Mountaineer Melissa Arnot is known as the Queen of Everest, and that’s not just because she holds the non-Sherpa female world record for Mount Everest summits (five times, in case you were wondering). As one of the only female guides on Everest, she has also played a key role in recent events on the mountain, including the avalanche in April that left 16 Sherpas dead and the 2013 fight between Sherpas and European climbers that nearly turned fatal. Arnot, who at 30 years old is already one of the top female mountaineers in the world, will speak on Aug. 6 at a fundraiser for Myths & Mountains’ READ Global, which builds community libraries in rural villages in Nepal, Bhutan, and India.
Although Arnot was raised near Glacier National Park in Whitefish, Mont., she didn’t start climbing mountains until after she graduated from the University of Iowa.
“It didn’t occur to me I could go climbing and have adventures,” she said. “Even though I could see the Great Northern Mountain from my bedroom window as a kid, I never considered I could hike up it.”
After moving back to Montana, the first mountain she climbed was the Great Northern. At age 18, Arnot summited Mt. Rainier (14,410 feet) for the first time. Three years later she was a professional mountain guide with Rainier Mountaineering, Inc., and has since reached Rainier’s peak more than 100 times. By the time she was 24 years old, Arnot was guiding on Everest.
“You have to be who you are in life. You can’t be anyone else,” Arnot said about falling in love with climbing mountains. “It makes me feel more centered than anything else. It’s challenging and endless. I decided to make it my job.”
Arnot is not your typical big mountain guide. At 5-foot-3 and 115 pounds, not only is she petite, but she is also a woman, which puts her squarely in the minority for both climbers and guides. According to Arnot, 10 percent of climbers on Everest are women, and only 1 percent of guides are female. But since she started guiding on the world’s highest mountain, she has seen a slight change in those numbers. Back in 2004, only three or four out of 85 guides were women; now Arnot says there are eight female guides on Everest. Nevertheless, she says gender is not a major factor when climbing.
“The mountains don’t care if you are a man or a woman or big or small,” she said. “No one takes a gender poll when you are walking uphill.”
But being a woman can have its advantages on the mountain. In April 2013, a fight between 100 Sherpas and three foreign climbers erupted at 29,000 feet.
Tensions escalated when the climbers kept ascending, kicking down ice on the Sherpas who were fixing safety ropes, violating climbing etiquette. The Nepali guides started throwing huge rocks and crampons at the Europeans. Arnot used her friendship with both the Sherpas and Europeans to insert herself between the two all-male groups, negotiating for 45 minutes until the climbers were finally allowed to retreat to base camp.
“I am really close with the Sherpa people. They know me well because I am the only woman,” said Arnot, who speaks Sherpa. “My good friends all around were fighting with each other. I wasn’t scared in the moment. I realized intervention was needed. But it was dangerous.”
Arnot was on Everest this past April with the only female Sherpa guide to attempt to summit Everest twice, from both the north and south sides, a feat only accomplished once before. If she and her friend succeeded, they would become the first women to summit Everest from the south side in Nepal. But their plans were cut short on April 18 when an avalanche ripped down the southern side of the mountain at 20,000 feet, killing 16 Sherpas and making it the single deadliest accident on Mount Everest. Arnot spent two days doing body recovery. Five people she worked with and one of her good friends were killed.
“It was very tragic. You accept the objective hazards, but it’s so catastrophic when you lose friends,” she said. “There is a massive potential for bad things to happen. When you are confronted with that, it gives you pause.”
However, the most life-changing incident for Arnot occurred in 2010, when her Sherpa climbing partner, who she was roped together with, fell through a cornice and died. (The ice cut the rope, thus saving Arnot.) His body was never recovered. As a result, Arnot, along with fellow mountain guide Dave Morton, in 2012 started the Juniper Fund to provide life insurance and cover rescue expense of mountain workers in Nepal. Despite the dangers of climbing the world’s highest peaks, Arnot has never once thought about giving up the sport she loves.
“I get so much out of climbing; it feeds my soul, it’s my profession,” she said. “I don’t think my life would be complete without it.”
