Apa Sherpa, The Legendary Climber Who Reached Everest 21 Times Before the Record Was Broken By Kami Rita

Apa Sherpa’s life is one of the great Himalayan stories because it is not built around one lucky summit or one famous photograph.

It is built around hardship, repetition, and a kind of quiet determination that most people never see.

Apa, born on 1960, came from Thame in Nepal’s Everest region, grew up in poverty, worked the mountains from the bottom up, and eventually became the man who held the record for the most Everest ascents for years.

His birth name was Lhakpa Tenzing Sherpa and that he was later renamed Apa, meaning “much loved,” after a childhood avalanche story.

When his father passed away, he became the man of the house while still a child, working as a porter for mountaineering groups.

Carrying the heavy gear of foreign climbers taught him discipline, strength, and endurance long before he ever dreamed of standing on Everest’s summit.

Early Life and the Road to Everest

Apa Sherpa never had the idea of records as a child. He has lived in a village of the mountains where life was difficult, work began early and life was not about dreams.

Thame, a Sherpa village in the very heart of the Everest region formed his entire life. At the age of three months, he was hit by an avalanche that hit him and his mother changed his name to Apa.

That early incident seems to be symbolic since the mountains would continue working their way in his life in a manner he can never anticipate. His father died when he was still young and this made his childhood difficult.

He was forced to accept responsibility at an early age. He dropped out of school and was employed as a porter in climbing teams.

This shows how his life began. Neither did he enter the world of fame and high climbing. He began as a boy who carried the loads of others up through the same mountain which would up to now give his name immortality.

Before Everest became his defining mountain, Annapurna was where his expedition life first took shape. In 1985 and 1987 he worked on Annapurna as a cook and a porter respectively.

Those early roles matter because they show that he entered the climbing world from the ground level.

He got to know the operation of expeditions by first serving them. He studied the pace of the mountain teams, watched the physical performance of the jobs at the high altitudes and gradually created that type of experience that would one day make him one of the most reliable Sherpas in the Himalayas.

By 1988 he had started working on Everest itself in which came the point when his life became something extraordinary.

It was not immediately his first summit. In May 10, 1990, he was able to reach the summit in his fourth attempt along with Rob Hall, Gary Ball, and Peter Hillary.

Then that only makes the story stronger, not weaker. It is that he was not given success the first time in Everest.

He never came, returned, failed, and returned until the mountain finally provided him with the breakthrough he was to be struggling so hard to achieve.

That was not the only time Apa Sherpa was impressed to do something. He kept going. After 1990, he came up to Everest nearly every year, only skipping 1996 and 2001 and succeeded in reaching the summit twice in 1992.

Everest did not hand him success on the first try. He failed, came back, failed again, and kept returning until the mountain finally gave him the breakthrough he had been chasing.

Apa continued to make a comeback over a period of more than two decades. He was not just climbing to glory.

He had a hard mountain task which he was performing under one of the most dangerous conditions on earth, and he had done it with great uniformity.

One of the reasons why he was so respected is that he never climbed to attain personal gains. He was also a mountaineer and a guide, and that is significant.

It implies that he was not just the one who could get to summits, but also facilitate the safe arrival of others.

He did transports, favored expeditions, travelled hard in the mountain, and came to be reputable when the interests depended.

That kind of reliability is one of the reasons the title “Super Sherpa” stuck so naturally to his name. It was not marketing. It was recognition.

The danger behind all of this is hard to exaggerate. Apa went over the Khumbu Icefall over one thousand times and that alone speaks volumes about his home life.

The Icefall is considered to be one of the most dreaded routes of the Everest since it is unstable, in a continuous flux, and filled with crevasses and moving ice towers.

It is a nightmare ordeal to most of the climbers. To Apa, it was one more part of a life in the mountain.

This is the magnitude of reiteration and danger of his legend. Apa Sherpa made a significant change in 2000 since this was the year when he made a record of the most number of summits that he had on Everest during his 11th ascent.

This was the moment when he changed into being a highly respected Sherpa climber to a world standard.

Since then, each new summit was an addition to a list that already was placed in the history of mountaineering. He was the man that other people could compare themselves to and his name was available with the contemporary account of Everest.

His last Everest summit came on 11 May 2011, when he reached the peak for the 21st time as part of the Eco Everest Expedition.

This climb marked the conclusion of a career defined by consistency, and from 2008 onward all of his ascents were tied to the Eco Everest project, which focused on cleaning the mountain and raising awareness about climate change.

That last record climb was important since it was not just the conclusion of a record run. It also was a statement of the mountain itself.

Eco Everest project was aimed at cleaning up Everest and to create awareness regarding the climate change, which earned his last climb a greater purpose than a mere personal victory.

What makes his story so powerful is that it also changed the way many people saw Sherpas. For years, Everest stories often focused on foreign climbers, while Sherpa labour remained in the background.

Apa Sherpa’s career made that impossible to ignore. He made the world realize that Sherpas were not auxiliary personnel in the adventure of somebody.

They were the same people whose power, knowledge and judgment enabled the whole system of Everest.

His 11 th summit in 2000 has earned him the record and several years later he has continued to be the benchmark of the Sherpa climbing performance.

The other mountain which obviously features in his story is Annapurna. It was the place where his career as a public expeditioner began where he was initially hired as a cook in 1985 and as a porter in 1987. His climbing journey started there and his legacy as created in Everest.

Apa Sherpa did not fade in the background after giving up Ascent of Everest climbing. He gave more of his focus on education, community service and environment consciousness.

His foundation, started in 2012, works to enhance educational and economic prospects for children and families across Nepal’s mountain regions, with a special focus on his home village of Thame.

That is exactly what his life story serves best, considering his experience of growing in the environment of having too little choices and dropping out of school to get a job.

When he was more experienced and older, he used name to help the youth and the people in the mountains, it was a way of giving back to the place that had shaped him as a record-holder and a mountain legend.

He also helped lead the Great Himalaya Trail climate smart trek in 2012, which showed that even after Everest, he was still using his experience for something bigger than himself.

The trek was of relating mountain adventure with environmental consciousness and it suited his late career well.

The boy who once carried loads for other people eventually became someone whose voice carried weight on issues that affected the whole region.

Everest Record, Retirement, and the Kami Rita Chapter

Apa Sherpa’s record was historic, but the story did not stop with him. The Everest record was later matched and then surpassed by another Sherpa climber, and that is where Kami Rita Sherpa enters the story.

Kami Rita reached the summit of Everest for the 31st time on 27 May 2025, breaking his own record. He first summited Everest on 13 May 1994, and like Apa, he built his reputation through years of repeated climbs rather than one dramatic success.

Apa Sherpa’s record of 21 Everest summits was broken on May 16, 2018, by Kami Rita Sherpa, who scaled the peak for the 22nd time in that time.

Apa Sherpa had set the 21-summit record in 2011, which was later matched by Phurba Tashi Sherpa.

Kami Rita was born in Thame too, which makes the connection between the two stories even stronger. He was a 55-year-old Sherpa guide when he made the record in 2025, and he has been climbing Everest regularly since 1994.

His profession is now the legacy of the identical Sherpa tradition in which Apa had personified. Apa demonstrated what one could do with 21 summits. Kami Rita continued that tradition and had it as far to 31. That is the reason why the two stories are connected.

One established the great norm, and the other continued it. What matters is the fact that the ascent of Kami Rita does not take away the spot of Apa Sherpa. It deepens it.

The 21 summits staged by Apa were the world record during time and have become a benchmark in relation to all that has come thereafter.

Kami Rita continued the same mountain tradition and raised the figure even higher but the emotional form of the narrative remains the same.

It tells the story of Sherpa men of the Everest region who made the work at the mountain their life calling and in the process they transformed the history of high altitude climbing.

That is why Apa Sherpa remains such an important figure even now. He was not just the man who climbed Everest 21 times.

He was the climber who showed the world what Sherpa endurance looked like, what discipline looked like, and what service looked like on the highest mountain on Earth.

Then that same tradition was transferred into another age by Kami Rita. Their stories make up a single long chain of Himalayan history, as Apa was the legend who made history and Kami was the climber who continued the history.