Nima Rinji Sherpa is youngest person to summit world’s 14 highest peaks at 18 years old. Now he is pushing for recognition of his community.
This month, at 18 years old, he became the youngest person to summit all 14 of the world’s highest mountains - which are spread across Nepal, Pakistan, China and India - a mission he began aged just 16.
Growing up as a sherpa in Nepal, Nima Rinji Sherpa was used to his relatives performing superhuman feats on the mountains. There was his father, Tashi Lakpa Sherpa, who at 19 summited Mount Everest without any additional oxygen, becoming the youngest to do so. Then there were his uncles, the first brothers to scale the world’s 14 highest peaks together.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, during his two year odyssey climbing the world's tallest peaks, he began to reflect on how the achievements of sherpas were treated to those of western climbers. A case in point was the worldwide media attention that focused on Adriana Brownlee earlier this month, with legions of media outlets (including OGN Daily) proclaiming her extraordinary achievement of becoming the youngest woman, aged 23, to scale the 14 highest peaks in the world.
But who knew about Nima Rinji Sherpa's achievement? By the time he had climbed half of the world’s highest peaks, across Nepal and Pakistan, he found he had “a greater motive for why I was doing this”.
“I realised how important it was to me to push the narrative of sherpas as elite athletes, and to push for an equality with western climbers,” he said.
Yet even with the world’s 14 highest peaks under his belt, he is already planning his next challenge: the unprecedented feat of scaling Nepal’s Mount Manaslu - the world's eighth-highest mountain, reaching a lofty 8,163m / 26,781ft - in the dead of winter without any oxygen or ropes.
He is curious to see how far he can push his own endurance. But more than anything, he wants to make his fellow sherpas proud. “The more well known I become, the more I can be a bridge for my community,” he said. “I am doing this for the next generation.”
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