Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa

Lhakpa Sherpa lives, by most metrics, a most ordinary life. She works at her local Whole Foods, a job that’s allowed her to raise her children in the United States—which is a long way away from her native Nepal, where she first fell in love with Everest. That imposing mountain has long dominated her imagination, and turned her life from ordinary to extraordinary. Even though she knew young girls were not to aspire to such a treacherous climb, Lhakpa has always known she’s not like other girls. She’s always been wild, as she says. And that’s how, over the course of her life, she’s defied odds to summit Mount Everest a record-breaking ten times. More than merely sketch out that improbable journey (including Lhakpa’s abuse at the hands of the father of her children), Lucy Walker’s documentary on Lhakpa finds time to give viewers a front row seat to the very vibrancy this most unassuming of women corralls whenever she’s in her element, climbing that most inhospitable of mountains. For capturing the zeal and resilience of its central figure, a woman as tenacious as the peaks she climbs, Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa wins a Peabody award.