Richland man summits Mount Everest 15th time
MOUNTAINEERING -- Ang Dorjee Sherpa reached the 29,036-foot summit at 4 a.m. May 13, marking the 15th time he has completed the feat.
“This year wasn’t that great, until May 1,” Ang Dorjee said Tuesday after returning to his home in Richland, Wash. “It was very windy and snowy.”
Ang Dorjee, a world-renown mountaineering guide, was the second of three teams from the New Zealand-based Adventure Consultants to reach the summit.
The first team summited May 11, Ang Dorjee helped guide three climbers in his team to the summit Friday the 13th, and the last team reached the top May 19.
Read on for more details from a Tri-City Herald story.
Strong winds and snow made this year’s expedition to summit
But it didn’t stop a
Ang Dorjee Sherpa reached the 29,036-foot summit at 4 a.m. May 13, marking the 15th time he has completed the feat.
“This year wasn’t that great, until May 1,” Ang Dorjee said Tuesday at his
Ang Dorjee, a world-renown mountaineering guide, was the second of three teams from the New Zealand-based Adventure Consultants to reach the summit.
The first team summited May 11, Ang Dorjee helped guide three climbers in his team to the summit Friday the 13th, and the last team reached the top May 19.
“We had to do it in three different groups, because some people were ready and some were not,” he said.
There are four camps along the way up to the summit, with the last camp at 26,000 feet, he explained. If climbers manage to sleep at the last camp, then they can continue and attempt to reach the top.
Besides the weather, Ang Dorjee said the group didn’t have any other issues on the way up or down the mountain.
“They did very well this year,” he said. “Two people got a little cold, so we had to separate them (and hold them back a few days), but this year was very good.”
There was a death in another climbing group May 12, the day before his team reached the summit.
It was windy and stormy and a Japanese climber abandoned his efforts to get to the top and ended up running out of oxygen on the way back down, Ang Dorjee said.
When Ang Dorjee’s team reached the top, the weather was decent with no wind, so the group was able to stay up for about 25 minutes to mark the moment and take pictures before beginning its two-day trip back down.
The descent is often more difficult than the ascent because climbers use up their energy going up and sometimes don’t have enough to get back down.
“Many people die on the way down,” Ang Dorjee said. “The summit is only halfway, but some people think the summit is the finish.”
In the mountaineering community, Ang Dorjee is a legend for guiding numerous expeditions in his native
The most infamous was the deadly 1996 expedition on Everest that was the basis for Jon Krakauer’s best seller Into Thin Air. He is featured in the novel and the 1997 movie of the same name based on Krakauer’s personal account.
Ang Dorjee makes the climb each year, not to set any records, but to help others fulfill their dreams. He also gets to visit his family on the way up and down.
He was born and raised in a small village in the Khumbu region of
Ang Dorjee doesn’t boast about his climbing accomplishments. When asked what he was thinking about as his reached the summit for the 15th time, he replied: “I feel like I want to go back home safe.”
At home waiting for him was his wife, Michelle Gregory, and their kids, Tenzing, 7, and Karma, 5.
He returned to the Tri-Cities on Monday after a 35-hour trip and was once again greeted by friends and family at the
Welcome back messages still were visible on the driveway and sliding glass door to the backyard on Tuesday, but there was no relaxing for Ang Dorjee.
Gregory, a research scientist with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, was on her way to
The big smile on Ang Dorjee’s face as his children played nearby showed he was happy to be home safe.
