Last Member of Pioneering Everest Expedition Dies

Kanchha Sherpa, the only surviving member of the mountaineering expedition team that first conquered Mount Everest, died early Thursday, according to the Nepal Mountaineering Association. Kanchha died at age 92 at his home in Kathmandu, confirmed Phur Gelje Sherpa, the association president. "He passed away peacefully at his residence," Phur Gelje Sherpa told the AP, adding that he had been unwell for some time. "A chapter of the mountaineering history has vanished with him." Kanchha Sherpa was among the 35 members of the team that put New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay atop the 29,032-foot peak on May 29, 1953. The route they opened from the base camp to the summit is still used by climbers.

A mountain guide for most of his life, he was one of three Sherpas to reach the final camp before the summit with Hillary and Tenzing. But he never climbed to the summit of Everest himself, as his wife considered it too risky, he said in an interview with the AP last year. He forbade his children from becoming mountaineers. In the interview, he expressed concerns about overcrowding and filth at the world's highest peak. He urged people to respect the mountain, revered as the mother goddess Qomolangma among the Sherpas, Himalayan people renowned as mountaineering guides. "It would be better for the mountain to reduce the number of climbers," he said.

Kanchha was born in 1933 in the village of Namche in the Everest foothills, when most members of Nepal's Sherpa community earned their livings farming potatoes and herding yaks. He spent his childhood and young adult years earning a meager living through trading potatoes in neighboring Tibet. When he and several friends later visited Darjeeling, India, he was persuaded to train for mountain climbing, and he began working with foreign trekkers. He began mountaineering when he was 19 and remained active in the expedition sector until the age of 50.

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Well-liked and widely respected in the climbing community, Kanchha "was full of energy, and even after retiring and in his old age, he was trekking to monasteries all over the Everest region for religious ceremonies," said Ang Tshering Sherpa of the Nepal Mountaineering Association