Lhakpa Sherpa grew up impoverished in the shadow of Mount Everest.  Her father worked as a shepherd and her mother raised her along with her ten siblings.  They were dirt poor.  So poor that they couldn’t afford to buy shoes for the children, let alone to send Lhakpa to school.  Instead, she spent her days wandering barefoot through the mountains.

Ever since she was little, Lhakpa has had one dream: she wanted to climb Mount Everest.  At the time, women were not welcome to try.  Every climber was male, every Sherpa porter was male, and even the thought of a woman trying to climb Mount Everest was enough to make experienced mountaineers laugh out loud.  When Lhakpa was about 15, she started hanging around base camp and begging the Sherpa porters there to give her a chance.  She spent two years pleading, begging, lobbying, and trying to persuade them before Babu Chhiri Sherpa, a legend in his own right who once spent a record-breaking 21 hours on the top of Mount Everest without oxygen, agreed to give her a chance.

She quickly rose through the ranks.  She started as a regular porter, just carrying wealthy tourists’ oxygen canisters and tents and supplies and then became a “kitchen boy.”  She would rise before the tourists, hike with all the supplies to the next base camp, set up camp, and then cook dinner all so that when the tourists arrived, they could have a hot meal and go to sleep.

But that wasn’t enough for Lhakpa.