Why we’re called Sherpa

“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.

Sherpa mountaineers helped make the name widely associated with guidance. Using it as a generic job title reduces a people to a service role. We use the name for the idea of a trusted guide, while acknowledging that borrowing it carries an obligation in our funding and conduct.

Supporting The Juniper Fund

We support The Juniper Fund, which helps the families and communities of Nepali high-altitude mountain workers injured or killed at work.

To learn about their work or support them directly, visit their own site.

We never caricature or appropriate Sherpa culture.

These rules apply across the site, our guide character and every ad we run.

• Our guide is abstract — never a person. The Sherpa you see is an AI guide: a simple digital face within a navy mountain silhouette. It is a symbol of guidance, not an 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.