Getting pretty frigid out, eh? Maybe not so bad if you’re from one of the coldest, highest, most dangerous places to climb on Earth. Four years ago I met–completely by accident—a Sherpa from the Himalayas in SoHo, who was once a high-altitude mountaineer, now working as a N.Y.C. cab driver. Anything’s possible in New York, I thought, right? Then I discovered he wasn’t just any Sherpa but a relative of Tenzing Norgay, the famed conqueror—with Sir Edmund Hillary—of Mount Everest, in 1953. Tsering Norbu Sherpa and I became friends, and soon I found out that some 2,500 of his fellow Sherpas from the Himalayas have fled the war-torn region to live in N.YC., Queens to be precise. Beginning in 2003, I began reporting a story to explain this exodus-in-progress from the world’s highest place to the asphalt canyons of New York. The result, “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Hale, Hearty, Tough-As-Nails, Acclimatized-at-Birth Mountain People…”, was just published in the November, 2007 issue of Outside Magazine (on newsstands now). In PDF form here, or online. In the same issue, I’ve got a review of STEEP, arguably the most ambitious big-mountain skiing movie ever made, and the tale of a man who decided to take incredibly rash measures to save himself from drowning.
CHRISTIAN DEBENEDETTI 