Every trekker who walks into Everest Base Camp is following in the footsteps of a story that stretches back more than a century, long before Lukla had an airstrip and long before Base Camp was a stop on anyone’s bucket list rather than the launching point for the most dangerous mountaineering objective on earth. Knowing this history does not just add trivia to your trip. It changes how you look at the mountain, the villages you walk through, and the Sherpa guides and porters walking beside you, because almost every part of the modern trekking route exists because of decisions and sacrifices made across a century of attempts to reach the summit above you. This guide walks through that history in full, from the first serious attempts in the 1920s through to the record breaking climbers of today, and ends with the story of how the mountain became a trekking destination rather than a climbers only expedition zone.
Three Names for One Mountain
The mountain most of the world calls Everest carries two other names that matter far more to the people who actually live in its shadow. In Nepali, it is Sagarmatha, commonly translated as forehead of the sky or head of the great blue sky, a name formally adopted by Nepal around the 1960s. In Tibetan and Sherpa tradition, it is Chomolungma, meaning goddess mother of the world, a name rooted in Tibetan Buddhist belief that considers the mountain sacred and predates any Western contact with the region by centuries.
The English name comes from a very different source. In 1865, Andrew Waugh, the British Surveyor General of India, proposed naming the peak after his predecessor in that role, Sir George Everest, even though Everest himself reportedly objected to having a mountain in another country named after him and never saw the peak in person. Before that, the mountain was known in survey records simply as Peak XV, and its status as the tallest point on earth was first calculated in 1852 not by a British officer but by Radhanath Sikdar, a Bengali mathematician working for the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, who worked out the height from measurement stations roughly 150 miles away using trigonometry rather than any direct approach to the mountain. Sherpa and Nepali communities in the Khumbu today generally favor Sagarmatha or Chomolungma over Everest, and it is worth using those names yourself when you can, as a small sign of respect for the culture whose home this mountain actually is.
The Failed Attempts Before 1953
None of these early expeditions moved with the speed or comfort trekkers enjoy today. Every piece of equipment, every tin of food, and every length of rope had to be carried on foot or by yak from Kathmandu or from Darjeeling in India, often over the course of weeks, before the climbing itself even began. The early twentieth century mountaineers who attempted Everest were, in a real sense, exploring a completely unmapped extreme environment with only their own judgment, wool clothing, and rudimentary oxygen systems to rely on, a stark contrast to the detailed weather forecasting, satellite communication, and specialized high altitude gear available to anyone attempting the mountain today.
For the first three decades of serious mountaineering interest in the peak, every expedition approached from the north, through Tibet, because Nepal kept its borders closed to foreign travelers until the early 1950s. The 1921 British expedition was a reconnaissance mission to find a viable route rather than a summit attempt, and it identified the North Col as the likely path upward. The 1922 expedition pushed higher but was cut short partly by a deadly avalanche that killed seven Nepali and Tibetan porters on the North Col route, an early reminder of how dangerous the mountain would prove for the local climbers who made every expedition possible.
The 1924 expedition produced the most famous unresolved mystery in mountaineering history. George Mallory and Andrew Irvine set out for the summit on June 8, 1924, and were last seen alive roughly 800 feet below the top before disappearing into cloud. Whether they reached the summit before dying on the descent, 29 years before Hillary and Tenzing’s confirmed ascent, remains unknown. Mallory’s body was found in 1999 at over 8,000 meters, with no camera or conclusive evidence of a summit, and Irvine’s body has never been definitively recovered, though possible remains were reported found as recently as 2024. Further British attempts in 1933, 1935, 1936, and 1938 all failed to reach the top, hampered by weather, exhaustion, and the sheer difficulty of climbing at extreme altitude with the equipment available at the time.
The closest anyone came before the eventual successful ascent was in 1952, when a Swiss expedition including Raymond Lambert and a young Tenzing Norgay reached roughly 8,595 meters on the southeast ridge, the same general route that would succeed the following year, before turning back due to failing oxygen equipment and a lack of gear for an overnight bivouac at that altitude. China’s 1950 annexation of Tibet closed off the northern route entirely just as Nepal was beginning to open its own borders, which meant future expeditions had to approach from the south through Nepal instead, using the very valley that trekkers walk through today on their way to Base Camp.
May 29, 1953: The Day the Summit Was Reached
The 1953 British expedition, led by Colonel John Hunt, was a massive undertaking by any standard, involving 37 expedition members and climbers, roughly 20 Sherpa high altitude climbers, and 362 porters carrying supplies up through the Khumbu valley in stages, establishing a sequence of camps that pushed progressively higher up the mountain. A first summit attempt by Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans using experimental closed circuit oxygen equipment came close but turned back just short of the top due to equipment trouble. Days later, on the morning of May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand mountaineer, and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa climber who had already attempted the mountain multiple times including the 1952 Swiss expedition, set out from their high camp and reached the summit at approximately 11:30 in the morning, becoming the first confirmed climbers to stand on top of the world’s tallest mountain.
Their success came down to a combination of factors that the earlier expeditions lacked. The southern route through Nepal, already scouted by the Swiss the year before, avoided the harder terrain of the Tibetan approach. Improved open circuit oxygen systems performed more reliably than the experimental equipment tried days earlier. Better cold weather gear, tested extensively beforehand, held up under summit conditions. And John Hunt’s methodical, almost military style logistics meant supplies, oxygen, and support climbers were exactly where they needed to be when the two men made their final push. News of the successful ascent reached London on the morning of Queen Elizabeth the Second’s coronation, turning the achievement into a moment of national celebration that helped cement its place in history far beyond the small world of mountaineering.
Milestones That Followed
The decades after 1953 added chapter after chapter to the mountain’s story, and several of these moments still shape how the mountain is understood and climbed today.
In 1963, Jim Whittaker became the first American to summit Everest as part of a larger American expedition, a milestone that helped grow international interest in the mountain beyond Britain and the immediate region. In 1975, Junko Tabei of Japan became the first woman to reach the summit, opening the mountain’s history to a wider range of climbers and proving that success on Everest was never limited by gender. In 1978, Peter Habeler and Reinhold Messner achieved the first ascent without supplemental oxygen, a feat that many experts at the time believed was physiologically impossible above 8,000 meters, and one that permanently changed what climbers believed the human body could endure at extreme altitude.
The early 1990s marked a turning point of a different kind, as commercial guided expeditions began operating at scale for the first time. Companies such as Adventure Consultants, co founded by Rob Hall and Gary Ball, began taking paying clients up the mountain with professional guiding support, transforming Everest from an expedition reserved for elite mountaineers into an achievable, if still extremely difficult and expensive, goal for well prepared amateur climbers. That commercial era brought both opportunity and tragedy. On May 10 and 11, 1996, a sudden storm killed eight climbers in a single deadly stretch, including guides Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, an event later chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, which remains one of the most widely read accounts of what can go wrong on the mountain even with experienced guides and modern equipment involved.
Inside the 1953 Expedition’s Logistics
The scale of what John Hunt organized in 1953 is easy to underestimate from a distance of seventy years. The expedition moved through Nepal in stages, establishing a series of camps that climbed progressively up the mountain, each one stocked by porters and Sherpa climbers carrying oxygen bottles, tents, food, and fuel from the camp below. Base Camp itself served as the expedition’s main staging ground, much as it does for climbing expeditions today, and from there the team pushed camps up through the Khumbu Icefall, across the Western Cwm, up the Lhotse Face, and eventually to the South Col at close to 8,000 meters, the final staging point before a summit push. Hunt’s approach borrowed heavily from military style planning, treating the mountain almost like a siege, with each camp’s supply run calculated to leave the strongest climbers with the best chance of reaching the top once the lower work was done. Hillary and Tenzing were, in effect, the final beneficiaries of that entire logistical chain, and it is worth remembering that dozens of climbers and well over three hundred porters made their specific summit attempt possible even though only two names are remembered for reaching the top.
The Sacred Mountain and the Puja Ceremony
For the Sherpa community, Everest has never been simply a physical objective. As Chomolungma, it holds a central place in Tibetan Buddhist belief as a sacred, living presence rather than an inert pile of rock and ice, and this spiritual dimension shapes how climbing and trekking in the region are approached even today. Before any climbing expedition begins its ascent, it is standard practice to hold a puja ceremony, a Buddhist blessing conducted by a lama or senior Sherpa, asking the mountain’s permission and protection for the climb ahead. Prayer flags, stacked stone cairns called chortens, and mani walls carved with Buddhist prayers line the trekking route itself, particularly around Tengboche Monastery, which climbing expeditions have visited for a blessing before heading higher since long before Base Camp trekking existed as a separate tourism activity. Trekkers who stop at Tengboche today are, in a small way, participating in the same tradition that has accompanied nearly every serious attempt on the mountain since climbing began.
The Sherpa Climbers Who Made Everest Possible
No history of Everest is honest if it treats the mountain as a story about foreign climbers alone. Sherpa climbers have carried the physical weight of nearly every expedition in the mountain’s history, fixing ropes through the most dangerous sections, establishing and stocking camps, and guiding clients who could not safely reach the summit without that support. Kami Rita Sherpa holds the record for the most Everest summits of any climber in history, with 31 confirmed ascents as of May 2025, alongside Guinness World Records recognition for 42 total summits across all of the world’s peaks above 8,000 meters. Figures like this are a reminder that the labor, skill, and risk behind Everest’s climbing history has always been carried disproportionately by the Sherpa community, the same community whose villages, teahouses, and trails you pass through on the walk to Base Camp today.
The scale of climbing on Everest has grown enormously since 1953. Between 1921 and 1999, roughly 5,600 people climbed above Base Camp on the mountain. Between 2000 and 2025 alone, that number nearly tripled to close to 15,800 climbers, reflecting both the growth of commercial guiding and improvements in gear, forecasting, and route knowledge. Cumulative summits have now passed 13,700, with an overall success rate of roughly 43 percent, while total deaths on the mountain stand at around 339, a death rate that has fallen over the decades from roughly 1.8 per 100 summits in the earlier era to closer to 0.8 per 100 summits today, a real improvement even though the mountain remains genuinely dangerous.
The Exact Height of Everest, and Why It Changed
For decades, Everest’s official height was given as 8,848 meters, based on a 1954 Survey of India measurement, though a 1999 American survey using GPS technology suggested a slightly higher figure of 8,850 meters, and a separate 2005 Chinese survey measured 8,844.43 meters by focusing on the rock height beneath the snow cap rather than the snow itself. These competing figures created a genuine, long running dispute between China and Nepal over which number was correct.
The dispute was finally settled on December 8, 2020, when China and Nepal jointly announced a new, agreed official height of 8,848.86 meters, the figure used almost universally today. Reaching this number required years of fieldwork, with Nepali surveyors summiting the mountain on May 22, 2019, and Chinese surveyors following on May 27, 2020, combining satellite positioning, precise ground leveling, gravity measurements, and ground penetrating radar to measure the actual depth of snow and ice sitting on top of the underlying rock. Part of the motivation for this joint survey was lingering uncertainty about whether the devastating 2015 Gorkha earthquake had shifted the mountain’s elevation, which the new measurement helped resolve alongside settling the decades old dispute between the two countries.
How Oxygen Equipment Changed What Was Possible
Supplemental oxygen has been part of Everest’s story since the very earliest attempts, and the evolution of that equipment tracks almost exactly with the evolution of what climbers believed was survivable at extreme altitude. Early expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s used heavy, unreliable oxygen sets that frequently failed and that many climbers of the era distrusted, preferring to rely on acclimatization and raw endurance instead. By 1953, John Hunt’s team carried improved open circuit oxygen systems that proved far more dependable than the experimental closed circuit sets tried just days earlier by Bourdillon and Evans, and that reliability is part of why Hillary and Tenzing succeeded when the first attempt of that same expedition had to turn back. The next major shift came in 1978, when Habeler and Messner proved a summit was achievable without any supplemental oxygen at all, a feat that reset expectations about human performance at extreme altitude and inspired a smaller, purist tradition of oxygen free ascents that continues among elite mountaineers today, even as the vast majority of climbers, including nearly all clients on commercially guided expeditions, still rely on supplemental oxygen for both safety and improved odds of success above 8,000 meters.
What Base Camp Itself Actually Is
Everest Base Camp on the Nepal side sits at roughly 5,364 meters, right at the foot of the Khumbu Glacier and directly below the Khumbu Icefall, the constantly shifting wall of ice that every climbing expedition must cross to progress higher up the mountain. It is worth understanding, especially if you are trekking there rather than climbing further, that Base Camp is not a permanent settlement of any kind. It exists only as a seasonal tent city, assembled fresh each climbing season, chiefly in the pre monsoon window of April and May, and dismantled completely once that season’s expeditions finish. When you visit outside the main climbing season, you will find a rocky, glacier covered plain with little sign that hundreds of tents and climbers were there only months before.
The Khumbu Icefall above Base Camp has been the site of some of the mountain’s worst tragedies precisely because of how unpredictable it is. On April 18, 2014, an ice avalanche tore through the Icefall and killed 16 Nepali guides and support climbers in a single event, the deadliest single day on the mountain up to that point, and it led to that entire season’s climbing being called off out of respect and safety concerns. Just over a year later, on April 25, 2015, the magnitude 7.8 Gorkha earthquake triggered a massive avalanche off nearby Pumori that swept directly through Base Camp itself, killing at least 19 to 24 people there as part of a nationwide disaster that killed roughly 9,000 people across Nepal, and that season’s climbs were abandoned as well. Both events are sober reminders of how much danger surrounds the upper mountain, even though the trek to Base Camp itself, for trekkers who go no further, involves none of the technical climbing risk found above it.
Milestones in Diversity and Endurance
Beyond the headline first ascent and the milestones already covered, Everest’s history includes a long list of records that expanded who the mountain was believed to be climbable by. In 1988, Lydia Bradey became the first woman to reach the summit without supplemental oxygen, a feat that combined the endurance challenge Habeler and Messner had proven possible a decade earlier with the barrier Junko Tabei had broken in 1975. Climbers have since summited at both ends of the age spectrum in remarkable fashion, with teenagers and climbers in their seventies and eighties reaching the top in separate expeditions over the years, a pattern that reflects less any single record and more how much safer equipment, weather forecasting, and route knowledge have become compared to the 1950s. Double amputee climbers, blind climbers, and climbers managing serious chronic illness have also reached the summit in the decades since commercial guiding became widespread, each expanding the boundaries of what a well supported expedition on this specific mountain can achieve, even though the underlying altitude and weather risks have never gone away.
Crowding, Fixed Ropes, and the Modern Debate Around Everest
The same commercial growth that made Everest more accessible has also created a genuine and ongoing debate about crowding on the mountain. Photographs from the 2019 spring season showing long lines of climbers waiting on fixed ropes near the summit, sometimes for hours in the thin air of what climbers call the death zone above 8,000 meters, drew international attention to how bottlenecks on a single short weather window can turn an already dangerous climb into an even riskier one. Nepal has taken steps in response, including tightening permit issuance criteria and requiring proof of prior high altitude experience for some climbers, though the debate over how many permits should be issued each season continues among mountaineers, guiding companies, and the Nepali government. None of this affects trekkers heading only to Base Camp, since the crowding in question happens thousands of meters higher on the mountain itself, but it is part of the same ongoing story that began with Hunt’s expedition in 1953 and continues to evolve with each climbing season.
Cleaning Up the Mountain
Decades of expeditions left a genuine environmental problem behind on the upper mountain, from abandoned oxygen bottles and tents to human waste left at high camps where nothing decomposes in the cold and thin air. In recent years, the Nepali government and various volunteer and military led cleanup expeditions have removed tons of waste from the mountain’s higher camps, and rules now require every expedition to bring down a set amount of garbage per climber or forfeit part of their permit deposit. This cleanup effort, alongside stricter waste management rules for trekking lodges lower down the route, reflects a broader shift in how the region’s tourism industry treats the environmental cost of decades of unmanaged growth, something worth knowing as you walk through villages that depend on keeping this landscape intact for the tourism income that sustains them.
How Lukla Turned a Climbing Objective Into a Trekking Destination
Everything about the modern Everest Base Camp trekking industry traces back to a single piece of infrastructure: the airstrip at Lukla. Before it existed, reaching the Khumbu required a walk of three weeks or more from Kathmandu on foot, a journey that limited access to the region almost entirely to expedition climbers and their support teams. Sir Edmund Hillary, through the Himalayan Trust he founded after his own 1953 climb, built the Lukla airstrip in 1964, primarily to support the schools and hospitals his organization was establishing throughout the Khumbu for the Sherpa communities who had made his own success possible. The airstrip was renamed Tenzing Hillary Airport in 2008, honoring both men who reached the summit together in 1953.
By cutting the approach to the region from a multi week trek to a flight of roughly 30 to 40 minutes from Kathmandu, Lukla transformed the Khumbu from a remote, climbers only expedition zone into a destination accessible to ordinary trekkers with no mountaineering ambitions at all. Today the airport handles dozens of flights daily during peak season, and tens of thousands of trekkers pass through it every year on their way to Namche Bazaar, Tengboche, and eventually Base Camp itself, walking a route that exists today largely because Hillary wanted to give something back to the community whose skill and sacrifice had carried his own expedition to the summit.
The Business of Everest Today
What began as a purely exploratory and later national prestige pursuit has grown into a major part of Nepal’s economy. A single climbing permit for a foreign climber attempting the summit currently costs several thousand dollars, and when combined with the guiding fees, oxygen, high altitude porter wages, and logistics that a serious expedition requires, a single Everest summit attempt can cost anywhere from roughly thirty thousand dollars on a budget expedition to well over a hundred thousand dollars for a fully supported, luxury style climb. Multiply that by the roughly several hundred climbing permits issued each spring season and the trekking tourism that flows through the same valley, and Everest alone supports a meaningful share of the entire Khumbu region’s economy, along with a significant portion of Nepal’s national tourism revenue. This is part of why the debate over permit numbers, crowding, and safety regulation carries such weight in Nepal, since the mountain is simultaneously a source of national pride, a place of deep spiritual significance, a genuine safety concern, and an economic engine that a great many families depend on directly.
Everest in Books and Film
The mountain’s history has produced an entire library of its own. Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air remains the most widely read account of the 1996 disaster and introduced millions of readers who will never set foot in Nepal to the realities of high altitude climbing. Earlier accounts, including official expedition reports from 1953 and memoirs from climbers across the following decades, built the foundation of mountaineering literature that still shapes how the public understands Everest today. Documentary films and, more recently, dramatized feature films have retold the 1996 disaster and other expeditions to new audiences, and the mountain’s near mythical status in popular culture is itself part of why so many trekkers who have no intention of climbing still feel a strong pull to see Base Camp with their own eyes, walking distance from a story they read about long before they ever booked a flight to Kathmandu.
Walking the Same Ground the Climbers Walked
One of the most striking things about trekking to Everest Base Camp today is how directly you retrace the same approach used by every climbing expedition since the 1950s. You pass through Namche Bazaar, the trading hub that has supplied every expedition heading higher. You pass Tengboche Monastery, where climbers have traditionally sought a blessing before continuing upward. You walk beside the Khumbu Glacier on your final approach, the same glacier every summit expedition must cross before the technical climbing even begins. Standing at Base Camp yourself, looking up at the Khumbu Icefall that has claimed lives across a century of attempts, connects the walk you just completed to a story that began with survey officers guessing at a mountain’s height from 150 miles away and grew into one of the most storied pursuits in the history of exploration. Very few trekking destinations anywhere in the world let an ordinary traveler stand at the actual staging ground of a century long human story simply by walking there over roughly ten to twelve days, and that access, made possible by Hillary’s airstrip at Lukla, is a large part of why Everest Base Camp remains one of the most requested trekking routes on earth even for people with no interest in mountaineering itself.
If you want to plan your own trek along this historic route, our Everest Base Camp trek cost guide and honest difficulty guide are good starting points, our piece on whether you actually need a guide for this trek explains the current rules for anyone weighing a guided trip against an independent one, and our full guide to Namche Bazaar covers the historic trading town you will pass through on your way toward this same story.
Why This History Matters for Your Own Trek
It would be easy to treat all of this as background trivia to read once and forget by the time you land in Kathmandu, but the history actually changes the experience of the walk itself in small, tangible ways. When you cross a swaying suspension bridge over the Dudh Koshi river, you are following a supply route that has carried expedition gear since the 1950s. When your guide points out Tengboche Monastery in the distance, you are looking at the same building where climbers have sought a blessing before their summit attempts for generations. When you finally stand on the rocky plain at Base Camp itself, looking up at the Khumbu Icefall, you are looking at the same obstacle that stopped, injured, and in some seasons killed climbers from the very first serious attempts on the mountain nearly a century ago. None of this requires any special knowledge to see with your own eyes, but knowing the history behind it turns a strenuous walk into something closer to walking through a living museum, one that happens to still be an active mountain rather than a preserved historical site.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does Everest have three different names
Sagarmatha is the Nepali name, Chomolungma is the Tibetan and Sherpa name rooted in Buddhist belief, and Everest is the English name assigned in 1865 after Sir George Everest, a British Surveyor General of India who never actually saw the mountain. Local communities generally favor Sagarmatha or Chomolungma, since both names carry deep cultural and spiritual meaning that the English name does not.
Who were the first people to climb Mount Everest
Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa climber, reached the summit together on May 29, 1953, as part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt.
What is the official height of Mount Everest today
The official height, agreed jointly by China and Nepal in December 2020 after years of survey work, is 8,848.86 meters. This resolved a long standing dispute between earlier measurements that ranged from 8,844 to 8,850 meters.
Why is Everest called Sagarmatha in Nepal
Sagarmatha is the Nepali name for the mountain, generally translated as forehead of the sky, and it was formally adopted by Nepal in the twentieth century. Many Nepalis and Sherpas prefer this name, or the Tibetan name Chomolungma, over the English name Everest, which honors a British surveyor who never saw the mountain himself.
Is Everest Base Camp a permanent camp trekkers can visit anytime
Everest Base Camp is not a permanent structure. It is a seasonal tent camp assembled fresh for each climbing season, mainly in April and May, and taken down afterward. Trekkers visiting Base Camp outside the main climbing season will find an open, rocky, glacier covered area rather than an active camp full of tents.
What happened to George Mallory and Andrew Irvine
Mallory and Irvine disappeared on June 8, 1924, roughly 800 feet below the summit, and whether they reached the top before dying remains one of mountaineering’s great unresolved mysteries. Mallory’s body was found in 1999 with no conclusive evidence of a summit, and Irvine’s body has never been definitively recovered, though possible remains were reported as recently as 2024.
Who holds the record for the most Everest summits
Kami Rita Sherpa holds the record with 31 confirmed summits of Everest as of May 2025, alongside Guinness World Records recognition for 42 total summits across all of the world’s peaks above 8,000 meters, a reflection of the enormous role Sherpa climbers play in the mountain’s climbing history.
How much does it cost to climb Everest today
A full climbing expedition, including permit fees, guiding, oxygen, and logistics, commonly ranges from roughly thirty thousand dollars on a budget expedition to well over a hundred thousand dollars for a fully supported, high service climb. This is a completely separate cost structure from trekking to Base Camp, which does not involve any climbing permit and costs a small fraction of that amount.
Do trekkers walk the same route climbers use to reach the summit
Trekkers walk the same approach route through Namche Bazaar, Tengboche, and up the Khumbu valley that every climbing expedition has used since the 1950s, and Base Camp itself is the exact staging ground climbing expeditions still use today. Trekkers do not, however, continue up through the Khumbu Icefall or onto the technical climbing route above Base Camp, which requires a separate climbing permit and mountaineering skill.
Understanding this history is, in a real sense, part of preparing for the trek itself. The villages, the monastery, the glacier, and the trail beneath your boots all carry the weight of more than a century of attempts, sacrifice, and achievement, and walking to Base Camp today puts you, briefly, on the same ground as every name in this story. If this history makes you curious about walking in on foot rather than flying to Lukla, our guide to the classic Jiri route to Everest Base Camp covers what that same original approach looks like today. If you are ready to plan your own trek along this route, take a look at our current Everest Base Camp trek packages or the wider set of routes on our Everest destination page.
