Word: sherpa
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...Sherpa boots, Uggies—call them what you will, sheepskin lined footwear is always going to be a difficult look to pull off. Yes, they’re the ultimate in comfort footwear—think macaroni and cheese for your feet—and yes, they’re more toasty than a hot, doughy bagel, but Uggs have a troubled history in the cultural lexicon that remains unknown to many of the campus fashionistas who sport them with a mini in public. From admittedly cool beginnings among Aussie surfers in the 1970s for warming up after hanging...
...heroes, perhaps because, having elevated skepticism to a virtue, we don't allow ourselves to be. But by all accounts, Edmund Hillary, who is still alive, and Tenzing Norgay, who died in 1986, were the real deal. Hillary was a beekeeper; Tenzing, in effect, a professional climber from the Sherpa community in the Himalayan foothills. The two men, wrote Jan Morris in TIME three years ago - and as a young journalist in the Everest party, Morris had known them both - were "cheerful and courageous fellows doing what they liked doing, and did, best." In their lives after Everest, their reputations...
...what was really important. They had seen life held cheaply; they had witnessed bravery, nobility, horror, shame and sacrifice. I don't mean to imply that they were depressingly earnest. On the contrary, all accounts of the expedition revel in the fun the group had, with parties galore in Sherpa villages. But I doubt if anyone on the team thought he was doing anything more significant than climbing a mountain. Those men kept things in perspective. One of my single favorite sentences in all literature is Hunt's description of the return to camp of Hillary and Tenzing after reaching...
...world converged on Everest's slopes to attempt their own groundbreaking firsts. In 1978, Reinhold Messner's ascent without bottled oxygen defied the conventional wisdom that time spent without artificial oxygen above 7,900 meters?in the "death zone"?would cause irreparable brain damage. In 2000, Babu Chiri Sherpa?the most famous Sherpa?climbed from base camp to the top of Everest in just under 16 hours...
...this testament to Sherpas past and present, Tashi Tenzing is confident that his people will face these challenges with the same determination as their forefathers who faced Everest. "I believe little has changed in the Sherpa heart," he writes, "for whether I meet my family and friends at Everest base camp or Kathmandu, in San Francisco or London, the bond of Sherpa kinship and tradition runs deep and strong...