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this lesson. They were Everest’s first recorded fatalities—the first of many more to come, for both the Sherpas and the foreigners.
    Lakpa’s father, Nima, who worked in the mountains during the climbing season, wanted to give his son another career option, however. And so he convinced a generous foreign client he often guided to pay for his son’s education in Kathmandu. With only one year of rural schooling behind him, Lakpa abruptly found himself plucked from the mountains, put on a small, bone-rattling plane, and deposited swiftly in a boarding school surrounded by over a million people and a thick cloud of smog.
    It proved to be an unstable place for the young Lakpa, in more ways than one.

    Placed inconveniently near one of the world’s most active fault lines, where the Indian subcontinent collides violently with Asia, Kathmandu was first razed by the movements of the earth’s crust in 1253, then again in 1259, 1407, 1680, 1810, 1833, 1860, and once more in 1934. Tens of thousands died. And the next major quake will likely be worse than all of them.
    The off-white haze hanging over Kathmandu is also a threat, but less sporadic. Smoke and soot, which billow up from the city’s myriad brick factories, buses, cars, trucks, motorcycles, and scooters—cradled by an amphitheater of mountains—linger, even at night. People walking on the labyrinth of narrow, busy streets—flooded by, in addition to motorized vehicles, bicycles, cows, chickens, dogs, food carts, street children, and beggars—can be seen wearing surgical masks to help filter the grit of the air from their lungs. Those who don’t cover up cough black phlegm.
    Lakpa spent the next eight years in the city attending boarding school, where he learned to read, to write, and to like beer, cigarettes, and motorcycles. He was allowed to return to his family’s farm in Chaurikharka for one week every year. He liked beer, cigarettes, and motorcycles, but not school. After failing his final exams in tenth grade, he left school for good and returned to the mountains, without any idea as to what to do next. “I had no plan,” he admits. “None.”
    Lakpa’s cousin Kili, meanwhile, had become a highly skilled climbing sherpa, working for one of Nepal’s largest mountaineering outfitters, Equator Expeditions. Knowing his younger, educated cousin didn’t have a career plan, he volunteered to teach Lakpa the basics of mountaineering: how to put on crampons, tie knots, and camp at altitude in the Himalaya without freezing to death, all while guiding on an “easy” nearby, nontechnical, 20,075-foot mountain rising up from the Khumbu Glacier called Lobuche East. Lakpa, as it turned out, proved to be a faster learner in the mountains than he was in the city, and he caught on quick. The only problem he encountered was on the summit, where an acute case of altitude sickness—a blinding headache that “made lights flash in my eyes,” he says—nearly immobilized him. This, of course, did not dissuade him from venturing back into the mountains.
    Not long after climbing Lobuche East, Kili took Lakpa to 20,305-foot Island Peak, another “trekking mountain,” on which Lakpa had no difficulty and proved to be a valuable member of the expedition, namely by making the clients laugh. His infectious, broad grin never left his face the entire trip. He would often crack jokes and was caught singing happily to himself regularly—he still does. “It’s what I do when I’m happy,” he says.
    Kili continued to hire Lakpa as an assistant on the lower peaks of the Himalaya, which in turn gave Lakpa a source of income outside of the family farm. “I climb for work, not for fun,” Lakpa is quick to point out to Westerners who ask him if he enjoys mountaineering. “Climbing is not fun,” he says plainly. As if it were obvious. “Climbing is hardwork.” This is always followed by a deep, booming, open-mouth laugh. “I do not climb for fun. Climbing is my job.”
    In