Scaling the world's highest peak is all in a day's work for 54-year-old Nepali mountaineer Kami Rita Sherpa, a man breezily modest about having set foot on the summit of Everest more times than any other person. On Wednesday morning, Sherpa scaled Everest for the 30th time in three decades of climbing the mountain, extending his own record just 10 days after his last successful ascent. "I am glad for the record, but records are eventually broken," Sherpa told AFP last week after his 29th successful climb.
"I am happier that my climbs help Nepal be recognised in the world." Dubbed the "Everest Man", he has held the record since 2018 and his closest rival is now three summits back. "I did not climb for world records, I was just working," he said in a 2019 interview.
"I did not even know you could set records earlier." A living legend of mountaineering, Sherpa was born in 1970 in Thame, a village in the Himalayas famed as a breeding ground of successful mountaineers. The community's most famous son, Tenzing Norgay, made the first successful climb of Everest's 8,849-meter (29,029-foot) peak alongside New Zealand 's Edmund Hillary in 1953.
Growing up, Sherpa watched his father and then his brother don climbing gear to join expeditions as mountain guides, and was soon following in their footsteps. A guide for about four decades, he first reached the summit in 1994 while working for a commercial expedition, and has repeated the feat almost every year since. In 2018, he ascended Ever.
