Ang Tshering

Ang Tshering is a Kathmandu-based organizer with Asian Trekking whose work linked expedition leadership to the logistics and Sherpa labor required to climb Everest. He helped recruit Boukreev for the Indonesian team’s 1997 Everest expedition and supplied its logistical and staffing support, placing him within a narrative that also examines who organized, performed, and benefited from the work of commercial mountaineering.

Role in the Indonesian expedition

During the fall of 1996, Ang Tshering asked Boukreev whether he would consult for an Indonesian team planning a spring ascent of Everest by the Southeast Ridge Route. Boukreev accepted the position of lead climbing consultant, drawn both by the chance to return to Everest after the previous season’s disaster and by the opportunity to work in a leadership role consistent with his ideas about climbing.

Ang Tshering’s contribution was practical as well as organizational. He provided logistical support and hired the Sherpa staff. The expedition’s leaders met in Kathmandu on January 10 to coordinate plans and begin selecting the team, and Ang Tshering was among those present with Boukreev and the other climbing advisers.

Sherpa staffing and division of labor

The expedition had the services of Apa Sherpa as sirdar and lead climbing Sherpa. The Sherpa team was to provide support at Base Camp, fix ropes above the Icefall, establish and supply higher camps, and carry the extra oxygen intended for summit day. In principle, these arrangements would allow the climbing advisers to concentrate on the clients and difficult conditions on the route.

That division of labor depended on having a sufficiently capable team. During preparations, Boukreev described Apa as a hard worker but noted that only eight of the sixteen Sherpas were still fit to work. Some members had been recruited from among Apa’s family and friends and, in Boukreev’s assessment, could not contribute an equal share. The staffing weakness and the Indonesian organizers’ ineffective control of the situation threatened both the summit plan and its backup safety arrangements. Boukreev nevertheless cautioned against assigning simple blame: building a Sherpa team with consistently matched strength and skill, he observed, required years of repeated ascents and sustained financial support.

Route work and control of resources

Ang Tshering’s organizational role is set against the economics of route preparation. At Everest Base Camp in 1997, seventeen teams were present, while expedition leaders contested who would fix the Icefall and collect payment for the work. A brief effort by the Pangboche Sherpa Cooperative to secure that income did not prevail; Henry Todd and Mal Duff obtained the work, and Duff’s Sherpas quickly fixed the route the other teams would use.

Boukreev criticized a system in which leaders could collect substantial payments from expeditions using a route while relying on Sherpas’ hard work and comparatively low pay. He imagined instead a route fixed in advance by Sherpa contractors, with all expeditions paying them directly. Ang Tshering’s role in hiring staff and supplying logistics belongs to this broader picture of commercial climbing: local organization was essential to making expeditions possible, even as control of route work and its proceeds remained contested.