Everest climbing feature in NYT

Though we are at the tail end of 2017, I came across possibly my favorite article of the year just this week. It was a terrific feature by the New York Times, with some incredible multimedia, on the attempt to recover the bodies of Indian climbers that had perished on Mt. Everest a little more than a year ago.

International Mountain Museum

I actually went on a bit of a Himalayan/Everest/mountaineering splurge after reading the article, including watching several great videos on YouTube on the subjects and listening to the Into Thin Air audio-book, the gripping personal account of the 1996 Everest disaster written by Jon Krakauer. Obviously, Nepal's connection to these topics make it that the more intriguing and salient.

Just a few weeks ago, as a relative novice on all things "mountain", I had visited the International Mountain Museum in Pokhara - a fairly impressive exhibition that sits on a 5 hector compound. With my new insights the next visit there should be even more enriching.

Mountaineering in the sports pages

When Everest pioneer Pemba Dorje Sherpa met the Minister for Youth and Sports, Gopal Shakya, to handover the jacket he wore when he climbed the worlds highest peak in a record breaking time, the story was published in the sports pages of practically every newspaper in Nepal.

Perhaps it was because (1) he was meeting with the Minister for Youth and Sports and (2) he was donating his jacket to the Nepal Olympic Museum, as mountaineering stories rarely, if ever, make it to the back pages of Nepali rags.

I have long held the belief that Nepal's sports media needs to do much more to promote mountaineering as a sport. If they can monitor Chess events on a daily basis, surely they can cover a discipline that has brought much glory to the country. Articles on mountaineering, mountain weather reports and profiles of the climbers should feature periodically in the sports pages - especially during the peak climbing seasons.

On a related note Minister Shakya promised to include mountaineering as a sports discipline in the government's new sports policy.