KATHMANDU: Nepali climber Kami Rita Sherpa on Friday reached the summit of Mount Everest for the 25th time, breaking his own record for the most summits of the highest mountain in the world.

Sherpa was part of a 12-member team fixing the ropes to the summit, the first of hundreds of climbers expected to reach the top of Everest in coming weeks.

“Kami Rita has made a new record with his 25th summit,” Mingma Sherpa of Seven Summit Treks, an expedition organiser, told AFP.

A guide for more than two decades, Sherpa first reached the 8,848-metre (29,029-foot) peak in 1994 when working for a commercial expedition.

Since then, he has climbed Everest almost every year. “It isn’t about breaking records... My aim was to celebrate my silver jubilee by climbing 25 times in 2020 at the age of 50, but Covid didn’t let that happen. So this year I will make my dream come true,” Sherpa told AFP at the base camp before heading up.