days of climbing, we catch our first glimpse of Everest Base Camp. It sits on top of constantly shifting and melting ice.
The world's highest glacier - the Khumbu glacier.
Cecilia Vega: It's freezing, my nose feels like it's going to fall off.
Cecilia Vega: This is where you try to not fall in the glacier lake. Every rock counts.
Here, at 17,600 feet above sea level, every breath delivers only half the oxygen. It's like breathing through a straw.
Our lips are blue, a sign that we are not getting enough oxygen, but we've made it.
Cecilia Vega: Welcome to Everest Base Camp.
Cecilia Vega: I was like, am I going to make this? Do I need a helicopter? So nice to see you. Namaste. Thank you.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: We're officially here now.
Cecilia Vega: Oh my goodness.
From a few dozen successful summits in the early 1980s to a near record - almost 500 climbing permits issued this season, Everest has never been more commercialized.
And climbers go to new extremes to stand out, such as the British team who, this season, summited Everest in less than a week by using Xenon gas to boost oxygen levels in their blood.
Cecilia Vega: Has tourism changed Everest for better or worse?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: For Nepal of course Everest has been the blessing. For Sherpas, for the country, the biggest revenue source.
Cecilia Vega: It's a big part of your family's livelihood.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: You have to understand that it's not only us who is getting– business, but that taxi driver, the heli pilot, the lodges, the porters, the whole economy's sustaining, you know. So you cannot s-- just say that only we are profiting. So everyone is profiting from this.
Commercial expeditions have transformed Everest into high-altitude luxury. Today, some climbers pay up to $180,000 for premium packages that come with private chefs, a movie theatre and espresso machines.
For better or worse, this is Everest now. And starting in 2013, Nima's father, Tashi Lakpa Sherpa, helped build it, turning an isolated mountainside into an economy.
What was once a weeks-long, bone-chilling wait at Base Camp for a summit window - that lull in the weather when it's safe to attempt a move to the top - can now feel like summer camp on a glacier.
Small luxuries aside, two nights here test every ounce of resilience. Breathing, eating, and sleeping are struggles. and the bathroom is a bed of rocks in a flapping tent. The wind is brutal, the cold piercing, and the terrain offers no shelter from the elements.
As always, it's the Sherpas who shoulder the burden, especially on expeditions that extend beyond ours and push up to higher camps and ultimately to the summit, a journey that can take weeks.
Through it, they navigate Everest's deadliest terrain: the Khumbu Icefall, a maze of shifting towers of ice and bottomless crevasses. It's the elite Sherpas called icefall doctors, who go in first. They build the route with ladders lashed together over sheer drops. Every step is a gamble. Sherpas cross far more than any climber. risking everything for someone else's summit.
To make it safer, innovation is taking flight.
For the first time, expedition companies, including Seven Summit Treks, are using drones to ferry loads in high altitudes.
Cecilia Vega: The drones are flying around as we speak right now.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: The drones are now helping the icefall doctors, they're helping—to take the ladders, the ropes. And at the same time the drones are helping to bring down all the trash and many things.
The hope is that the new technology might reduce the number of fatal accidents.
Cecilia Vega: So these are jobs that Sherpas would have done in the past?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: The job has not gone away. It's just making the job easier, and safer, and faster.
Cecilia Vega: So if it takes a porter hours to climb from Base Camp to Camp 1, how quickly can a drone do it?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Three minutes.
Cecilia Vega: Three minutes?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Three and a half minutes, yeah.
Cecilia Vega: Wow.
Inexperience can be deadly. especially at the top of the world's highest mountain.
In the death zone where every minute counts, one stalled climber can trap dozens behind them for hours, turning Everest into the world's highest traffic jam.
When the inevitable rescue is needed, it's Simone Moro who gets the call. The Italian has been flying helicopters for Nima's family and climbing this mountain for years. In April, he pulled off this dangerous rescue mission, so high up there was barely enough air to keep the rotor blades spinning.
Simone Moro: You can't imagine how many people, they come up, some with not enough acclimatization, some other with—with not enough preparation, and they start to feel bad. And if I don't go and pick them, and quickly took them down, they die for pulmonary edema, cerebral edema. And this happen quite often, even in the night while they are sleeping in the lodge. In the morning they go, they w—try to wake up, they are dead.
Even for those who survive the night, another danger often looms: this Avalanche stopped just short of our tents, one of many that followed a 5.5-magnitude earthquake when we were on the mountain.
Simone Moro: For sure this is an extra stress that you feel it.
Cecilia Vega: Oh, we felt the stress. I heard the avalanche all night.
Simone Moro: But honestly, the Base Camp, for such kind of danger—you have a higher danger here than not higher.
Cecilia Vega: I'm glad you're telling me this on our final day as we're about to leave.
Simone Moro: It was intentional that we didn't told you anything.
When he's not flying around the mountain, Moro - one of the world's top climbers - is scaling them.
And now he's taking Nima with him. Together they are training to conquer more peaks – this time without fixed ropes, supplemental oxygen or support teams.
It is survival as sport.
Cecilia Vega: There's a difference between you and me. What's—what's different in here?
Nima Rinji Sherpa: I think we – we are a little bit better in suffering maybe.
Cecilia Vega: You've heard me complaining.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: But people like Simone, me, like—my dad, my uncle, like, we know we—we come from zero. We're n—we're nobody in this—in this world. And we created something for ourself.
Cecilia Vega: So, like, this is your legacy, but the mountain is also your legacy. You know, usually you don't talk to 19-year-olds about their legacies.
Nima Rinji Sherpa: Yeah. I don't know about legacy for now. Maybe one day then the– I will have my own legacy maybe after 20,30 years, yeah?
Cecilia Vega: All right, we'll circle back in 30 years. In Kathmandu, though. I'm not coming back all the way up here.
Produced by Jacqueline Williams. Associate producer, Katie Jahns. Edited by Sean Kelly.