Sherpa guide breaks record by making 31st summit of Mount Everest

Shaki Sutharsan · CBC News

· Posted: May 28, 2025 11:30 AM EDT | Last Updated: 39 minutes ago

Kami Rita Sherpa, 55, reached the acme of the tallest upland successful the satellite for a grounds 31st clip connected Tuesday. He broke his ain grounds of astir climbs to the apical of Everest. 

The famed Sherpa usher made it to Everest's 8,849-metre highest portion starring a squad of 22 Indian-army members and 27 chap Sherpas. Since his archetypal ascent successful 1994, Kami Rita has summitted Everest astir each year, guiding overseas climbers successful the gruelling, and often dangerous, trek up to the apical of the world. 

In the decades since Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Sherpa usher Tenzing Norgay became the archetypal climbers to person recognition for summitting Everest successful 1953, much than 8,000 radical person made the climb. Around 700 to 1,000 radical effort to standard the upland each twelvemonth with occurrence rates ranging from 60 to 70 per cent. 

Kami Rita's monumental acme reflects the important relation of the Sherpas — an taste radical indigenous to the Himalayan portion — successful keeping overseas climbers harmless during the often weeks-long travel to the peak. 

Sherpas person agelong been associated with Everest, known for their quality to withstand precocious altitudes owed to physiological adaptations. As affluent foreigners flocked to the Himalayan portion looking to cheque the iconic acme disconnected their bucket lists, an manufacture began to grow, providing a caller root of income successful a state that has historically been poorness stricken. 

David Morton, a climber and a co-founder of the Juniper Fund, an enactment that supports high-altitude Sherpa workers successful the lawsuit of an accidental decease connected the job, said that portion things person changed successful the past 15 to 20 years, galore Sherpas inactive enactment arsenic porters, ferrying the instrumentality of overseas climbers up and down the mountain. 

Morton, who personally knows Kami Rita, said that much Sherpas person been capable to find amended paying enactment arsenic guides successful caller years — establishing camps and fixing routes arsenic opposed to conscionable functioning arsenic load-bearers. But determination are inactive galore "inadequacies" successful however the enactment is compensated, particularly erstwhile a idiosyncratic dies during a climb, helium said. 

He said the families of Sherpa workers who person died during a ascent lone person up to $15,000 US successful compensation from the Nepali government. 

According to the Himalayan Database, an archive of each Himalayan acme expeditions and attempts implicit the past century, astir 340 radical person died trying to ascent Mount Everest. Nearly one-third of those deaths were Sherpa workers. 

In the 2025 play alone, which began successful aboriginal April, 4 climbers person died truthful far, 2 of them being Sherpa workers, according to a study from Outside Magazine. 

Morton said Kami Rita and his member Lakpa Rita Sherpa, who is besides a Sherpa usher and has scaled Mount Everest 17 times, person been capable to enactment their tiny assemblage of Thame successful Nepal done the planetary designation they've received from mounting and breaking climbing records, and proceed to bash truthful done the entree they've gained to foreigners.