Why we’re called Sherpa

01 · The acknowledgment

“Sherpa” is a people, not a job title.

Sherpa is the name of a distinct ethnic group — indigenous to the high mountain regions of Nepal and the Himalayas. It is the name of a living culture and the people who carry it.

Over the last century, because so many Sherpa worked as elite high-altitude mountaineering guides and porters, the wider world started using “sherpa” as a generic word for any guide, porter, or assistant. That usage is a problem: it reduces a people to a service role, and in doing so it erases an ethnic and cultural identity. We don’t want to pretend otherwise, so we’re saying it here, first.

We chose the name because the idea of the Sherpa — the trusted guide who knows the route, carries the load, and gets you up and back down alive — is precisely the promise we’re trying to keep for you. But borrowing a people’s name to do that isn’t free. It carries an obligation, and we’d rather answer it with money and conduct than with a disclaimer.

02 · The pledge

A quiet thank-you to the people behind the name.

As a small thank-you to the people whose name we borrowed, we support The Juniper Fund — a charity that helps the families of Nepali high-altitude mountain workers who lost their lives in the mountains. We’re not going to dress this up with percentages or self-congratulation; if you want to understand their work, their own site is the best place to start.

We keep this quiet on purpose. It’s an acknowledgement, not a marketing claim — so you won’t find a percentage, an impact counter, or a donation badge here. If their work matters to you, support them directly.

03 · Our conduct

We never caricature or appropriate Sherpa culture.

Money is the easy part. The harder part is not doing the casual, thoughtless things that turn “tribute” into appropriation. So we hold ourselves to these rules — across the site, our guide character, and every ad we run:

• Our guide is abstract — never a person. The Sherpa you see is a wayfinder: a compass, a route, a summit, a neutral figure pointing the way. It is coded by pose, not by ethnicity. It is not a depiction of a Sherpa person, and never will be.
• No caricature, no stereotype. No racialised features, no “exotic mountain people” tropes, no porters-with-load-baskets as decoration.
• No borrowed sacred or cultural symbols. No prayer flags, mani stones, religious iconography, or traditional dress used as “flavour.”
• Mountains as metaphor — not their mountains. Our maps, contours, and routes are generic terrain and wayfinding. They’re not a depiction of the Himalayas or the Sherpa homeland.
• Accurate, respectful language. When we talk about the name, we describe the Sherpa as a people — an ethnic group — never as “a type of guide.” We don’t romanticise them, exoticise them, or speak for them.

The rule we fall back on when we’re unsure: when in doubt, abstract it out. Anything that could be read as portraying or invoking the Sherpa people specifically, we reject.