Everest summiteers find new life in the US

While Nepal marked Mt Everest Day on 29 May, on the other side of the planet in the US state of Colorado dozens of Nepalis who have climbed the world’s highest peak multiple times were busy working as chefs and Uber drivers.

Among them is Nima Doma Sherpa, who climbed Mt Everest in 2019 after her husband Tshering Wangchu was among 16 crushed by an avalanche on the Khumbu Icefall five years earlier.

A large serac broke off the West Shoulder of Mt Everest and fell directly on a group of porters and guides making their way up the Icefall at 5,800m. Their bodies were flown by helicopter to Khumjung where Tshering Wangchu was born. He was excited about climbing Mt Everest for the first time. 

In Khumjung, Nima Doma felt like her own life had also ended. This was the kind of news Sherpa wives, mothers and sisters dreaded every mountaineering season.

She stayed home for more than two years grieving, but ultimately gathered up all her emotional strength to take care of her 6-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter.

Nima had grown up in Khumjung hearing tales of adventure on the mountains from their father, Ang Chubi Sherpa who had climbed Everest in 1993. He used to bring her and her sisters and brother European chocolates after every expedition, and used to tell them that the chocolate bars grew on the mountains.

“It was only after we got older did we realise that he told us that chocolates grew in the mountains so we would not worry about him putting himself in harm's way,” Nima Doma recalled with a faraway look at her home in Boulder this week.

Nima went to the school that Edmund Hillary opened in Khumjung till Grade 8, and then dropped out to help in the kitchen and tend yaks. She was married off to Tshering Wangchu, who was also a high altitude guide.

When Tshering went on expeditions, Nima also started working as a porter from Namche to Base Camp. It was perhaps her father’s tales of mountains of chocolates that had always attracted her to the peaks.

After her husband was killed ten years ago this month, being a widow with children was not easy for Nima Doma. But she was not alone: there were at least 200 single mothers in the Khumbu, and 20 of them just in Khumjung whose husbands had been killed in mountaineering accidents.

Some were not even 20 years old, and had children growing up without fathers. But there were also women in the 50s whose husbands had been killed in the 1980s.

Nima found sponsors for her children’s education, and moved to Kathmandu. In the capital, Sherpa widows used to meet to help each other. Some of them had joined the Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA) training for rock and ice climbing.

“I decided that it was no use sitting home and crying anymore, after meeting other single mothers I felt less alone,” remembers Nima, who joined the Juniper Foundation and enrolled in an NMA training camp in Manang.

There she climbed Chulu East (6,584m) and met Furadiki Sherpa, whose rope-fixing husband had also been killed on Everest in 2013. They set themselves the goal of climbing Everest one day, and started a fund-raising drive.

“We decided we had to overcome society’s stigma of widowhood and prove that women could also climb mountains,” Nima said, adding that she was inspired by Nepal’s first woman Everest summiteer Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, who died during her descent in 1993.

Nima Doma and Furdiki climbed the technically-difficult Ama Dablam (6,812m) and then arrived at Everest Base Camp in April 2019 as part of their Two Widows Expedition with the motto, ‘So Can We’.

While climbing up the Icefall Nima passed the spot where her husband had been killed. It was a jumble of constantly-shifting ice blocks bigger than houses. She closed her eyes and said a prayer.

“I remember thinking, this is so difficult and dangerous. This is what my husband had to do to support our family,” Nima Doma said. “I was determined to fulfil my husband’s dream of climbing Chomolungma, and to prove to ourselves that we two women could do it.”

It was 23 May 2019 when Nima and Furdiki stepped on the summit and looked over into Tibet, and down at Tengboche Monastery to the south. 

Nima Doma hugged Furdiki, took off her mask and wept. But for the first time in five years, it was not from grief but relief — relief for being free of all the sadness and sacrifices and for fulfilling her husband’s dream. They had found life after death.

“I felt this immense joy to be on top of the world, it was indescribable,” Nima Doma said, “I have wept only twice in my life. Once when my husband died, and once there on top of Everest.”

The tears had frozen on Nima Doma’s cheeks, as she and Furdiki headed back down the mountain.