Kami Rita Sherpa, 55, reached the world's tallest peak for the 31st time on Tuesday. He broke most of his climbing records to the top of Mount Everest.
The famous Sherpa guide makes it the 8,849-meter peak of Mount Everest while leading a team of 22 Indian army members and 27 Sherpas. Since its first climb in 1994, Kami Rita has been summiting on Everest almost every year, guiding foreign climbers into trouble and often trek to the top of the world dangerously.
More than 8,000 people have made the climb in decades since New Zealand's Edmund Hillary and Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay became the first climber to receive honors for summiting Mount Everest in 1953. About 700 to 1,000 people try to expand the peaks each year, with success rates ranging from 60 to 70%.
Kami Rita’s memorial summit reflects the critical role of the Sherpas, an indigenous people in the Himalayas, to ensure the safety of foreign climbers during their often-week peak journey.
Sherpas has long been associated with Mount Everest, Known for the ability to adapt physiologically. As wealthy foreigners flock to the Himalaya region, hoping to check the iconic summit from their bucket list, an industry began to grow, providing a new source of income in a country that has historically been in poverty.
David Morton, a climber and co-founder of the Mountaineering Fund, supported the organization of high-altitude Sherpa workers in the event of an unexpected death in the work, but despite the changes in the past 15 to 20 years, many Sherpa teams still work like porters, traversing foreign mountaineering equipment up and down the mountain.
Morton, who knows Kami Rita in person, said in recent years, more Sherpas have been able to find better paid jobs as guidance – building camps and restoring routes, rather than just the work of the loader. But there are still many “deficiencies” in how to compensate for work, especially when workers die during climbing, he said.
He said the families of Sherpas who died during the climb received only $15,000 from the Nepal government.
According to the Himalayan Database, all archives of Himalayan summit adventures and attempts have been trying to climb Mount Everest for the past century. Nearly one-third of these deaths were Sherpa workers.
According to the External Magazine External, four climbers were Sherpa workers only in the 2025 season that began in early April.
Morton said Kami Rita and his brother Lakpa Rita Sherpa are also guides for Sherpas and have scaled Mount Everest 17 times, and he was able to support their small Tam community in Nepal by gaining global recognition from setting up and destroying rock climbing records and by assisting foreigners to get auxiliary records.
