Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa

Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa was Scott Fischer’s climbing sirdar on the 1996 Everest expedition, responsible for managing the high-altitude Sherpas and central to the attempt’s summit-day organization. Experienced as a climber but still young and relatively untested as a leader, he became one of the expedition’s most consequential figures: he helped clients toward the summit, stayed behind to assist other climbers, and then struggled for hours to get Fischer down. Fischer’s death and Lopsang’s later death on Lhotse give his story a painful, unfinished end.

Role and Early Assessment

Lopsang was twenty-three when Fischer hired him as climbing sirdar, the person charged with managing the high-altitude Sherpas who would work and climb with the expedition. He had already summited Everest with Fischer in 1994 and Broad Peak with him in 1995. His climbing ability was not in question, but his youth made Anatoli Boukreev uneasy about his readiness to lead.

Henry Todd likewise distinguished between Lopsang’s climbing and leadership credentials. Todd observed that reaching a sirdar position usually required repeated proof of leadership as well as climbing, and worried that a young, inexperienced leader might make serious mistakes. The concern was not that Lopsang lacked high-altitude ability, but that the expedition had placed substantial organizational responsibility on someone whose command experience remained uncertain.

That tension sat within the commercial structure of Everest expeditions. Sherpas left their homes to establish camps, carry loads, and serve climbers, for pay ranging widely from $2.50 to $50 per day. Fischer’s Mountain Madness business had not reliably provided him a steady income, and he regarded commercial success on Everest as a chance to change its prospects. Lopsang’s leadership role therefore combined technical climbing work with responsibility in an expedition whose financial ambitions depended on clients reaching the mountain and on Sherpa labor making that attempt possible.

Work on the Mountain

The acclimatization plan divided the expedition’s progress into four excursions. Clients were to carry personal belongings and equipment, conserving their strength, while the climbing Sherpas working under Lopsang carried rope and supplies. His work thus began well before summit day: he was part of the labor and logistical system intended to prepare the route and support the climbers’ gradual movement upward.

That system came under pressure when Ngawang Topche Sherpa, Lopsang’s uncle, became seriously ill. Fischer encountered him while descending from Camp II and told him to go down, but Ngawang did not follow. Lopsang later flew with his uncle and Ingrid Hunt to Kathmandu. The rescue might cost as much as $10,000, and Fischer was also concerned about Ngawang’s condition, his use of oxygen from the expedition’s dwindling supply, and the fact that the Sherpas had not yet prepared Camp IV or brought the oxygen supplies there. Fischer and Boukreev agreed that the team’s Sherpa operation needed to be evaluated after the expedition, including who should be invited on future trips.

The episode also prompted reflection on what clients could assume of Sherpas in an emergency. The account stresses both their established skill and the danger of expecting them automatically to undertake any particular risk. Their capability did not remove the need to consider the risks being asked of them; their work was not simply an inexhaustible resource for an expedition in difficulty.

The summit plan depended on coordination among guides and Sherpas, but its written expectations did not always match what happened. Climbers understood that Lopsang and Ang Dorje Sherpa were to leave Camp IV ahead of the clients and fix ropes. Neither they nor other Sherpas had departed early for that task. Fischer had also set no firm turnaround time for his clients. His intended arrangement was for Lopsang and the guides to alternate at the front, with Fischer bringing up the rear and turning back stragglers; radio contact with Lopsang was expected to provide a link to the front, although the guides Boukreev and Neal Beidleman were not issued radios.

Summit Day and the Delayed Descent

At about midnight, Lopsang set out from Camp IV with Pittman attached behind him by a short rope, secured to her harness with a carabiner. Fischer had asked whether anyone was ready to go with Lopsang, and Pittman stepped forward. Charlotte Fox left about ten minutes later, on her thirty-ninth birthday. The towline made Lopsang’s role concrete: he was not only part of the route’s leadership but also directly guiding a client upward.

Lopsang reached the summit at around 2:30 p.m. and waited there until approximately 3:40, when Fischer arrived. They began descending about fifteen minutes later, Fischer first and Lopsang behind. On the way down, Lopsang stopped to retrieve the ice axe he had anchored in the snow while fixing rope for ascending climbers. He then noticed Hall helping his exhausted client Hansen up that rope. To make sure the two men were secure on their descent, Lopsang waited in the cold until they summited and came back down, between about 4:15 and 4:30. That delay separated him from Fischer at a moment when the weather and the climbers’ condition were deteriorating.

Lopsang’s account adds another measure of the competing demands on him. He said he gave climbers tea and juice and continued downward after Hall asked him to carry oxygen upward, explaining that Fischer was sick and that he would stay with his own client. In the same account, he described Fischer moving off in the wrong direction during the descent, away from the route taken by the other climbers. These details place Lopsang between assistance to other climbers and his commitment to the person he had been hired to guide.

Fischer’s Decline and Lopsang’s Promise

By late afternoon, the danger had become acute. Hall was with a client above the Hillary Step who had run out of oxygen. Lopsang had stayed behind to see Hansen safely under Hall’s care, then caught up with Fischer just above the Balcony. According to Lopsang, Fischer was seriously unwell and said he was dying. The reports reaching Camp IV were incomplete and confusing: Boukreev was told that Fischer was out of oxygen, delirious, apparently suffering from cerebral edema, and unable to move without Lopsang’s help. Lopsang had been struggling alone for hours to get his friend and mentor down.

Lopsang eventually had to leave Fischer below the Balcony. He told him he would send Sherpas, oxygen, and tea, while Fischer urged him to descend. Lopsang later recalled staying with Fischer for about an hour and then leaving after Fischer continued telling him to go. He said he would make a small shelter and send help, and that the next morning he sent two Sherpas with oxygen, tea, and soup. By then Fischer had died. The account records the promise not as a successful rescue but as the limit of what Lopsang, alone and himself exposed to the conditions, could accomplish.

Fischer died approximately 500 vertical meters above Camp IV. Lopsang’s effort to bring him down lasted more than five hours, but the book notes that this labor received little recognition. Boukreev and Beidleman later said that, had they seen a definite sign of Fischer’s serious distress, they would have tried to turn him around. Lopsang, by contrast, blamed himself entirely after learning Fischer had died. The gap between what others could see and what Lopsang had experienced with Fischer leaves his self-blame beside, rather than resolving it through, the account of his prolonged effort.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

The book’s later discussion of the controversy over Boukreev’s account notes Jon Krakauer’s repeated complaint that Lopsang had not been interviewed for The Climb. That absence matters to the shape of the record: Lopsang’s account appears elsewhere in the material, including his own recollection of the summit and of being left with Fischer, while the published controversy turns attention to whose testimony was sought and how the rescue was represented.

Lopsang did not live long enough to come fully to terms with Fischer’s death. Less than four months afterward, he was killed in an avalanche while attached to an expedition on Lhotse. His narrative therefore ends without a later reconciliation or a settled judgment of his leadership. The record instead holds together two contrasting assessments: doubts about his experience as a sirdar, and the documented decisions and hours of effort through which he stayed with Fischer and tried to help him. It also places that individual burden within the larger expedition economy, where Sherpas performed essential, dangerous work while decisions, money, and recognition were unevenly distributed.