Sherpas threaten Everest boycott
Guides in Nepal are deciding whether to abandon Everest ascents after an avalanche last week killed 16 Sherpas.
The Sherpas have threatened a boycott unless they get a bigger share of revenue which the Nepalese government receives from foreign climbers.
The accident last Friday was the single deadliest accident in modern mountaineering on the world’s highest peak.
Some local guides are calling for a boycott but most foreign mountaineers remain on the mountain and are still hoping to resume climbing in the next week or so.
Here is an excerpt from report of the accident in the New Yorker, written by Jon Krakauer:
On April 18, shortly before 7 A.M. local time, an overhanging wedge of ice the size of a Beverly Hills mansion broke loose.
As it crashed onto the slope below, the ice shattered into truck-size chunks and hurtled toward some 50 climbers laboring slowly upward through the Khumbu Icefall, a jumbled maze of unstable ice towers that looms above the 17,600-foot base camp.
The climbers in the line of fire were at approximately 19,000 feet when the avalanche struck. Of the twenty-five men hit by the falling ice, sixteen were killed, all of them Nepalis working for guided climbing teams.
Depending on their talent, experience, foreign-language skills, how many loads they carry up and down the mountain, and how generously they’re tipped by their clients, climbing Sherpas generally take home between two and eight thousand dollars at the conclusion of an Everest expedition, which commences for them in late March and typically ends around the first of June.
If a climbing Sherpa dies on the job, his family receives a million rupees (approximately ten thousand five hundred dollars) from the insurance his employer is required to provide.
By any reasonable measure, neither these wages nor insurance payouts are fair compensation for the risk involved.
But in Nepal, where the median annual income is less than six hundred dollars, most of the Sherpas’ countrymen would eagerly take similar risks for the opportunity to receive that kind of pay.
Ian Jarrett
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