Pasang Sherpa begins his shift driving a yellow taxi at 5 p.m., just as rush hour starts. He screeches through the jam-packed streets of Midtown Manhattan. Lights of the Times Square billboards reflect off his windshield, while cars cut in front of him, horns blaring. He must pull over and pick up anyone who simply throws an arm in the air, until his shift ends at 5 a.m. He spends his nights alone with strangers — with the pocketful of cash he’s collected.
The 39-year-old with an athletic build and a silver hoop earring in his left ear moved to the city from Nepal in 2006. He breaks into a wide smile when talking about his life here, which he says he loves “because it is not dangerous.”
Pasang is a former climbing guide who has scaled Mount Everest three times. In 1998, he led a death-defying search-and-rescue trip to the peak, saving two climbers who’d been stranded there for two hours.
He’s one of the 3,000 Sherpas who have fled Nepal for a safer life in New York City — the largest population of Sherpas outside South Asia.
The tight-knit community is mourning the 16 climbing guides who died in the April 18 avalanche on Mount Everest. Most of the fatalities were Sherpas, and many here had friends and relatives who died on that deadliest day in Everest history. Discovery Channel is airing a documentary Sunday about the avalanche to help raise money for the families of those who died.
When Passang Sherpa, another Nepali, heard about the avalanche at 2 a.m. that Friday morning, the 36-year-old gathered a group of Sherpa friends in Woodside to light candles and pray for the victims — all of whom he knew from his days as a climbing guide and an instructor on Mount Everest. (Many Sherpas use the name of their ethnic group as their last name.)
Passang, who moved to Queens last year, has scaled Everest nine times, sometimes going up twice in a year. Now he’s still helping climbers, but as a sales associate at Tent and Trails, an outdoor sporting goods shop in lower Manhattan.
When city dwellers pop into the store, looking for a fleece or backpack for their weekend hike in the Berkshires, they have no idea that the soft-spoken sales associate helping them has accomplished more than most Western climbers could dream of.
Last month’s tragedy was too familiar to Passang, who led an expedition that turned deadly in 2006.
“We were hiking from base camp to Camp 1. We were with more than 50 people going up the ice fall, and a big ice cliff collapsed,” Passang remembers. “It killed three of my friends. We are running away and big sounds come and we look back and we can see nothing. Everyone is trying to contact each other. People in the back and the front, they’re OK, but in the middle, the Sherpas there didn’t make it. It is so sad. One was my neighbor.”
Passang is relieved to have “an easier life” here in the city, but he hasn’t lost his passion for climbing. He spends his days off scaling the indoor rock-climbing walls at a gym in Long Island City. He laughs, “It is very different from Mount Everest, but I like it. It is fun.”
While a Westerner’s expedition to the top of Everest can earn them a book deal or TV special, Sherpa guides, who bear the brunt of the trek, carrying most of the supplies, usually without the help of supplemental oxygen, are the under-appreciated conquerors of the world’s highest peak.
The name Sherpa has been closely tied to mountain climbing since 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary first scaled Mount Everest with Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay. But Sherpas are a small group from the mountainous region in eastern Nepal from which most Everest guides hail, who are physically well-suited for high-altitude exertion. In the poor country, climbing is one of the best-paying jobs. A season can pay the US equivalent of $4,000 to $5,000 — enough to support a family for the year.
Without Sherpas preparing Everest by setting up ropes and priming pathways, foreign climbers would be unable to tackle the peak. “You hear people say they summited Mount Everest,” says Phurba Sherpa, 24, of Elmhurst, whose brother-in-law was severely injured in the recent avalanche. “You just walked there! Everything is put in place by these Sherpa people.”
If Phurba, whose father was a climber, hadn’t gotten the chance to come to America to get a degree, he would be on the mountain, too.
“I would have given continuation to what my father did,” he says. “That’s how Sherpa people do it. It’s passed from one generation to another generation.”
Ang Psurba Sherpa, 51, is happy he doesn’t have to deal with avalanches in Queens. In the 1980s, he survived two of the powerful disasters, including one on Everest that found him digging for his life.
“On top of my chest is a big [piece of] ice. And for maybe 30 minutes, I am unconscious,” Ang Psurba recalls. “Then I woke up and I pushed out of the ice. I thought, ‘I have life! I’m not dead!’ ” He then dug out 11 other guides and clients.
After two decades of climbing, he switched to a quieter life in Jackson Heights, with his wife and high-school-age son, in 2007. Now, instead of dodging deadly ice chunks, he works at restaurants and spends his Sundays at the Sherpa community center.
Serap Jangbu Sherpa, 45, reached the peak of Everest three times and once survived a 100-foot fall at more than 26,000 feet up a mountain. He is very proud of traversing Everest, but part of the reason he moved to New York with his wife and two kids in 2011 was so his children didn’t have to follow in his footsteps.
“I know how the mountain is; it’s a very dangerous and very risky life,” says Serap, who began working as a climbing guide in his early 20s. “So, I don’t want them to become climbers. Of course, one or two times for fun is OK, but not professionally.”
Serap, who also works at Tents and Trails, says his kids aren’t interested in climbing, but his son got his fearlessness from Dad — he wants to be a pilot.
Tenzing Sherpa, 48, made the sacrifice to leave his family behind in Nepal for the chance of a more stable career. Tenzing began climbing in 1991 and topped Everest eight times. Now he works as a sushi chef in The Bronx and sends his earnings to his wife and mother back in Nepal.
“It’s OK. Just enough, no more,” Tenzing says. “Just barely sustainable.”
Joby Ogwyn, who was planning to jump off Everest in a wingsuit and soar to the bottom — live on TV — was at base camp when the avalanche hit. He opened his tent and saw the wall of snow and ice completely cover the group of Sherpa guides, including three he had hired, who were found dead.
“I feel a massive amount of responsibility to them and their families,” Ogwyn says. “I also know they would have gone up anyway, whether it was working for me or another.”
Many Sherpas are boycotting this climbing season and negotiating with the Nepalese government for more compensation when someone is killed.
“The life of a climber is very difficult,” says Ang Geljen Sherpa, president of the United Sherpa Association, which is raising funds for the victims’ families. “Sherpas move to New York looking for more opportunity, better life. They think, ‘Maybe I’ll have children, maybe they’ll go to an Ivy League college,’ ” he adds, “ ‘and they’ll do something good with their life and won’t have to climb.’ ”