Lhakpa Sherpa’s colleagues at US supermarket Whole Foods had no idea she had a double life as a serial record-breaker. To them, their hard-working colleague, who was born to yak farmers in the Nepalese Himalayas in 1973, was just another mum trying to make ends meet in West Hartford, Connecticut. But Lhakpa was harbouring a secret: she had a once-in-a-generation skill for mountain climbing and had reached the summit of Mount Everest ten times, the most of any woman in the world.
‘I didn’t want to talk about my life. I didn’t want to say, “I summit Everest”,’ Lhakpa tells Metro.co.
uk when asked why she concealed her extraordinary talent. ‘You know I’m just a normal woman, a normal person working. I’m not educated.
I need to do everything I can: washing dishes and cleaning houses.’ It was a feat she achieved against all odds. When Lhakpa was growing up in Nepal, girls were banned from having an education and she did not go to school.
She is still illiterate. Her generation of women were paired off in arranged marriages and expected to stay at home, but Lhakpa did not want that life. Growing up in the foothills of the Nepalese mountains, she dreamed one day of reaching the summit.
‘I felt stuck,’ she says in upcoming Netflix documentary, Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa about her inspiring achievements. ‘I was a wild girl. I was a nature girl.
’ By 2000, Lhakpa had defied cultural expectations and was working for an Everest expedition tou.