BY KAREN BOSSICK

Sarah Michael was 29 years old and running out of time.

Not in any real sense, of course. But in her mind, 30 was the line.

Once she crossed it, she thought, she'd be too old to hike the Himalayas. So, in 1975, she joined a trek to Nepal's Annapurna region, determined to see the world's highest peaks before that self-imposed deadline arrived.

Mingma Sherpa and Nima Wangchu Sherpa, who live in Ventura, Calif., trekked through the Sawtooths with Sarah Michael and Bob Jonas last summer.

She had no way of knowing that a two-month journey through the mountains of Nepal would reshape the entire trajectory of her life.

It would send her to a mountain valley in Idaho where she would pursue a career of public service and marry a man who would take her on adventures through the wilds of Idaho and Alaska. And it would forge a friendship across continents that endures to today—a half-century later.

Sarah met Mea Marden, an artist and fellow solo adventurer on that 1975 trek. The two women shared a tent for two months, the kind of arrangement that either cements a friendship or destroys one.

Theirs cemented and together they flew to the tiny airstrip at Lukla and hired a Sherpa guide to lead them through the Everest region.

Mingma Sherpa and Sarah Michael celebrated Michael’s 50th anniversary of making Sun Valley her home—and her 80th birthday—on Friday.

Nepal in 1975 was a different world. The country had only recently opened to Western tourists. Barley fields stretched across high valleys and rickety bridges swayed over rushing rivers. Lodges were primitive when they existed at all.

The landscape was raw and immense, and the Sherpa people who inhabited it lived subsistence lives at elevations that left many Westerners gasping.

Nima Chottar came from mountaineering royalty, though he would never have described it that way. His father, Dawa Tenzing, had been one of the early Sherpa guides involved in British climbing expeditions in the 1950s.

Nima himself had run away from home at 10, made his way to Darjeeling, made himself useful to the British Army, and returned to his village of Khumjung with excellent English and an arranged marriage waiting.

The Festival at Tengboche Monastery features colorful costumes.

He took Michael and Marsden to the sacred Mani Rimdu festival at the Tengboche Monastery, timed to the full moon in November. The monastery sits at 12,700 feet on a ridge with views of Ama Dablam and Mount Everest that stop you mid-sentence, said Michael.

Michael fell in love with Nepal, with the Sherpa people, with a landscape so vast it made every concern she'd carried from home seem trivial. She would return many times over the decades that followed.

But Nepal gave her something else. She also met two hikers on her trek—Hildegard Raeber and Louis Stur, a legendary climber and skier who managed the Sun Valley Lodge. They told her of a magical place in central Idaho ringed by mountains where the skiing was world-class and the community close knit.

Michael visited in 1976 and fell in love again. She moved to Ketchum and never left.

Sarah Michael, Tashi Sherpa and Ruby Marsden enjoyed colorful Nepal.

She joined the Ketchum-Sun Valley Chamber of Commerce, at the center of the first public transportation study in the Wood River Valley. She helped build the valley’s bus system from a single vehicle into a free transportation network that spans the length of the valley from Bellevue to Sun Valley.

And she championed affordable housing and other issues during decades of public service that included a stint as Blaine County Commissioner.

She also met and married Bob Jonas, who owned Sun Valley Trekking. And he took her kayaking through Alaska and llama packing through the Sawtooth Mountains.

But, through it all, she never forgot Nepal.

When her sherpa and his wife died in a bus accident ferrying pilgrims to see the Dalai Lama, Michael came to the aid of his daughters Ang Tashi and Ang Mingma. Schoolgirls when Sarah had first met them, they were 19 and 20. And they had to work day and night to pay for the proper Buddhist ceremony in the Khumbu, with lamas and food for the villagers, as tradition required.

Michael helped, and she stayed in touch.

Ang Tashi married Lakpa Dorjee, a climbing Sherpa who had guided Prince Charles through the Everest region in 1977. Lakpa was later invited to London to have tea with the Prince. And he built a trekking lodge--the Ama Dablam Lodge and Restaurant--set into the hills at 11,500 feet in Kangzuma, with Buddhist prayer wheels and carved mani stones lining the paths.

Ang Mingma married Nima Wangchu Sherpa, whose own father had, at 18, been the youngest member of beekeeper Sir Edmund Hillary's historic summit of Mount Everest in 1953.  Nima Wangchu was selected by Sir Hillary himself in 1974 to train as a park ranger and became one of two Nepalese to serve as the first rangers of Nepal's national parks, including Sagarmatha National Park, the preserve ringing the world's tallest mountain.

Hillary had worried that the very tourists who came to see the pristine region would destroy it, so he championed the creation of national parks throughout Nepal, said Nima, as he enjoyed lunch on the patio of Sun Valley’s Konditorei with Michael and Jonas.

In 1993 Mingma came to the United States to visit her son who had gotten a scholarship to Montana State University in Bozeman.

Michael took her on a two-month trip to see the American West, visiting Mono Lake, Lake Tahoe, the Grand Canyon, Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam. Mingma was most impressed with Bryce Canyon because nothing like it existed in Nepal.

"She'd never seen women in bathing suits before because it was too cold in the mountains," Michael recalled.

Mingma got a job as a housekeeper for Gerry Spence, the flamboyant American trial lawyer who successfully defended Imelda Marcos and others, at his expansive ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyo. She took English as a Second Language courses and spent seven years getting her green card, continually renewing visas so she could come back.

“Everybody thought I was working so hard," Mingma said, laughing. “But here I just pushed a button to vacuum the floors. I pushed a button and the laundry was done. In Nepal I had to carry water on my back from the spring."

Nima Wangchu, meanwhile, earned a degree in soil science and spent 20 years as a royally decorated civil servant. But, with instability growing in Nepal, he was threatened with kidnapping. And, so, he fled to join his wife in the United States in 2002.

By this time Mingma had become a gourmet chef, creating dinner parties for 70, even baking carrot cakes in the shape of a carrot. She and Nima put all three children through college—two are now medical doctors and the other, a CFO for a Denver company

Mingma and Nima still visit Michael and Jonas in Ketchum, and their son visits Sun Valley to ski. Just last year Mingma and Michael went ziplining in San Margarita, hiked Little Wild Horse Canyon in southern Utah and walked the Queens Garden Trail in Bryce Canyon.

“We have a special bond,” Michael said. “My older sister recently died and to know I still have Mingma in my life means so much. If I needed anything, they'd be there for me. I feel very blessed."

In November 2025, Michael decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of her original trip to Nepal with the goal being the Mani Rimdu Festival. This time she was joined by Ruby Marden, who had studied at Sun Valley Community School, eventually teaching there.

Ruby had grown up hearing her grandmother’s stories.

"When I think how Sarah and my grandmother paved the way for my going to Nepal, it was so powerful," she said. “My grandmother was going through a divorce then. She was always an adventurer, an independent woman. That trip embodied her creative wild spirit.”

Seeing Kathmandu for the first time in 17 years astonished Michael. New hotels, restaurants, trekking and curio shops had proliferated, and the Kathmandu Guest House had expanded to include an art museum, exercise room, spa, yoga and meditation center.

Lakpa Dorjee, Tashi's husband, met them, only to have bad weather from Cyclone Montha ground flights, delaying their departure for the mountains by four days. Finally, he got them on a five-passenger helicopter. Then he got them on a helicopter destined for Everest base camp, which dropped them off at his lodge so they could make it to the Festival in time.

The next day Marsden and Michael hiked four miles along a trail that dropped a thousand feet to a river, then climbed 2,000 feet. They passed porters carrying beds and water kegs on their backs and caught stunning views of snow-capped peaks on a clear day that seemed to stretch to the edge of the known world.

Where once there had been barley fields were luxury lodges with electricity, hot water, and even wifi. The Himalayan Lodge at Tengboche offered private hotel rooms with floors heated by solar power, a spa, a hot tub, and a conference room.

The monastery, the highest in the world, had been rebuilt since a fire. And its interior glowed with brightly colored, intricate paintings of the Buddha and other figures.

Forty thousand trekkers a year now pass through the Everest region—double the number from 2007, Michael said. There are private chefs at base camp.

But the festival itself remained timeless.

The Mani Rimdu unfolded over two days during the full moon. The first was the ceremonial day, when invited guests were brought into the monastery for a blessing.

The second day the monks danced for 12 hours. Some of it was solemn and some of it playful and theatrical with brightly colored masks and elaborate costumes, many of the dances depicting Buddhism's victory over Bon, the ancient animistic religion.

Michael and Marsden watched from a balcony, listening to the chanting and deep tones of ancient horns and cymbals drift through the thin mountain air, while monks served them hot tea with yak butter and milk.

The costumes were far more elaborate than 50 years ago, reflecting the increased prosperity of the local villagers due to tourism, said Michael.

Marsden and Michael were treated like family. Not only did they stay in guest rooms in the monastery but they ate lunches of dal bhat and curry in the monks' kitchen, and Michael was presented a 50th anniversary cake with Pinot Noir.

After the festival, Marsden left Sarah and hiked solo for another week to 17,575-foot Gokyo Ri, Michael returned to Kathmandu.

"The experience blew me away," Ruby said. "I want to keep going back to Nepal like Sarah. I'm richer knowing the Nepali people and learning about their culture. I was amazed by their kindness, their hard-working nature."

On Friday, Michael celebrated another anniversary—her 50th year in Ketchum with her adventurer husband and many of the friends she has become endeared to since coming to Sun Valley.

And there beside her, working to make sure the hors d’oeuvres were being passed and the anniversary cake cut, was her longtime friend Mingma.