THE FEAST BEFORE THE CLIMB

LAST YEAR, LHAKPA GELU SHERPA RECEIVED THE document he’d waited 13 years to get: the certificate stating that he owned the world record for the fastest climb of Mount Everest. He didn’t get it triumphantly on his return to base camp or celebrate it in the shadow of Nepal’s famed peak. Instead, when he received the scanned document from the supreme court of Nepal certifying his record, he was at the base of a different mountain, Washington state’s Mount Rainier.

Lhakpa made it up Everest in 10 hours and 56 minutes in 2003. But until last year, that record had gone unrecognized for more than a decade. Another climber had made the climb in 12 hours and 45 minutes two days before, a record that Lhakpa had beaten almost before it could be tallied. The following year, that same climber—Pemba Dorje Sherpa—claimed to