Re:A Nepali team has made the first winter ascent of K2
by HotHotLava on Saturday January 16, 2021 @10:21PM
(#25807775)
While the Sherpa were crucial to success of the expedition, it's also important not to jump to the other extreme and underestimate the contributions of the British party. This was not a "guided" expedition where the clients were just going up in the wind shadow. Back in 1953, it's pretty unlikely that sherpa party could have summitted on their own.
If I remember correctly (it's a while since I read Hillary's account of the expedition), only three of the sherpa were able to go up to camp 4, and two of those them had to turn back due to altitude sickness. Tenzing Norgay did not have the technical knowledge to operate the oxygen systems. Also, crampons were far less advanced back then, so the mountaineers were also responsible for cutting steps every few days for all the routes that the porters were using to haul gear.
“The mountaineers were accompanied […] by 362 porters, so that the expedition in the end amounted to over four hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides from Tibet and Nepal, with a total weight of ten thousand pounds of baggage”
I don’t know the details of that expedition, but typically, the sherpas make multiple trips up and down the mountain to bring the necessary material up to height, so that those paying can relatively comfortably acclimatize at height. Climbing Everest almost always is a team effort.
Even if you ignore those porters , those “twenty Sherpa guides from Tibet and Nepal”, IMO, deserve to be mentioned there more than Jan Morris, who didn’t make it further up the mountain than 22,000 feet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Morris).
(and aside: ten thousand pounds of baggage seems very low to me. That’s less than 30 pounds per porter ⇒ I guess that’s what made it to the highest camp)