James Estrin/The New York Times

Sir Edmund Hillary, who died this month, was honored in Queens on Sunday with a Buddhist ceremony organized by the Sherpa community in New York.

By ANGELICA MEDAGLIA

Published: January 21, 2008

The lights were shut off, and suddenly the lanky man with rosy cheeks, the most beloved Western friend of the Sherpas, seemed to come back to life on Sunday.

In a Queens hall decorated with Buddhist paintings, fruit offerings and colorful flags inscribed with prayers, a series of photos of Sir Edmund Hillary, who died on Jan. 11 at the age of 88, flashed on a screen. A black-and-white photo of Sir Edmund with Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa guide on the first successful climb of Mount Everest, in 1953, reminded Kaji Sherpa of his own adventures on the earth’s tallest peak.

“It reminded me of the joy but also the difficult part of mountaineering, and the hardship of Sherpa life in the mountains,” said Mr. Sherpa, who said he had climbed Everest five times. (Like many members of the ethnic group, he uses Sherpa as his family name.)

Mr. Sherpa and hundreds of Sherpas, many arriving in Tibetan-style gowns or North Face down jackets, crowded the Queens Palace hall in Woodside to pay tribute to Sir Edmund. Sherpas revere him for raising millions of dollars for Sherpa schools and hospitals in Nepal and because he insisted on sharing credit with Mr. Norgay as being the first men to climb Everest.

Photographs of an older Sir Edmund with piles of silk scarves around his neck resembled the man that Mingma Phuti Sherpa met when she was in school in Nepal, one of the first he helped build.

“I was so pleased to see him,” said Ms. Sherpa, 22, a nursing student at Molloy College on Long Island. “Even though I was so little, I was thinking he had such a big heart.”

Her parents had helped build the school and then attended it through the third grade. Ms. Sherpa went to the school through the eighth grade, when her parents sent her to New York for high school.

The Sherpa ethnic group migrated from Tibet to Nepal in the 16th century, scholars believe. They were yak herders and traders of salt, wool and turquoise in the isolated Himalayas.

They began to be known as guides when Western climbers started to take interest in the mountain chain’s most daunting peaks. More than 100 years later, the Sherpas (a word that means “people from the east”) are multilingual trekkers, and they own airlines and restaurants that support the mountaineering tourism industry in Nepal.

Sir Edmund “gave the Sherpas this incredible start of development,” said Vincanne Adams, a medical anthropologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has studied the Sherpas.

On Sunday, the New York Sherpas — taxi drivers, construction workers, nannies and house cleaners — cited Sir Edmund’s contributions to the group’s welfare through his foundation, including scholarships and 30 schools, two hospitals and 13 clinics in Nepal.

About 1,500 Sherpas live in New York, said Sonam Sherpa, who produced the slide show on Sunday and was a founder of the United Sherpa Association, which organized the event.

“Not a whole lot, but for us that’s enough,” he said. “We have about 20 to 40 birthdays a week. Any conversation that we can’t finish this weekend, we’ll finish it next week.”

But as in Nepal, it is a tight community. It is not uncommon to see a number of Sherpa families living under the same roof; as many as 20 families live in one Queens building, Sonam Sherpa said.

The United Sherpa Association is trying to raise money to build a Buddhist monastery for the community.

For now, the Sherpas manage to improvise. The Queens Palace stage was transformed on Sunday, with a huge photograph of Mount Everest pinned to one wall and Buddhist paintings lining another. Beneath them, monks in red robes recited Buddhist prayers in the Tibetan language for Sir Edmund.

Like any other immigrant group with American-born children, the Sherpas are struggling to pass on their traditions. The monks who live here help, but many of them have other jobs.

Most of the adults in New York also prefer to speak the Nepali language rather than Sherpa. And grandparents are not around to help keep the language and some Tibetan Buddhist traditions alive.

But the community has been able to transplant a Sherpa principle they call “kyidug”— of pooling their money to hold celebrations and to offer financial help to people in need.

“Kyidug means that we band together,” Sonam Sherpa said, “in good times and in bad times.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/nyregion/21sherpas.html

EXCERPTED FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 

For a climber, the first time you lay eyes on Everest, it’s hard not to think about Edmund Hillary — and try to imagine what it was like when he and Tenzing Norgay topped out on the world’s highest peak shortly before noon on May 29, 1953.

That Hillary would become a national hero — without revealing until years after Tenzing’s death that it was Hillary who stepped first onto the summit — said a lot about him. For them both, it was about the adventure, and the brotherhood of the rope.

For almost everyone who studied the pictures of his epic first ascent with Tenzing, Hillary stood for adventure. The collective sense of triumph that seized the world with their success was etched into Hillary’s famous photograph of Tenzing on Everest’s summit. I stared at it as a child and dreamed.

“My destiny was to climb this mountain,” Tenzing’s son, Jamling, told me in 2003, having followed in his father’s footsteps to the summit of Everest. “I knew I was going to climb this mountain one day.”

The Hillary Step, the 40-foot cliff that is the last great obstacle before the summit, was a struggle even for Hillary, a master of cutting steps in the snow. Only after he got past that did he believe the summit was within his grasp. It remains a test piece for climbers — who now ascend fixed ropes — and a recurring image in my own Everest dreams.

Years later, after I’d had my first career as an Outward Bound mountaineering and backcountry skiing instructor based in Colorado, I would visit a National Geographic exhibit and stare at the padded boots, oxygen apparatus and skimpy goggles Hillary and Tenzing wore. It drove home the true adventure of their first ascent, and how much has changed since then.

I used double plastic boots, a 40-below-zero sleeping bag, crampons with “anti-bollant” snow plates and other high-tech equipment on an American expedition attempting the seldom-climbed North Face of K2, from the Chinese side in the Karakoram range, and later in Alaska on Denali. Looking at Hillary’s equipment made my gear seem like cheating.

For climbers, it’s liberating to be outside, drawn out, tested, changed.

Hillary was no stranger to change, and became determined to give something back to the high places that shaped him.

Heading up the valleys of the Khumbu region toward Everest, along the wide dirt path that is the Sherpas’ Interstate 95, it was obvious that villagers revered Hillary. I had gone there with three other climbers in the hopes of putting up some modest new Himalayan routes. A blizzard stopped most of our plans and we wound up carrying Nepali children on our backs to rescue them from being trapped in the snow.

In the Buddhist monasteries at Thyangboche and Thame, some of the locals we met talked about the good works of Hillary’s family. I could see for myself the healthy-looking kids gathered for class and playing at the newly built schools, and the new hospitals and electricity lines that lit up the teahouses. Hillary’s photo was everywhere. His foundation raised money for most of the projects, to protect forests and to rebuild Thyangboche after it burned to the ground in a fire.

For the Sherpas, and the trekkers and climbers they cater to, the change that Hillary ushered in now seems inevitable. The Everest gold rush brought to the Khumbu the frequent sight of Westerners sipping milk tea and dahl bat — steamed rice smothered in curried potatoes and lentil soup — and grabbing a bunk bed, all for less than $1.

Hillary was a model for other climbers to try to follow. It took decades for others to catch up to his class act. Where many climbers left behind trash, Hillary left a legacy of education, health care and bonds of friendship.

He always projected humility, not particularly impressed with himself, always sensing that climbers should seek new challenges, new adventures, rather than necessarily repeating something done before. In his day, he was out there. And he passed on his passion for being in the mountains.

“To me, it’s a bit like falling in love,” his son, Peter, told me, having become a famous climber like his father and reached the summit with Jamling. Peter Hillary also helps raise funds for the trust that runs more than 40 schools and hospitals for the villages at the foot of Everest. “There’s some special chemistry. And I think some of us go to the mountains — and it is just a wondrous thing. We like the people, we like the experiences, we like the mountains, we like the uncertainty.”