It was not a plan.

There was no strategy meeting at base camp, no record attempt announced to the media before the season began. It unfolded the way the best Himalayan stories always do: organically, almost inevitably, in the middle of ordinary professional duty. When Chhangwa Sherpa and his son returned to the summit of Everest for the second time in a single spring season, they did not fully understand the weight of what they had done until the numbers were put together. The first father-and-son duo in history to summit the world's highest mountain twice, doing so within a span of just 5 days, 21 hours, and 59 minutes.

Both men guide for Seven Summit Treks, Nepal's leading high-altitude expedition operator, and the season of 2026 had kept them busy. The Dad, Chhangwa is among the most experienced high-altitude professionals in the country, a mountaineer of remarkable breadth. His son, Lakpa Tasi Sherpa, still at the early edge of what promises to be a long and significant career, had been on Everest before in support roles, but the spring of 2026 would mark his first summit. Neither could have foreseen that by the time their second client group stood on the top of the world, they would have quietly rewritten the record books.

The journey up

The story begins, as all Everest stories do, with the road out of Kathmandu. Father and son traveled together from the capital to Lukla, then traced the well-worn caravan route through the Khumbu valley, past monasteries and tea houses and the deepening silence of altitude, to Everest Base Camp at 5,364 metres.

Chhangwa had made this approach before, many times. He started guiding on high peaks in 2017, his son was just eleven years old then and perhaps already watching his father pull on crampons and disappear toward the ice. The boy grew up inside the world of expedition mountaineering, and when he was old enough, he followed.

• 1ST ASCENT - 17 MAY 2026, 5:30 AM

Guiding Chinese climber Qiulong Peng on behalf of Seven Summit Treks. Both Chhangwa Sherpa and his son reached the summit of Everest (8,848.86 m).

• 2nd Ascent - 23 MAY 2026, 3:29 AM

Guiding the NSG Black Cats Commando group on behalf of Seven Summit Treks. Father and son reached the summit together for the second time this season, setting the world record.

5 days · 21 hours · 59 minutes between summits: WORLD RECORD    

The first ascent, on the morning of May 17, came as part of their professional duties guiding Qiulong Peng, a Chinese climber, to the summit at 5:30 in the morning. They stood on the roof of the world and came down. The season, most assumed, would proceed as seasons do.

Six days later, on May 23 at 3:29 AM, they were back. This time guiding a different client group entirely, the elite NSG Black Cats Commando team. And at that moment, without ceremony or prior announcement, the record was made.

“At that moment, as a father, I felt: how many actual father and son duos would there be who would have summited Everest like this? This was truly special.”- Chhangwa Sherpa, on the second summit, 23 May 2026

The father's summit list

To understand what Chhangwa brought to this record, it helps to look at the full shape of his career. His tenth Everest ascent, achieved this season with his son beside him for two of them, is only one chapter of a mountaineering biography that spans nearly every major 8,000-metre peak. He has guided and summited across the full vertical architecture of the Himalaya and Karakoram.

• Everest (8,849 m) - 10×
• Manaslu (8,163 m) - 5×
• Ama Dablam (6,812 m) - 4×
• Lhotse (8,516 m) - 3×
• Kangchenjunga (8,586 m) - 2×
• K2 (8,611 m) - 1×
• Dhaulagiri (8,167 m) - 1×
• Annapurna (8,091 m) - 1×

Thirty-five summits across eight distinct 8,000-metre peaks. That is a curriculum no classroom can offer, and it is the inheritance he is passing to his son, one rope length at a time.

The Son's First Summit

For the father, the 2026 season represented two more entries in a long ledger. For his son, it was something altogether different: his first time standing on the summit of Everest. That the achievement arrived not in solitary triumph but shoulder to shoulder with his father, guiding a client through the predawn cold of the upper mountain, says something about the culture of Sherpa mountaineering.

He is still young, still learning. He is studying English, understanding, in the practical way of someone who has already stood on the highest point on earth, that language is another form of altitude, and that the climbers who come to these mountains from every corner of the world will understand him better if he can meet them on that ground too. He intends to continue his formal education alongside his climbing career, following a generation of Sherpa guides who have understood that the mountain and the classroom are not competing ambitions.

His future in this profession appears to be as high as the peaks he will climb. He has already shown, in a single season, that he can operate at the highest level of high-altitude guiding, twice over, in difficult conditions, on the world's most demanding mountain.

Historical context

The first father and son to summit Everest together were Jean-Noël and Bertrand “Zébulon” Roche of France, who stood on the summit on 7 October 1990. Bertrand was just 17 years old at the time. That record of the first joint father-son ascent remains with the Roches. What Chhangwa Sherpa and his son have now claimed is an entirely different frontier: the fastest double summit of Everest by a father-and-son duo, with two complete ascents completed within a single season, in service of two separate client expeditions, across a span of less than six days. 

What the record means

The context matters. This was not a record attempt organized around the record itself. Both ascents were guiding assignments, professional commitments undertaken on behalf of their clients. The fact that history was made in the margins of that duty, almost as a byproduct of simply doing their jobs exceptionally well, is perhaps the most Sherpa thing about it.

It speaks to a broader truth about how Everest's record books are written now. The great markers of altitude history are no longer the exclusive province of well-funded expeditions. They are being set, with increasing frequency, by the professionals from the Khumbu valley and the mountain communities of Nepal who have turned the world's highest mountain into a career, and in doing so have accumulated a depth of experience that no single-expedition mountaineer can match.

Chhangwa Sherpa's ten Everest summits, across a career that has taken him from K2 to Annapurna, represent not just personal achievement but institutional knowledge, passed down now to a son who stood beside him at 8,849 metres on two separate mornings in the spring of 2026. The mountain was the same both times. The record was made quietly, in the dark, before the sun had climbed above the horizon of the world.