Like other climbers who have successfully reached the top of Mt. Everest, Ang Phurba Sherpa will allow himself a few rays of limelight this week.

Here in Kathmandu and across the country Thursday, hundreds of Everest summiteers will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest by Nepalese climber Tenzing Norgay and New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary.

Many of the 1,100 or so summiteers since 1953 consider Everest a kind of physical or emotional milestone in their lives, or, more broadly, a pinnacle of human achievement.

But Ang Phurba sees Wednesday's well-trodden trail to the top of the world pragmatically: it's his generation's path out of poverty.

Now the owner of a successful trekking company, Ang Phurba - a Horatio Alger with forearms as big as Popeye's - says the mountaineering industry is the reason why the Sherpas (a Nepalese ethnic minority) are steadily becoming self-sufficient in one of the planet's poorest countries.

"We Sherpas climb because it's a profession, it's our bread and butter, it's risky but we don't have a choice," says Ang Phurba, who admits that nowadays his wife won't let him climb mountains higher than 6,000 meters (19,700 feet). "But for foreigners, it's like a sport to them. And we don't mind helping them."

Few people have gained so much from the historic 1953 ascent of Mt. Everest (or Sagarmatha, as the Nepalese call it) than the Sherpas. The residents of some of the least fertile lands in a country where the annual per capita income is about $1,100, Sherpas have become such a regular fixture of Nepalese mountaineering, that some foreigners use the word interchangeably with guide.

For their high-altitude work, Sherpas earn an average of $7,000 annually.

But many Sherpas are now clamoring for something more: respect.

It's a quiet kind of clamoring, of course, since Sherpas are quiet people. But in their own way, Sherpas point out that the foreign climbers need the Sherpas at least as much as the Sherpas need the climbers. For every foreign mountaineer, there are one or more Sherpas making the journey.

"Sherpas climb the mountain twice," says Ang Phurba. "They climb the slope first and fix the ropes, they break up the ice to make the trail, they find the camp and set up the tents, and then they go back and bring the climber up. There are some climbers who go up together with the Sherpas, but they are very rare. Only strong climbers do that."

Nothing could be more symptomatic of this desire for respect than the long-running dispute over who reached the summit of Everest first: Sir Edmund, or Tenzing Norgay? Both Mr. Norgay and Sir Edmund avoided the issue, sticking to their story that they had both reached the summit together. But many Nepalis insist that Norgay reached the summit first.

Norgay's grandson, Tashi Tenzing, has breathed new life into this dispute, saying recently that Sir Edmund received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, while Norgay just received a British medal of honor.

"My grandfather did not get the recognition he deserved," Mr. Tenzing told the BBC. But he holds no grudges against Sir Edmund himself, who is now in his early 90s. "I see Hillary as an inspiration and he is a great man," he told the Associated Press.

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