The amazing double life of Lhakpa Sherpa: Everest record breaker — and Connecticut house cleaner

It’s approaching 9am and conditions favour a summit push. After days in which a kink in the jet stream has drawn cold air from the Arctic, a balmy southerly breeze washes across advanced base camp, otherwise known as Gospel Oak station in North London. 

It’s here, not far from the city centre, that I am meeting one of the world’s most accomplished mountaineers for an ascent to the roof of, er, inner London, where the highest point nudges the heavens at 134 metres above sea level.

Lhakpa Sherpa, who has climbed Everest 10 times, a record for a woman, arrives clutching a coffee cup. I show her the route on my phone — a 3.1km ascent through the grassland and woods of Hampstead Heath to Whitestone Pond.

“Maybe I will need oxygen!” Lhakpa says, laughing, as we set off, adjusting the pace as we begin to scale the south face of Parliament Hill. The pretence of adventure, already in peril, finally evaporates when I note that the FT’s photographer is wearing flip flops.

Ordinarily we might have met in some anonymous hotel room to talk about the big-budget documentary about Lhakpa, who is 50, that lands in cinemas and on Netflix later this month. But it’s clear in Mountain Queen: The Summits Of Lhakpa Sherpa that sitting still isn’t really her bag.

The film, by Oscar-nominated British director Lucy Walker, is an inspiring account of Lhakpa’s 10th assault on Everest in 2022. But it’s a lot more besides. Shot over several years on and off the mountain, it follows her much tougher attempt to reclaim her identity and heal her family after a series of extraordinary setbacks.

Speaking in high-energy volleys of broken English, Lhakpa, who has lived in the US for more than 20 years, recounts for the first time the horrific abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband, Gheorghe Dijmărescu, a renowned Romanian-American climber and guide.

At a time when mountaineering is facing a wider reckoning over gender power dynamics and allegations of sexual harassment and assault, Lhakpa also wonders what a climber like her has to do to get a sponsor. It’s startling to learn that, in order to travel to the UK to promote a film about her record-breaking exploits on a mountain that is increasingly awash with money, Lhakpa is having to take time off her job as a house cleaner.

“Sometimes when I ask sponsors [for support] they don’t believe in me,” says Lhakpa, who until recently worked in Whole Foods, a supermarket near the apartment she shares with her daughters, Sunny, 22, and Shiny, 17, in West Hartford, Connecticut. “They say, ‘ah, she’s divorced’, or, ‘she’s a mum’, or ‘she does dishes at Whole Foods’, and it makes me so angry! I am strong, I know this mountain very well, why not me?”

Lhakpa Sherpa was born in 1973 to a family of shepherds in a small Himalayan village. Her mother hated her early fascination with the towering peaks she could see from their home. She feared that her tomboy daughter, who was one of 11 children, might be attacked by a snow leopard. Locals were also afraid of the “yetis”, the name they gave to the tall, pale-skinned foreigners who had begun to come to the region on trekking holidays.

Lhakpa would have to surmount bigger barriers than maternal disapproval. Girls did not go to school in those days (Lhakpa carried her younger brothers to classes to spare them the long walk). A life of domestic graft laid out before her, she rebelled — and kept looking up. It helped that she was immensely strong, which was a source of pride for her father. “Nepali men say women must stay at home, but he told my mum, ‘let her go, she’s strong!’” she recalls. “‘You’re my strong son!’ he said to me.”

Her hair cut short, Lhakpa found work as a porter and “kitchen boy” on trekking expeditions. In 1993, she laid a flower during the funeral of Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, who died on the descent after becoming the first Nepalese woman to reach the summit of Everest. Lhakpa says she felt her fellow Sherpa’s energy pass to her.

By 2000, Lhakpa had been scraping a living in Kathmandu between expeditions and had had a son — Nima — after a short relationship. After writing a letter to the government, she ended up leading an all-female Nepalese team up Everest, and became the only one to summit. “I felt so powerful,” she tells me. “I had no worries, I felt like I was still a teenager.”

Lhakpa met Dijmărescu at a Kathmandu bar soon afterwards. Tall, handsome and charismatic, he had just summited Everest for the second time. The pair fell in love and reached the summit together in 2001. Lhakpa and Nima moved to Connecticut with Dijmărescu, who had a roofing company (Lhakpa recalls doing most of the heavy lifting). They returned to Everest with clients each spring.

After Sunny arrived in 2002, Lhakpa says Dijmărescu became aggressive and domineering. During an argument on Everest in 2004, he punched Lhakpa in the head in front of clients and dragged her limp body out of the tent, describing her as “trash”. Lhakpa feared she would die, and says only thoughts of Sunny kept her going.

For years she became locked in an abusive relationship with a controlling man who crushed her confidence and threatened the life she had built. “He’s my monster, he’s my yeti,” she says in the film.

Not long after we pause at a lookout to take in the London skyline, I ask Lhakpa if she has followed recent news about another Nepalese mountaineer. A couple of weeks before our hike, the New York Times ran a story about the dangers women face on big mountains. Two women alleged that Nirmal “Nims” Purja, the lauded British-Nepalese mountaineer whose feats on 8,000-metre peaks have earned him fame and fortune, sexually harassed them, one at a Kathmandu hotel, the other while she was on an expedition to K2 as a client of Elite Exped, Purja’s guiding company.

Via his lawyer, who did not reply to my emails, Purja told the New York Times that he “unequivocally denies the allegations of wrongdoing. These allegations are false and defamatory”. My own email to Elite Exped also goes unanswered, but a spokesperson for Nimsdai, Purja’s own company, repeats the denial and says that Purja is “currently evaluating his legal options”. 

Lhakpa tells me she has not followed the news, and it becomes clear that she wants to focus on her own story. But it strikes me that a film about a woman held back by extreme inequality — in her upbringing, in her marriage, in the mountains, and in the financial insecurity she still grapples with — feels timely. “I’m astonished that this conversation hasn’t happened before,” says Lucy Walker of the wider debate the Purja story has sparked.

Lhakpa’s own struggle was far from over. Unable to leave Dijmărescu, who later threatened to kill the family if she tried, she kept climbing with him, making her sixth Everest summit in 2006 while pregnant with Shiny. It would be her last for a decade; as Dijmărescu’s behaviour got worse and the family’s finances suffered, Lhakpa was forced to become the subservient housewife she had never wanted to be.

“When life is not easy for me, I think about my mountain, mountain is my childhood friend,” she says in the film of this miserable hiatus. “When I’m with Gheorghe I’m alone, nobody sees me, he treats me like I’m nobody.”

Her 10th summit won her plaudits, but she was always going to have to go back to cleaning fancy houses, whose owners have no idea who she is

After a devastating attack in 2012 that Sunny and Shiny witnessed, Lhakpa fled with them to a women’s refuge and finally escaped her marriage, later winning sole custody of her daughters. Dijmărescu, who received a suspended prison sentence, begged her to come back. Instead, she plotted a return to Everest. 

Lhakpa’s younger brother Mingma Gelu Sherpa, who had started working on the mountain at the same time as her, had managed to establish a guiding company and in 2016, Lhakpa joined an expedition with him. Taking a break from a job at a 7-Eleven, she managed to summit for a seventh time and start her rehabilitation. “Everest is my doctor, it fixed my soul,” she said.

Walker made contact with Lhakpa soon afterwards. Determined to give her the mountaineering movie she deserved, she recruited a high-altitude cinematographer to capture the landmark 10th summit in 2022. But it’s arguably the scenes in Connecticut and at Everest base camp that are most captivating.

We watch as an immigrant mother and her American daughters bridge a crevasse of understanding while they confront their very different lives and common traumas. It’s an ultimately rewarding process that Lhakpa nonetheless has found very difficult. “My culture is to hide this kind of problem,” she tells me as we near the end of our walk. “But now I don’t have a choice, I cannot hide any more.”

Her triumphant tenth summit was also eye opening. In 2000, Lhakpa had been one of only 145 people to reach the summit. This time she was one of almost 700. Everest is arguably now defined in the popular consciousness by photos of summit-day queues. “I wish there was a bit of a limit,” Lhakpa says. “Everest deserves respect.”

But she as much as anyone recognises the paradox at the heart of the industry, in which Sherpa-led guiding companies like her brother’s are boosting the status and prosperity of traditionally exploited people. The richest climbers are now employing three or even four personal Sherpas. “It looks more like babysitting, but Sherpa also needs the job,” she says.

Now Lhakpa needs a job. Her 10th summit won her plaudits, and a small amount of sponsorship to climb K2, the world’s second highest peak, in 2023. But she was always going to have to go back to cleaning fancy houses, whose owners have no idea who she is. She hopes the Netflix treatment will bring new opportunities.

She wants to climb to the highest point in each of the 50 US states with her daughters, to introduce young people who have had difficult lives to the mountains. And she wants to improve training for the young Sherpas who risk it all for rich summit baggers. “I want to change young people’s lives,” says Lhakpa, who now has her own guiding company, Cloudscape Climbing. 

After a slight detour into an ancient oak wood, we march south to Whitestone Pond, where a flagpole marks our summit. We exchange ironic high-fives. Lhakpa says she’s nervous about such a personal film going out into the world, but above all hopes it will inspire other people. “I’m an old lady but I have so much energy!” she says as we start our descent. “I want people to see that very bad things happen to me, but I never give up.”

‘Mountain Queen’ is released in a limited number of cinemas from July 26 and is available on Netflix from July 31