Pasang Lhamu Sherpa is a name shared by two incredible women. One, the first woman to climb Mt. Everest; the second, Nepal’s first female Nepali mountaineering guide. “It’s only coincidence that I share a name with the first Nepali woman to climb Mt. Everest, Pasang Lhamu Sherpa,” she told Tour Radar in 2018. I am Buddhist so when I was born my parents took me to the lama to get a name. I was born on Friday, so my first name is Pasang. Lhamu means goddess. Sherpa is my surname. And then I took a second surname from my husband when we married, which is Akita.”
That name, though, was a harbinger of what was to come in her life — and it’s been an amazing one. She’s climbed Everest, Ama Dablam, Lobuche, and she part of the first Nepali women’s team to summit K2, which is widely considered the most dangerous mountain on earth. She’s been named National Geographic’s People’s Choice Adventurer of the Year, and in 2016, she was awarded the International Alpine Solidarity Award for her actions in the community after the devastating earthquake of 2015.
She was born and raised in Lukla, a tiny town in northeastern Nepal in the shadow of Mt. Everest. At 15, her mother died and she moved with her sister to Kathmandu, where she began to study mountaineering. It wasn’t exactly a normal thing for a woman in Nepal to study, though. “A man’s place is on the mountain, a woman’s place is in the home—that’s the message Pasang Lhamu had always heard but was never willing to accept,” Yeti wrote in the description of the film you see above. By 20, she was enrolled in the Khumbu Climbing School. Then she earned a diploma in mountaineering from the École Nationale du Ski et de l’Alpinisme in Chamonix, France.
In Mothered By Mountains, Pasang and Sareena Rai, an unlikely companion on a climbing trip, attempt a first ascent together. And the film, which began as something about women’s empowerment, became something much, much more. And in a sea of fantastic short films, Yeti’s stands out.
