The Man Who Told the World That Everest Had Been Climbed

I first heard about the mail run five and a half years ago, in January 2019, at Base Camp Brewing, a now defunct, climbing-themed bar in Portland, Oregon, with a Nepalese food truck stationed outside. I was there to meet up with Ang Pemba Sherpa, a local photographer, who, I’d been told, had a story to tell. At first glance, Ang Pemba looked like he might be in the habit of running messages over long distances himself. Thirty-eight years old at the time, he was slim and wiry, his face all sharp angles, with just a dash of hair on his chin. Born near Everest, educated in Austria and then the U.S., Ang Pemba had lived in a way that was similar to many Sherpas of his generation. His dad had made a good living in tourism and the climbing industry, and that gave Ang Pemba the means to leave Nepal and live in the States for the previous 20 years. He worked at Next Adventure, a locally famous outdoor store, moonlighting as a photographer and filmmaker for various climbing brands.

“I’m from here as much as I’m from there,” he said during that first meeting. “I’m sort of from nowhere.” Maybe because of that statelessness, he was still haunted by the story of his grandfather, Ten Tsewang Sherpa (pronounced “Ten Chwong”), who ran himself to death delivering the news that Everest had been climbed.

Ten Tsewang was like a Nepalese Pheidippides—the Greek messenger who famously collapsed and died immediately after a 26.2-mile run to tell ruling officials in Athens that they’d won the battle of Marathon. The Pheidippides story probably isn’t true, but it became a powerful part of western cultural history. Ten Tsewang did something similar in real life, perishing a few weeks after delivering perhaps the last piece of world news ever sent by a runner. And his name, as far as I could tell, had never been written down.

We ordered another round. A plan took shape. We would run the Everest Marathon, which starts at Base Camp every May 29 and follows the route the mail runners traveled to the village of Namche. Then we’d keep going, running to Kathmandu as fast as possible, following in his grandfather’s footsteps.

Later we met up again to hash out the details, like where we’d sleep and what we’d carry. I was about to have a second surgery on a previously broken leg, and I was in no shape to run 200 miles, but something about the way Ang Pemba’s eyes lit up when he described the trip made me say: Yes, I will figure out a way.

It took a year to plan everything, then three to wait out the pandemic. My leg healed. Ang Pemba tore his meniscus rock climbing. Jan Morris died before I could interview her.

By the time we got to Everest, on May 29, 2023, the plan had changed considerably. We would no longer be running the Everest Marathon. In fact, we would no longer be running any of the route, just trekking. Instead of traveling light and carrying our own gear, like Ten Tsewang did, we had hired a 17-year-old porter, Rujan Thulung Rai, who kept stopping on the trail to film TikTok dance videos (@rujanthulung2). And instead of doing interviews at Everest Base Camp the morning of our departure like I had envisioned, I was walking around outside our hotel in Gorak Shep having a pretty good cry.

Gorak Shep, at 17,000 feet, is the spot where the Swiss made camp for their 1952 summit attempt. Today it’s a cluster of plywood buildings to house tourists, and modern Base Camp is about a mile and a half—and 500 vertical feet—away.

I never got to Base Camp.

A week ago, we’d taken a helicopter directly from Kathmandu to Namche—at 11,000 feet—and spent a few days acclimatizing and doing interviews. We then began climbing, about 1,000 feet each day, toward Base Camp. We felt great until yesterday, when we got to Lobuche—the usual overnight stop on this part of the trek—in the early afternoon. It was just a couple more hours to Gorak Shep. And only a few hundred extra vertical feet added to the day.

What was the harm in that?

At first, not much. Ang Pemba got a little dizzy; I got a little goofy. We had a good laugh when I pulled out some energy gels and learned that the Nepali word for “poop” is gu.

We made it to Gorak Shep, ate dinner, and went to bed. But I had only been asleep for 45 minutes when I woke up with ice-cold hands and feet, a nauseous brick of a stomach, and a head that felt like a squeezed water balloon.

I tested my oxygen saturation level: 57 percent. Those digits should have been reversed at this altitude.

“All I can say is hike back down,” my wife, an ICU nurse, told me via InReach. “If you lose your balance, that’s an emergency.”

Ten Tsewang would hardly have noticed the altitude. Once he was given the message, he would have left in a hurry, leaping through the boulders and ice blocks of the Khumbu Glacier, leaving behind the snowcapped peaks of Everest, Ama Dablam, and Kala Patthar. There was no time to waste.

It had already taken a day, May 30, for Morris to get back to Base Camp, and at first light the next morning she sent two runners sprinting downhill. They were headed to Namche, which had one of the only radio transmitters in the area. The operator had agreed to send a single message on the expedition’s behalf. Secrecy was paramount, however, and Morris knew that anyone tuning in would be able to hear the broadcast. So the message was short and written in code. “Snow conditions bad,” it said. “Advance base abandoned yesterday. Awaiting improvement. All well!”

Only staff at the British Embassy in Kathmandu and the Foreign Office in London would have known that those sentences meant Tenzing and Hillary had made it to the top. But would anyone be listening at the embassy? Would the military operator stick by his word and send the message? Would the radio even be working? Morris didn’t know. So she spent the next day, May 31, writing out a longer, more detailed account of the climb, and in the morning paid a premium for Ten Tsewang to deliver it to the British Embassy in Kathmandu as quickly as possible.

Left: a group shot of the 1953 British expedition team. Right: Tenzing on the summit. — From left: The 1953 British expedition team; Tenzing on the summit (Photos from left: Robic Upadhayay/AFP/Getty; Ullstein Bild/Getty)

“All the others [mail runners] were out, somewhere in the mountains between Everest and Kathmandu,” Morris wrote in Coronation Everest, her 1958 memoir of the expedition. “But I had saved the best of them for these last dispatches.”

The first Western climbers to take note of the Sherpas’ natural ability in the mountains were a pair of Norwegian climbers going for a summit in 1907. In 1909, British chemist A.M. Kellas showed up to study the effects of high altitude on human physiology, and almost immediately began promoting Sherpas as the best alpine workforce.

That simple endorsement would change everything. Historically a tiny tribe of religious refugees, Sherpas arrived from Tibet about 600 years ago, scratching level plots of farmland into the steep hillsides of the Khumbu Valley to grow barley and potatoes. They lived higher than trees would grow, burned dried yak dung for heat, and generally worked harder to survive than the nearby lowland tribes, whose farmland was considered more productive and desirable.

But if you were a local farmer who wanted to sell produce in Tibet, all roads led through Sherpa villages. And Sherpas, with their propensity at altitude, could generally carry a lot more than their lowland neighbors. So generations of Sherpas spent entire lifetimes moving goods through valleys and over mountains, hiking up and down steep hills at staggering heights with a lot of weight on their backs. You couldn’t design a better boot camp for mountaineering.

Left: Hillary catching up on mail after the climb. Right: Some of the gear he took to the top. — From left: Hillary catching up on mail after the climb; some of the gear he took to the top (Photos from left: Bettmann/Getty Images; John van Hasselt/Corbis/Getty)

Once climbers started showing up, the steady drip of expeditions brought enough wealth to slowly change the standard of living in the Khumbu. Thanks to some shrewd negotiating over the years, mountaineering work generally paid well, and most expeditions gave away their gear at the end of a climb—especially the warm jackets, boots, and pants—to be used or sold by the Sherpas.

And yet, because Sherpas were the labor class of Himalayan mountaineering, and because their names were confusing to Western mountaineers—most first names are a day of the week and, the last name has also become a job title—it was extremely rare for an individual to distinguish himself in such a way as to enter the historical record. This wasn’t just a case of oversight and confusion, though. Early expeditions were often financed by Brits who opposed India’s independence movement. Never mind that Everest is in Nepal, not India: the British elite wanted a Brit to be first, someone they could point to and claim victory over their former colony. Everyone else was a distraction.

The climbers themselves didn’t do a whole lot to counteract that messaging. Sherpas were so good at moving through the mountains, one anthropologist wrote, that climbers feared it was really the Sherpas doing the climbing, and they were just more cargo to carry to the top. Climbers didn’t go out of their way to share credit.

So we end up with an ethnic group simultaneously celebrated for its strength and endurance, full of individuals whose singular accomplishments and frequent heroism have been glossed over, lumped together, or totally ignored. For example, in Morris’s book-length account of the Everest mail run, none of the runners are mentioned by name. Not one.

The next morning, at Gorak Shep, Ang Pemba went to go tag Base Camp. I started hiking back down the mountain, five steps at a time. Twenty minutes and about 100 yards later, I crossed paths with a guy leading a pony along the rocky trail and asked if I could pay him for a ride to Lobuche. The price was exorbitant in Nepal but would be cab fare in New York. Everyone seemed happy about it except the horse, who stepped forward slightly every time I tried to climb on.

During Ten Tsewang’s 1953 mail run, once he was through the glacier he’d have been able to open up his stride, cruising six miles through the wide, shadeless summer grazing valleys near the villages of Pheriche and Dingboche. It’s more or less downhill after that, across a wooden bridge over the Dudh Khosi River, and into a steep climb, through blooming rhododendrons, up the other side of a canyon to Tengboche Monastery.

This was a good spot to watch Everest Marathon runners, who’d left Base Camp that morning, struggle with the second-to-last major hill of their journey. On the marathon course, eight to twelve hours is a good effort for a seasoned runner. Even the elites come in at around four hours. By all indications, Ten Tsewang would have been near the front of the group.

He was an athlete, and his body always gave what he asked of it. His childhood friend Kancha Sherpa—currently the only living member of the 1953 expedition—said that as kids they would gather firewood together and wrestle in a grassy clearing to see who was tougher.

There is only one picture of Ten Tsewang—five seconds in a newsreel, actually. (You’ll see him on the left, starting at 1:41.) He’s in Kathmandu, posing for a photo with the British expedition leader, Colonel John Hunt. He’s 20 but looks 14, baby-faced and something like five feet tall; he comes up to the chin of Hunt’s wife, Joy. It’s hard to believe that he’s the father of four kids. He’s wearing a pressed button-down shirt and wool beanie, likely new clothes for the occasion. He smiles wide when prompted, but when his face goes slack he looks tired.

We can only imagine what he looked like on the run. We know that his hair was long and would have flowed out behind him. Sherpa men would only begin cutting their hair later, when regular climbing expeditions provided steady income; long hair was also difficult to manage on the mountain. His clothes would have been made from wool or fur, probably with a huge belt around the waist.

His footwear would have been a kind of knee-high moccasin—picture a leather tube sock with laces up the front—perhaps with grass stuffed into it for warmth. His cousin, Kami Sherpa, was a mail runner for the American Everest expedition in 1963. When your boots started to smell, Kami said, you changed the grass.

He would have carried only the letter from Morris and a small pack. Inside would have been a jug of water and a pouch of tsampa—roasted barley flour and ground nuts. This was the energy gel of its time, a just-add-water meal that could be eaten on the go. If it rained he had a poncho. At night he would have borrowed a lantern from a village, for someone else to return.

His body, clothes, and food were optimized for the environment. He was in his physical prime and had been paid in advance. With all of England expecting news, there was no better or more reliable way to get a message to Kathmandu than Ten Tsewang.

How does someone like that run themselves to death?

The route descends unbelievably quickly. My altitude sickness evaporated and Pemba caught up with me in Pheriche. But by the time we left the Everest region, two days later, we had new issues.

We spent the night in Lukla, at 9,000 feet, where the air felt soupy because it was so rich with oxygen. Most hikers take a flight to Kathmandu from here, but we kept descending, and the trail somehow got even steeper. Our quads burned and our feet cramped from three straight days plodding downhill. Pemba’s knee problems got worse; my leg kept reminding me that it had been broken. That afternoon we limped into a teahouse and sipped from our cups with thousand-yard stares. We were tired, hurting, and just getting started.

Left: the author detouring around a rockslide near the village of Puiya. Right: a local carrying supplies. — From left: The author detouring around a rockslide near the village of Puiya; a local carrying supplies. (Photos: Ang Pemba Sherpa)

Having so far basically followed the Dudh Khosi River’s straightforward path downhill, our route would soon turn west toward Kathmandu. As we hiked, we were running against the grain of three mountain ranges. The first valley we crossed on our route had roughly the same vertical gain as hiking the Grand Canyon from rim to rim: around 5,500 feet. So did the next three.

The trails themselves were mostly uneven paths made from shoebox-size rocks. We’d hop from rock to rock, trying to avoid those that were slippery with donkey shit. There were very few switchbacks. Most of the route was straight up and down, bouncing between 5,000 and 11,500 feet.

Before the Lukla airport was built in 1964, expeditions took three weeks or a month to make the trek, often arriving at Base Camp disheveled and exhausted. Jamling Norgay—Tenzing Norgay’s son—suggested in his 2002 autobiography, Touching My Father’s Soul, that the trek from Kathmandu to the foot of Everest was harder than climbing the mountain itself.

Morris paid runners ten British pounds to carry her dispatches to Kathmandu. She bumped that up to 15 pounds if they made it there in less than a week; 20 pounds for six days or less. “Two of them, traveling alone, actually did the journey in five days,” she wrote. “An astounding achievement: an average of nearly 35 miles a day.”

In 2013, British ultrarunner Lizzy Hawker set the fastest known time for a run from Base Camp to Kathmandu, making the trip in two days, 15 hours, eight minutes. Impressive, but Hawker ran in only one direction. Mail runners were expected to make the return trip too, bringing news from home. Hawker knew this. “A real challenge would be to run up to Base Camp and back,” she said when she’d finished.

Americans Scott Loughney and Ryan Wagner did exactly that in the fall of 2019. Guided by Nepalese runner Upendra Sunuwar—he’d also guided Hawker during the later parts of her runs—they ran from Kathmandu to Everest and back in nine days, 23 hours, 18 minutes.

“I don’t care who you are or how you’ve trained,” Loughney told me. “The middle hundred miles is going to kick your ass.”

Yet if you truly wanted to re-create the experience of a mail runner—if you wished to prove that you were as tough as Ten Tsewang—you’d have to do the round trip more than once. Because as soon as runners returned to Base Camp, they might be asked to leave again with a new message. By the end of May, when Ten Tsewang embarked on his final run, he had already made the 400-mile round-trip journey twice. When he got to Kathmandu, he would have run almost 1,000 miles in service of the expedition.

Left: a man heading to Namche Bazaar to sell produce. Right: A view of Khumb Yui Lah, just below Lukla. — From left: A man heading to Namche to sell produce; a view of Khumb Yui Lah, just below Lukla (Photos: Ang Pemba Sherpa)

It was an incredible feat of endurance, but not a story people know or tell. It’s almost like it never happened.

When Ang Pemba and I sat down with Upendra Sunuwar for an interview in Kathmandu, he was unsure what we were talking about. He had supported three different FKT attempts and had never heard of the mail runners, much less Ten Tsewang.

“I never knew that was a thing,” Upendra said after we explained. “The whole time I thought they were saying ‘Everest mile run.’ Because it’s a lot of miles.”

Ang Pemba’s favorite stories to tell on a hike are stories from previous hikes. The time he spent a night on that ridge over there—no, the higher one; the time he led a woman with altitude sickness to a medical clinic in the middle of the night; the time he hiked the hardest part of the mail run as a little kid.

He was six years old in Namche when he fell off a fence and broke his arm. He took a medical flight to Kathmandu for surgery and spent a week or two in the hospital. The only way back to Namche was a bus ride to Jiri, and then a very long and difficult walk.

Jiri is halfway between Everest and Kathmandu. It’s where the high country softens up a bit, where mountains become hills and trails become roads.

“I can’t believe I did this as a six-year-old,” Ang Pemba says during one particularly heinous climb up to the town of Nunthala. “What were they thinking?”

His family says he walked the whole way. He wasn’t carried once.

I believe it.

Ang Pemba is energized by this route. He is constantly running ahead to take pictures. He always has two cameras with him: one with a huge telephoto lens that he carries in his hands, and another smaller camera strapped to the shoulder of his pack.

When I manage to catch up to him, he’s often posing someone for a trailside portrait, or taking a shot of field workers in the distance. He’s drawn to images that haven’t changed for a thousand years, that you wouldn’t believe are from the 21st century. Water buffalo plowing fields. Old men scything grass.

His photos make the argument that the past wasn’t so long ago, that it still lives on in certain places, certain people. He takes pictures as if he lost something that can only be found with his camera.

The trail from Jiri to Lukla—the one we’re on—was once a popular trekking route. The airfield in Lukla opened the door for tourists to come to the region, but back then it was like landing on an aircraft carrier parked between two mountains. It was safer and cheaper to take a bus and then hike from Jiri. These days, however, the runway is longer and tourists take helicopters.

There are plenty of places to stay, the path is well-marked, but there are fewer people hiking each season. As a result, most of the youth have gone to Kathmandu to work or have moved abroad to live. Ang Pemba points out that almost everyone in each village is elderly; that the new roads are being built atop the old walking trails; that after another couple of years of growth and development, this route will hardly exist. Even now it barely resembles the path Ten Tsewang took. Ang Pemba’s mission to retrace his grandfather’s steps couldn’t have waited much longer. Soon the route won’t offer any clues at all about the man we’re looking for. Soon, it seems, he will disappear forever.

We know basically what he looked like. It’s harder to get a grasp on what he was like. His eldest son, Pemba Tsering Sherpa, only remembers that he made it back to Namche a few weeks after the run, got sick, and died in bed. “There were no doctors in Khumbu at that time,” he said. “Not one.”

Ten Tsewang’s childhood friend, Kancha Sherpa, remembers him in general terms. “He was a good man,” he said. “With a good heart.”

Lakhpa Sonam Sherpa, a local historian who founded the Sherpa Culture Museum in Namche, had never heard of him. “I studied all the famous climbing Sherpas,” he said. “I never studied the mail runners.”

We can assume that Ten Tsewang was happy to be on the expedition. Historical accounts highlight the extraordinarily good attitudes of workers recruited from Sherpa villages. The “happy Sherpa” stereotype is still something you hear about, even today.

But the recipe for a happy workforce has never been secret.

“Their financial success on early expeditions was a major factor in their cheerfulness,” writes UCLA anthropologist Sherry Ortner in Life and Death on Mt. Everest, her 1999 study of Sherpa climbing.

Happiness wasn’t entirely about the money, though. On those early expeditions—the 1930s and before—tribes from other areas were paid similar wages and did not seem nearly as contented. Ortner writes that Western climbers described them as “sullen, ill-tempered, and largely unreliable.”

The difference, she says, was the way the Sherpa economy was organized. In other tribes labor was owed, like taxes, to a leader or chief, and the expedition worked with that chief to manage personnel. Any payment for climbing or portering work was indirect. It sometimes came only in the form of favors endowed by the chief later on. Sometimes it was simply a way to avoid punishment.

Sherpas, on the other hand, worked for themselves. They were paid directly, in cash, and received bonuses for exemplary performance. One popular reward for going above and beyond on the mountain was a fistful of coins from a chest—as many as they could grab with one hand.

“They were true capitalist workers,” Ortner writes, “selling their own labor power on their own behalf and keeping their own wages.”

Anthropologist and mountaineer Mike Thompson took this idea a step further, suggesting that Sherpas developed their friendly cultural style because they relied so much on relations with other groups.

“Their individualistic, exuberant, risk-taking, reward-enjoying trade has formed the basis for a cheerful, convivial, easy-going, open and hospitable life-style,” Thompson writes. “That has endeared them to generations of Western mountaineers.”

That’s a pretty wide brush to paint an entire ethnic group with, although few dispute the characterization. But it doesn’t fully explain Ten Tsewang.

Before he was a mail runner, Ten Tsewang was a farmer and trader. His village, Namche Bazaar, was home to one of the most popular markets in the region, and strategically located at the crossroads of trails to Tibet (four days away) and Lukla (one or two days away). Lukla was the gateway to the rest of Nepal. Ten Tsewang’s life—and the life of nearly every Sherpa man—was spent hiking up and down these inclines to buy, sell, and trade products like wool, barley, sheepskin, rice, buckwheat, and maize.

Yet one does not get paid—in advance—to run 200 miles in six days, then run it in five because they want to make a good impression. Something else compelled Ten Tsewang.

His son, Pemba Tsering, says it was Tenzing Norgay himself who pushed him so hard.

“They were like brothers,” he says. “He risked his life on the mail run because Tenzing risked his life on the mountain.”

Now 74, Pemba Tsering is compact and stout, with a huge, quick smile and thick fingers and hands. He has a playful face, but from his forearms down he looks like someone who chops firewood by tearing it in half.

Pemba Tsering is in the middle generation of this family. He is Ten Tsewang’s son and Ang Pemba’s father. He grew up not knowing the story of how his father had died. He didn’t know there was a story until much later. He was three when it happened. What would anyone say?

As the eldest of Ten Tsewang’s four children, he was tasked with finding an income for the family. The situation was bleak until Tenzing Norgay sent for him.

Apart from Pemba Tsering’s story, I couldn’t find any firm evidence that Ten Tsewang and Tenzing were close. He isn’t mentioned in any historical accounts, but of course he wouldn’t be. No one I talked to could comment on their friendship, but that isn’t surprising: this was 70 years ago. People tend to exaggerate their connection to someone like Tenzing Norgay, who became world-famous when the news of success on Everest made it back to London. Still, it seems likely that they knew each other: it would have been Tenzing who chose Ten Tsewang for the job of mail runner.

Tenzing had been the sirdar—the head Sherpa—on the 1953 expedition, so he hired a lot of people for a lot of jobs. Being a mail runner was desirable: it paid well, and you didn’t have to risk your life with high-altitude work. Later, when Tenzing summoned Ten Tsewang’s son to come to Darjeeling for school, it opened up a world of opportunity that wouldn’t have been available otherwise. That seems like the best evidence of their friendship.

The problem was that as of 1959, Pemba Tsering had never been to school before. By the time he started, he was a nine-year-old in a class of first-graders. It wasn’t a good fit, and he stopped going after a week. When Tenzing found out, he had an angry-parent moment and said that if Pemba Tsering didn’t like school, he would work. The next day, Tenzing had him wash dishes and deliver room service at the hostel connected to the climbing school. Eventually, Pemba Tsering became something like Tenzing’s personal assistant, carrying his luggage on trips, setting up his tent on climbs, and accompanying him on official business.

It was a good job, he said, but he was surrounded by mountaineers all the time. He realized that he wanted to be one, too.

So in 1969, at 19, he went back to Everest and joined a Japanese expedition. He got altitude sickness at Camp Two but didn’t tell anyone. He just snuck away to puke. In 1971, he worked on an expedition for the Argentinian military. “The equipment was bad, the food was bad,” he said. “Anyway, we try our best.” He climbed to the South Col at 26,000 feet that year. It was the highest he ever went on Everest.

In 1972, he decided that if he was going to make a career out of mountaineering, he needed more training, so he went back to Darjeeling to enroll in the mountaineering school where he’d grown up. This was the only formal education he ever had.

The next year he worked on an Italian expedition that was unlike anything that had come before it. A 64-person, mostly military team led by Italian adventurer Guido Monzino, they hired some 80 Sherpas and 3,000 porters to get to Base Camp. During the climb, they had three helicopters and flew in fresh vegetables every day. Things have been getting more luxurious on Everest ever since.

Pemba Tsering’s climbing career spanned 30 years and 42 expeditions. He survived avalanches and accidents, and worked with the best climbers in the world, including Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler, eventually becoming a sirdar himself on expeditions to Everest, Annapurna II, and Dhaulagiri II. In 1981, with contacts all over from his expeditions, he started Amadablam Trekking and ran it from Kathmandu.

His work as a sirdar made him, at times, a celebrity. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, whenever climbers from a country made it to the top of Everest for the first time—Spain, Austria, Korea, Japan—they sometimes brought their sirdar with them for a victory tour back home. Pemba Tsering attended bullfights as the guest of honor; his movements and opinions were regarded as news. People would cry when they didn’t get his autograph. He was treated like a king.

“Mountain also not a bad job,” he said with a grin.

Ang Pemba on the ascending route to Gorak Shep (Photo: Peter Frick-Wright)

I asked him if he ever thought about a life where none of this happened, where it wasn’t Tenzing who made the summit and became famous, where his father wasn’t motivated to run so hard that he died, where he wasn’t summoned to climbing school and didn’t have a career in the mountains. Was this all because Tenzing felt guilty about Ten Tsewang’s death?

He thinks quietly for a minute. “It wasn’t Tenzing’s fault,” he says finally.

“How did your father die?” I asked.

“Low-altitude sickness.”

I wait for him to smile and acknowledge the joke. But later he says it again.

As we progressed toward Kathmandu, our days fell into a brutal rhythm. We would wake up, eat as much breakfast as we could cram in, and try to hit the trail before it got too hot. We were rarely successful. It was early June, and everyone kept saying that the monsoon rains were coming, but they sure weren’t here yet. At lower elevations, temperatures and humidity peaked in the mid-nineties. We tried to adjust our pace so that we ended each day up high, to sleep where it was cool.

As a result, most mornings were spent descending, and afternoons climbing in terrible heat.

As we moved up and down, Ang Pemba’s fitness changed dramatically. Whenever we were up high, he could charge down the path to take pictures whenever he wanted. Down low he got noticeably slower. I’d sometimes leave him behind. He said that he wasn’t any good in hot weather, but one night we stopped in the village of Kharikhola, at 6,600 feet. We’d been twice that high two days ago, and while I felt and slept better, Ang Pemba felt worse. At dinner he slumped in his chair, elbows on the table, barely able to keep his eyes open.

Left: Keshav Regmi Magar and his wife, Bishnu Regmi Magar, outside the Blue Haven Lodge in Khari Khola. Right: the author approaching Lamjura Pass. — From left: Keshav Regmi Magar and his wife, Bishnu Regmi Magar, outside the Blue Haven Lodge in Kharikhola; the author approaching Lamjura Pass (Photos: Ang Pemba Sherpa)

“This always happens below 8,000 feet,” he told me. “I never have any energy.”

When Ang Pemba’s father told me about low-altitude sickness, I didn’t know what to think. Some kind of joke? Mistranslated folk wisdom? But when I looked into it back home, I found out it’s a real condition.

Scientists call the phenomenon high-altitude de-acclimatization syndrome, or HADAS, and it occurs when someone who lives at altitude descends too quickly.

In a 2013 study of seasonal factory workers in China who returned to sea level after six months working at 12,000 feet, researchers found that one-half to three-quarters of the group experienced a suite of symptoms eerily similar to mountain sickness—fatigue, dizziness, coughing.

The authors, a group of ten researchers from the Institute of Respiratory Diseases, and one from the College of High Altitude Military Medicine, both based in Chongqing, aren’t sure about the mechanism, but their paper suggests that having too much oxygen in one’s blood may cause inflammation and tissue damage that the body has to process and repair—like feeling exhausted when your immune system is working overtime to fight a virus.

Unlike altitude sickness, however, HADAS’s symptoms are mild and never life-threatening. A 2019 study by the same authors showed that pollen capsules were effective at mitigating the effects. It would be nearly impossible to descend quickly enough on foot to die from the shock to your system.

But oxygen isn’t the only thing that changes with altitude.

As we hiked our way through the peaks and valleys of rural Nepal, we began to notice certain differences between elevations. Some were obvious and expected, like trees and insects disappearing up high. Some were more surprising, like the way accents changed. The owner of the hostel where we stayed in Kharikhola—Keshav Regmi Magar—explained that in this part of Nepal, everything was organized by elevation, even people.

This is because altitude affects the kinds of crops you grow, the kinds of animals you raise, the type of clothes you wear—culture itself is shaped by altitude. In the flatlands, different tribes stuck together and lived in one place, like different types of food on a plate. Here, tribes gravitated toward specific altitudes, spread through the mountains like the layers of a cake.

Hospital sign in the village of Khunde — A hospital sign in the village of Khunde (Photo: Peter Frick-Wright)

As we got farther away from Everest, Keshav said, we’d find that it was still Sherpas living up high. And we did. Other tribes—Magar, Tamang, Rai—lived at lower elevations, some along the rivers, others on the hillsides. Historically, because each elevation had its own bugs and illnesses, different tribes developed distinctive immune systems. As a result, travel was sometimes limited: In the winter, you could go anywhere you wanted. But once it got hot and the mosquitoes came out, travel between elevations was dangerous.

Ang Pemba called it “auhl.” In Sherpa, it referred to all the different ways you got sick if you went down too low during summer. Low-altitude sickness. Before modern medicine, Sherpas never went below Lukla after May, much less all the way to Kathmandu. Ten Tsewang got a bonus for delivering his message quickly, but he should have asked for hazard pay.

Two hundred miles isn’t such a long way really, but it’s far enough for the world to change completely.

We had started up high, and we were cold; now we were down low, and it was hot. Instead of being circled by vultures in an expanse of ice and rock, we were watched by wild monkeys, perched in trees, as we drenched ourselves and gulped water from natural fountains.

When we began, it felt like pretty much everyone we met had some connection to Ang Pemba. His cousin owned the best restaurant in Namche; a photo of him as a child was on the wall at one of our hotels. At one point near Lukla, we paused to buy soda from a guy selling bottles out of a basket, and it turned out that Ang Pemba’s grandma was his aunt. Then the man’s neighbors wandered over, and they knew Ang Pemba’s mom.

Ang Pemba Sherpa, grandson of Ten Tsewang Sherpa, and Nyima Tshering Sherpa, grandson of Palden Sherpa — From left: Ang Pemba Sherpa, the grandson of Ten Tsewang Sherpa, and Nyima Tshering Sherpa, the grandson of Palden Sherpa (Photo: Ang Pemba Sherpa)

As the days went by and we put Everest farther behind us, everything got much less familiar. Shaded, rocky trails turned into sun-beaten dirt roads. Sun-beaten dirt roads became pavement shimmering with heat. People stopped knowing Ang Pemba’s family, then they stopped knowing his village. He replied “Solu-Khumbu”—the region’s political name—when asked where he was from.

Eventually, we met a guy named Umesh. He was traveling from the district of Surkhet to work on new electrical lines.

“Where are you guys coming from?” he asked in Nepali as we walked along the same path.

“Mount Everest,” Ang Pemba said.

“Ever-rest,” he said slowly. “Where’s that?”

Like his father, Ang Pemba left Namche when he was nine. Unlike his father, he didn’t go to climbing school; instead he went to an English-language boarding school in Kathmandu. His father had been the only nine-year-old in first grade, but Ang Pemba’s education was right on track. And this, too, was thanks to the 1953 Everest expedition.

After Hillary reached the summit and was knighted, he came back to Nepal and offered to build hospitals—there were almost no doctors in Khumbu. The community declined the offer. They would prefer schools.

So Ang Pemba was educated at the Edmund Hillary School in Khumjung, a 45-minute walk from Namche, which allowed him to go to boarding school in Kathmandu and learn English, which allowed him to go to Austria and then Wisconsin for college. That was 19 years ago. The disconnection from his homeland has been profound.

It’s a common story. Climbing changed the lives of one generation; education changed the lives of the next. So many Sherpas have left the region that when we dropped in on Pemba’s old school in Khumjung, most of the students were from other tribes—all the Sherpa families had left. Kids from downvalley were coming up to take their spots in the classroom.

Ang Pemba is undecided on whether he’s had a better life in the U.S. He had a hard time at first, so far from Nepal, not knowing anyone. Eventually, he transferred to Portland State University to be closer to family members in Oregon. But he suffered panic attacks, and his fear of having one in public kept him cooped up at home. A doctor gave him medication; he never took the pills, but it helped to know he had them. He just held them in his hand, inside his pocket, as a kind of comfort.

Ang Pemba Sherpa taking photos at Pheriche — Ang Pemba taking photos at Pheriche (Photo: Peter Frick-Wright)

“Why didn’t you go back to Nepal?” I asked.

“I couldn’t leave my room,” he said. “How was I supposed to travel?”

The one thing that helped was taking pictures. He found that if he had his camera with him—if he had a reason to be outside—he could go out and do things. First a park, then a hike, then a backpacking trip. After we met, he found himself organizing a trek retracing the mail run. It was a rescue mission for his grandfather’s memory—his chance to bring something back to the community he left behind.

“I’ve been trying to find an identity as someone from both places,” he told me later. “Seeking my grandfather is seeking myself.”

On the final lunge toward Kathmandu, I found myself wondering how Ten Tsewang’s story had survived at all. He’d been left out of the written history, his kids had never known what he did, and no one else seemed to remember, either. It wasn’t a story people told.

I was quite far into this journey before I realized that there was someone else with Ten Tsewang on the mail run.

Palden Sherpa.

Everyone remembers the same detail about Palden.

“Always drinking,” his son Anu Sherpa said.

“Drinking, every day drinking,” Pemba Tsering told me.

Palden lived to be 90. He was Ten Tsewang’s cousin. They made the run to Kathmandu three times together, but Pemba Tsering never knew that. He would see Palden at weddings, at ceremonies, and Palden never brought it up.

That might be because Pemba Tsering had left Namche, left the community. He was off guiding famous climbers, or he was in Kathmandu organizing logistics for foreign trekkers. He was raising his family’s standard of living, but losing his connection to the Khumbu region in the process.

It wasn’t until Pemba Tsering was in his thirties that this situation started to change. That was when he moved back to Namche, when his kids became fixtures playing in the grassy field at the center of town. One day, hiking the steepest part of the trail between Namche and Lukla, he realized that there was a stretch where almost everyone got thirsty but there was nowhere to get a drink. It was the very first spot where you could see Everest. He opened a teahouse and worked there every day, carrying his liquor inventory back up the hill at night to keep it from being stolen.

Palden walked between Namche and Lukla constantly. His house was in Namche; his wife’s family was near Lukla. He was probably the only person in Nepal who really knew Ten Tsewang’s story. He stopped in at the teahouse all the time but never talked about it.

All Pemba Tsering knew about his father’s death was that he’d gotten sick in the low country and died very young. He had no idea why he was down there. Everyone knew you didn’t go below Lukla after May.

Palden knew why Ten Tsewang had gone. But he wasn’t telling. Not to outsiders.

Left: Prayer Flags at Lamjura Pass. Right: Palden Sherpa in the mid-1990s. — From left: Prayer flags at Lamjura Pass; Palden Sherpa in the mid-1990s (Photos from left: Ang Pemba Sherpa; courtesy Nyima Tshering Sherpa)

One reason for Palden’s silence may have been that the story wasn’t so flattering. To tell it would mean describing how Ten Tsewang was always urging Palden to move faster. How Palden would protest and plead with him to take a break, slow down. And how, instead of easing the pace, Ten Tsewang would run ahead, drop his stuff, and come back to carry Palden’s pack.

Or maybe his silence was because, in the end, they weren’t the people who broke the news of the climb’s success. As it happened, the first message, the one sent by radio, made it through. News of the first Everest ascent was published in the London Times evening edition on June 1, 1953, the night before the queen’s coronation. The longer dispatch, which Ten Tsewang and Palden carried, was published a week later, on June 8. They came in second.

Maybe he didn’t talk about it because, according to Morris, not a single mail runner knew the contents of the message they carried, in order to guard its secrecy.

More likely, they did know. They would have been aware that Tenzing was going for the summit that day. And suddenly they had a message of the highest importance to deliver? They weren’t stupid.

Whatever the reason, the story of the mail run might have been lost forever if Pemba Tsering hadn’t opened that teahouse and Palden wasn’t such a loyal drinker. One time, probably in the mid-1980s, he stopped in and the place wasn’t busy. And there was Pemba Tsering behind the bar, with plenty of time to chat.

Palden sat down and ordered his usual.

“You know, you look just like your father,” he said after a moment.

“Really?” Pemba Tsering said, pulling up a chair and settling in. “How did you know my father?”

The Man Who Raced to Tell the World That Mount Everest Had Been Climbed