At 7 AM on May 19 Sophia Danenberg reached the summit of Mount Everest, making her the first African-American–and the first black woman from anywhere–to stand at the top of the world. Bad weather during the night had delayed other climbers, so Danenberg and the Sherpas she’d hired, Pa Nuru Sherpa and his brother Mingma Tshiring, were the only people there. She wasn’t as elated as you might expect: she had bronchitis, a stuffed nose, and frostbite on her cheeks, and her oxygen mask was clogged with snow and ice. “So I was like, cool, I made it,” she says. “I have to get this oxygen mask fixed and get off this mountain.”
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Danenberg, whose father is black and mother Japanese, says most people are surprised to hear she was the first African-American to scale Everest, but not other climbers. “There aren’t a lot of African-Americans–or black people from anywhere, American or otherwise–in high-altitude mountaineering,” she says. She’s never met another black person on any big mountain in the world, and when the subject comes up with other climbers, most of them white males, they usually haven’t either. She says climbers are pretty much oblivious to race, though not gender: “They won’t really notice that I’m a black woman, but with a bunch of guys isolated somewhere, and there’s only 15 women, yeah, they’ll notice you.”
Danenberg got into mountaineering in 1999 after a childhood friend encouraged her to try rock climbing. For two years she did technical climbs, meeting her husband, David, on one of them. “He was near the top of a cliff,” she says. “He noticed me walking in below.” When the friend took her up Mount Rainier in 2002, she decided she liked the challenges of a wide variety of terrains even better, and over the next couple years she and David scaled every mountain they could together, including Mount Baker, Mount Kenya, Kilimanjaro, Mount Rainier, Grand Teton, and Mount McKinley, or Denali. In 2005 she scaled five peaks, two of them without David: Mount Tasman in New Zealand and Ama Dablam in Nepal.
Danenberg, along with eight people she didn’t know, signed up for an “unguided” climb with an outfitter. For the $36,000 fee she would get a tent site at the base camp and each of the four camps along the southern route up the mountain, the help of two Sherpas, weather reports, food, and oxygen. But she would carry her own gear and pitch her own tent, and there would be no guide making decisions for her–she would have to decide what route to take, when to try for the summit, when to turn back.
She passed the climbers who’d left just before her, and eventually the man who’d left at the same time she did decided to go back down. As she kept climbing in the dark she couldn’t see any other headlamps. “I thought everyone except us had turned around,” she says. “I thought we were the only people on the mountain.” But she and the Sherpas felt strong, so they kept going. “It never crossed my mind that we could be going so much faster that they could be that far behind us.” When she made the summit at 7 AM she saw that no one had come up the north side, though she could now see people coming up behind her. “I was two hours ahead of everybody on the south side,” she says. “So I was completely by myself.” She cleared the snow and ice from her mask, took photos, and watched the Sherpas take pictures of each other. She says they joked about hopping from Nepal to Tibet–the border runs across the summit–but they were all too tired. A quarter hour later they headed back down.
