Rolwaling School
Project details
In 1970, while crossing an 18,500-foot pass into the remote Rolwaling valley on the Tibetan border, in a trip he later described as harder than he had expected, Sir Edmund Hillary reached the small Sherpa village of Beding and agreed to help build a school there. Construction, led by Mingma Tsering, was confirmed under way by May 1972, the year the Trust's own records now use for Rolwaling School.
Beding sits in Dolakha district, not Solukhumbu, and because it fell outside the Trust's usual district, the Trust played no ongoing part in running the school once it was built. The Rolwaling Monastery later opened its own monastic school nearby, and the original building is now closed. It is the one school on this list that sits outside Solukhumbu entirely.
In 1970, Sir Edmund Hillary set out to cross an 18,500-foot pass into the Rolwaling valley, on the Tibetan border, to reach the small Sherpa community of Beding. He later described the crossing to a contact at Sears as "higher and more difficult than I had anticipated". Night fell as he lowered fourteen porters and their loads down a 150-foot drop just over the pass, and the group then had to cross crevasses and steep slopes before making camp on snow at nearly 17,000 feet. Sir Ed suffered altitude sickness on the way, including headache, nausea and impaired eyesight, and was relieved to finally reach Beding at 12,000 feet.
It was there, in a cluster of about twenty stone houses under the cliffs of the unclimbed peak Gauri Shankar, that Sir Ed made his decision: "I agreed to try and build them a school." Construction was led by Mingma Tsering, and a letter dated 21 May 1972 confirms the work was under way that spring: "Lindsay, Ang Pasang and Mingma are crossing the Tashi Laptsa to the Rolwaling where Ed is building a school."
Beding sits in Dolakha district, outside Solukhumbu, and that turned out to matter. A separate account in the same Trust history notes that because Rolwaling was not under Solukhumbu's jurisdiction, "the Trust played no part in its management" once the school was built. It is the one school on this list the Trust helped start but never went on to run.
Mingma had nearly been killed by a rock avalanche on an earlier crossing of the Tashi Laptsa, and on later trips he deliberately took a longer route down the valley, half-joking that it let him avoid "the spirit that's out to get him". Sir Ed, for his part, always played down his own first crossing of the pass back in 1951 as having given him only "a modest thrill", a line so at odds with how dangerous the pass actually was that it inspired a colleague, Dr Selwyn Lang, to write ten verses of comic doggerel about it, of which only one survives.
The school itself is now closed. The Trust's own records note that the Rolwaling Monastery has since started its own monastic school in a new location. A separate 2023-24 annual report describes a 30-student monastery school in the valley, supported since 2021 by a French foundation, though it is not confirmed whether this is the same institution that replaced Sir Ed's original building.