4/17/2007 9:27:17 PM -- The members of the 2007 SuperSherpas Expedition hoped to reach some lofty heights this spring, but they didn’t expect that it would happen before they even made it to Mount Everest base camp.
    The team, led by record-holding climbers Apa Sherpa and Lhakpa Sherpa, has been touring the high society of Kathmandu, Nepal, in the final days before departing for base camp and their historic summit attempt on Everest.
    The team met Tuesday with Sir Edmund Hillary, who made the first successful climb of Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1953, and Elizabeth Hawley, the unofficial “official” chronicler of expeditions in the Himalayas for the past 40 years.
    “It has been a very busy time for Apa and Lhakpa and the team,” expedition manager Roger Kehr said from Kathmandu Tuesday night [Wednesday morning in Nepal]. “Elizabeth Hawley invited us over to gather information about the expedition and we were unbelievably surprised that Sir Edmund Hillary was there as her guest. We were honored when he said that this may be his last trip to Nepal.”
    Hillary, 87, told the team “it was was easy to devote his energy [to this latest trip to Nepal from his home in New Zealand] because of his love for the Sherpa people”.
    The team spent Tuesday morning touring the Tilganga Eye Centre in Kathmandu. Apa gave a speech to the staff of the state-of-the-art facility which has performed more than 78,000 surgeries in the last 12 years, many of them free of charge. Tilganga has served more than 1 million people since it opened in the mid-1990s.
    The visit was especially meaningful to Apa, who harbored dreams of becoming a doctor during his youth in the village of Thame. Instead he became the first, and only human, to stand on the top of Everest 16 times.
    The SuperSherpas Expedition is hoping to complete a historic all-Sherpa summit of the tallest mountain in the world in May in an effort to bring attention to the under-appreciated Sherpa people who have been a part of every successful attempt on Everest from the beginning.
    The team will visit another minister of the Nepali government Wednesday, meet with Hillary again to collect his thoughts of the Sherpa people for the SuperSherpas documentary and seek the blessing of the head lama in Kathmandu before starting their trek to base camp Thursday.
    “The government of Nepal has been extremely supportive of this expedition and the Nepali people are extremely proud of Apa and Lhakpa and the team,” Kehr said. “It has been an incredible thing to see.”
   — Brett Prettyman, The Salt Lake Tribune