The Sherpas did it.
A group of Sherpas, including two who now live in Utah, reached the top of the world Tuesday night, when it was Wednesday morning in Nepal, according to www.everestnews.com.
Utahns Apa Sherpa and Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa were part of the seven-Sherpa summit team that set out for the top of the 29,035-foot peak, located in a time zone 12 hours ahead of Utah's.
"With great excitement in his voice, Apa (Sherpa) called base camp on his radio and said, 'We are on the summit. We are all on the summit,"' Roger Kehr said in an e-mail.
Kehr has kept in constant contact with the group from his home in Utah. He said all but one of the seven made it to the summit (Dawa Sherpa had to return to Camp 4), and all were "safe and sound," ready to take the "necessary" photos just before 9 a.m. Wednesday and then make a "hasty" departure.
The SuperSherpas Expedition became one of the first two teams this year to summit from the mountain's more technically difficult south side. This time, however, these Sherpas weren't porters working for pennies on the dollar.
They weren't carrying heavy loads of food and supplies in the bitter cold and wind for foreigners who typically pay an outfitter tens of thousands of dollars for a trek up Everest.
On the world stage, they were just a bunch of Sherpas, that is, before they became the first-ever all-Sherpa team to summit Everest.
But how will the successful summit of the SuperSherpas Expedition be received by an international media that critics say have, in the past, glorified foreign climbers while leaving Sherpas essentially in the shadows of their own back yard?
"They still do not command even a fraction of the attention that foreigners still attract," Kehr said in an interview earlier Tuesday.
Kehr was part of the SuperSherpas team in Nepal until he became ill and had to return to Utah.
"It's our fervent hope that they become Hollywood stars," Kehr said. "That way they can get paid. Right now they don't have enough money to pay for their children's education."
In a 2001 interview posted on the Web site www.k2news.com, Apa Sherpa said he considers his work on Everest, which includes a record 17 summits, as only a job, one he hopes his children won't have to do. He said back then that Sherpas are stronger climbers than Westerners and that Sherpas should be paid on the same level as Western porters and guides on Everest.
The trek for the SuperSherpas Expedition — and the danger — isn't over yet.
The hardest part, the descent, is still ahead for the Sherpas. And a majority of the people who die on Everest every year perish during the descent.
"Going down is harder than going up in many areas," Kehr said.
Physically, climbers are weak if they haven't been conserving enough energy during the ascent. And mental exhaustion can lead to mental mistakes, Kehr added. He also offered words of reassurance.
"You've got the strongest team in history," he said. And the group has about 50 summits of Everest between them. "They're brilliant climbers."
Other Sherpas on the summit team are believed to have been Ang Passang, Arita, Pemba, Dawa and Passang Gaylzan Lhakpa.
In their community of more than 100,000 people nestled high in the Himalayas of Nepal, Sherpa is a shared last name. Typical first names are derived from the day of the week on which Sherpas are born — Ngi'ma for Sunday, Dawa for Monday and so on. Utahn Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, for example, was born on a Wednesday.
For all they have accomplished — or rather, for as much as they have helped others become famous — most people around the world know little about Sherpas, who within the last 500 years left Tibet for Nepal.
With the SuperSherpas Expedition, doctors in Utah's medical community hope to collect enough data — through blood samples taken and observations made during the climb — in order to find out why Sherpas are so much stronger on Everest than virtually everyone else around the world.
"We really don't know exactly what we're going to find," said Geoffrey Tabin, who helped assemble a team to study the Sherpas before, during and after the Everest climb.
Tabin has known Apa Sherpa since 1988, when the two were together on an Everest expedition. Tabin said Apa was strong enough but lacked the experience back then to summit.
"He got nervous," Tabin said about Apa.
But the following year Apa Sherpa would summit, and he hasn't stopped reaching the peak since, holding the record for the most successful attempts.
What Tabin and others hope to learn from two of the world's strongest climbers — Apa and Lhakpa — is how their bodies utilize oxygen while under physical stress at high altitudes and whether there is anything in their DNA to suggest they have a head start on climbing from the moment they're born.
"(The study) has a lot of implications in terms of what we can do to control certain parameters with people who have congestive heart failure and pulmonary disease," Tabin said. The research collected from Apa and Lhakpa, he added, "...may be something that will be of great benefit to patients in the intensive care unit in a very short time."
E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com