Peak Performance
‘Mountain Queen’ tells how one woman climbed Everest — and overcame an abusive marriage
The only woman to have scaled Mount Everest 10 times is making easy work of a steep hill in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. On a blistering July day, Lhakpa Sherpa — whose remarkable story is told in the documentary “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa” — is leading a hike that has most of the group huffing and mopping their brows. But the 50-year-old Sherpa, clad in sandals and wrapped in a sweater, isn’t even breaking a sweat.
“Mountain Queen” details Sherpa’s journey to becoming the first Nepali woman to summit Everest in 2000, a particularly impressive feat as she was illiterate and had no formal education. But the movie, which arrives on Netflix July 31, isn’t just an account of physical triumph. It begins in 2022, with Sherpa working at a Whole Foods in Connecticut and living in a small apartment with her two daughters. From there, the film relates how she survived an abusive marriage to climber George Dijmarescu (she met him in a bar and moved to America with him) and her decision to make her 10th climb of Everest.
The film’s director, Lucy Walker, first learned about Sherpa in 2004, when she was in Tibet filming “Blindsight,” her acclaimed 2006 doc about blind teenagers climbing a mountain near Everest. It wasn’t just Walker’s familiarity with the landscape that made her ideally suited for the project. “Knowing how to shoot Everest is an obvious skill needed in telling Lhakpa’s story,” she says. “But this film really needed the creative vision of being able to weave two stories together.”
The dual stories of Sherpa’s past struggles and present attempts to summit Everest have moved audiences ever since the film’s premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Which is just what Sherpa hoped for in telling her story; it’s one reason she launched the Lhakpa Sherpa Climb Any Mountain Initiative, which aims to inspire women, girls and marginalized communities through nature.
“Look at me, I’m not educated,” she says of her achievements. “[If] I can do it, anybody can do whatever they want. People are hurt, and nature can heal people and change them.”