Kanchha Sherpa, last member of first Mount Everest expedition, dies at 92

Kanchha Sherpa, the last surviving member of the mountaineering team that first reached the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak, has died in Nepal at the age of 92.

The Nepal Mountaineering Association described Kanchha Sherpa as a “historic and legendary figure” who died at his home in Kapan in the Kathmandu district of Nepal on Thursday.

“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Mr Kanchha Sherpa, the last surviving member of the first successful summit of Mount Everest in 1953,” the association’s president, Fur Gelje Sherpa, said in a statement.

“His absence leaves an irreplaceable loss … He will be dearly missed,” the president said.

Tenzing Chogyal Sherpa said his grandfather had “some issues with his throat” recently. “Otherwise, he had no major health issue for a person of his age,” his grandson told the DPA news agency.

Kanchha Sherpa was among the 35 members of the team that helped Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay and New Zealander Edmund Hillary reach the 8,849-metre (29,032-foot) peak of Everest on May 29, 1953.

He was one of three Sherpas to reach the final camp before the summit with Hillary and Tenzing.

Hillary and Norgay, both 39 at the time, became the first to reach the summit on May 29, 1953.

Kanchha was born in 1933 in the village of Namche in the Everest foothills, when most members of Nepal’s Sherpa community – a Himalayan people renowned as mountaineering guides – worked in farming.

He spent his childhood and young adult years earning a meagre living through trading potatoes in neighbouring Tibet. When he and several friends later visited Darjeeling, India, he was persuaded to train for mountain climbing, and he began working with foreign trekkers.

His father’s friendship with Tenzing Norgay helped Kanchha Sherpa secure a job as a high-altitude porter for Tenzing and Hillary.

Kanchha Sherpa worked in the Himalayan mountains for two more decades after the 1953 expedition, until his wife asked him to stop the dangerous journeys after many of his friends died assisting other climbing treks, his family said.

He never actually climbed to the summit of Everest himself, as his wife considered it too risky, he said in a March 2024 interview with The Associated Press, and he forbade his children from becoming mountaineers.

Later in his life, Kanchha had mixed feelings about Everest’s fate as an adventure tourism destination where thousands of people have made the ascent to the peak and the mountain has become known for overcrowding and discarded litter.

National Geographic Society said in an article published in April that more than 600 people attempt to summit Everest every climbing season, and the mountain has “grown increasingly polluted”, leading to the contamination of the local watershed, which threatens the health of local people.

“The mountain has become so overcrowded that oftentimes climbers have to stand in line for hours in freezing cold conditions to reach the top”, and when climbers finally reach the summit, “there is barely room to stand because of overcrowding”, the magazine said.

In 2024, Kanchha Sherpa urged people to respect the mountain, revered as the mother goddess Qomolangma among the Sherpas.

“It would be better for the mountain to reduce the number of climbers,” he said.

“Qomolangma is the biggest god for the Sherpas,” Kanchha added.

“But people smoke and eat meat and throw them on the mountain.”

Source: Aljazeera