The lore of mountaineering is dominated by white men. Edmund Hillary, George Mallory, Ueli Steck, Jeff Lowe, Steve House, Conrad Anker, etc. All those guys are impressive in what they accomplished, but their accomplishments happened alongside — and sometimes in the literal footsteps of — people who are equally or more impressive but who almost never earn the fame and notoriety of their pale-skinned counterparts. So in service of counteracting that:
Ang Rita was probably more badass than the most badass athlete you can think of. Alex Honnold can free solo El Capitan, but can he climb Mount Everest without using bottled oxygen? (Almost no one does that; it dramatically decreases physical and cognitive performance and increases the risk of High-Altitude Cerebral Edema and High-Altitude Pulmonary Edema, both fatal without intervention.)
How about climbing Mount Everest nine times without breathing any more than the thin air available at 29,029 feet above sea level?
Ang Rita died last month at the age of 72, but not before claiming the world record for Everest ascents without oxygen, and climbing four of the other tallest mountains in the world in the same style. According to his obituary on ExplorersWeb, Rita started working as a porter (load-carrier) for Himalayan expeditions at age 15 and kept climbing higher and higher.
Of the 14 mountains taller than 8,000 meters — about 26,250 feet — Rita climbed five, all without using bottled oxygen. He summited his first 8,000-er, Dhaulagiri, in 1979, and did his last trip up Everest in 1996. His accomplishments earned him the nickname Heem Xhituwa, Nepalese for Snow Leopard. In the Sherpa community of Nepal, where badassery abounds, being called Snow Leopard seems like kind of a big deal.
That final punctuation mark on his epic career came with a stark reminder of the risks Rita faced for his entire career: His 1996 summit day on Everest came a week after one of the most infamous days in mountaineering history, when a storm and a chain of mistakes led to the deaths of eight climbers. That saga was documented in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air.
Ang Rita died at 72, mostly forgotten to all but a narrow slice of dedicated Himalayan mountaineering nerds (I only learned about him after his death). He accomplished more by the age of 36 — his halfway mark — than most of us do in a lifetime, and he was just getting started. Let’s remember his name too.