Editor,
The sport of top-level mountaineering should be done with the pure spirit of using one’s own physical prowess and endurance to reach the top, not the use of coolies to carry one’s stuff and otherwise attend to one’s every need, besides giving the mountaineer a leg up when needed and showing them the easier, gentler, safer path upward. That is cheating.
Yet that is happening all the time on Mother Sagarmatha (the real local name for Mt. Everest). Onto her the rich Westerners climb as wannabe conquerors, (the locals just think of it as crawling into the Mother’s lap), expecting in some cases to be practically carried to the top and back by the hardy local Sherpas, whom they refer to as “boys” to this day, and who are the true mountaineering experts, often risking their own lives to save some arrogant foreigner who desecrate the flanks of this mountain goddess with trash, and loudly complains about all the money he is losing when the Sherpas (as happened in 2014 when 13 Sherpas died at that dangerous icefall), go on strike.
And he whom the Sherpas refer to as “the tourist,” who is there to boast to his kids and grandkids that he actually scaled the world’s highest mountain – complete with the obligatory film crew these days as his entourage -- does not have the guts to go for it on his own.
Arun Ahuja
UNM student
