KATMANDU, Nepal — The rescuers moved quickly, just minutes after the first block of ice tore loose from Mount Everest and started an avalanche that roared down the mountain, ripping through teams of guides hauling gear.
They couldn’t get there quickly enough. No one can move that fast. Not even the people who have spent their lives in Everest’s shadow and have spent years working on the world’s highest peak.
By Saturday evening, the bodies of 13 Sherpa guides had been taken from the mountain. Three more were missing, though few held out hope that they were still alive, 36 hours after Friday’s avalanche. Four survivors had been flown to hospitals in Katmandu, Nepal’s capital, where they were in stable condition. It was the deadliest disaster ever on Mount Everest.
For the Sherpas, the once-obscure mountain people whose name has become synonymous with Everest, and whose entire culture has been changed by decades of working as guides and porters for wealthy foreigners, it was a reminder of the risks they face.
Many gathered Saturday at the Boudha Monastery in Katmandu, where prayers were said for the dead. “The mountains are a death trap,” said Norbu Tshering, a 50-year-old Sherpa and mountain guide who lives mostly in Katmandu. “But we have no other work, and most of our people take up this profession, which has now become a tradition for all of us.”
Nepalese tourism officials said the guides killed in the avalanche had been fixing ropes. But guiding companies said the ropes had already been laid down, and the Sherpas were carrying loads of tents, oxygen tanks and other gear to the higher camps used by climbers as they approach the summit.
A day after the disaster, many Sherpa guides spoke of their work in ways that reflect the complexities of poor people working in a deeply hazardous place.
The work is dangerous — a year rarely passes without at least one death on Everest — but the Sherpas, who were once among the poorest and most isolated people of Nepal, also now have schools, cellphones and their own middle class. All that is the result of the economy of Mount Everest, which brings tens of millions of dollars to Nepal every year.
“We make more money than most of the people in the country,” said Dawa Dorje, 28, a mountain guide from Everest’s foothills. “If the foreigners did not come, then we would be out of a job. They need us and we need them — it is a win-win situation.”
And some of what happens on the mountain, Dorje noted, comes down to sheer luck.
“There have been concerns why so many Nepali Sherpas were killed in the avalanche,” he said. “But they were there at the wrong time. If the avalanche had struck a few days later, then there could have been many foreign fatalities, too.”
