A series in 5 parts. Read them in order, or start anywhere.
Everest has more history on its slopes than any other mountain on the list: the survey that gave it its name, the expeditions that turned back and the ones that did not, and the people (very often Sherpas) whose work made every summit possible. This series tells that history one story at a time.
Two Polish firsts on Everest, sixteen months apart: Wanda Rutkiewicz became the first European woman on the summit on 16 October 1978, climbing with anaemia, and Leszek Cichy and Krzysztof Wielicki made the first winter ascent on 17 February 1980.
Everest's Kangshung Face rises around 3,350 metres from the Kangshung Glacier to the summit and was first climbed by an American team in October 1983. A profile published by Gripped traces the wall from the 1921 British reconnaissance through to the Neverest Buttress climb of 1988. Here is what that account says, and which parts of it rest on a single telling.
Thirty years after the 1996 Everest disaster, Jon Krakauer's account of it remains one of the most argued-about books in adventure writing. In a National Geographic interview for the anniversary, he talks about what the disaster cost him, where he stands on the questions the book raised, and what he makes of Everest's commercialisation.
Every spring, before any climbing team sets foot on Everest, a small crew of Sherpa climbers has already been up and down the Khumbu Icefall dozens of times. They are the Icefall Doctors, and the route through the most dangerous kilometre on the mountain exists because of them. They carry aluminium ladders across crevasses that can swallow a person whole, fix ropes through a glacier that moves about a metre downhill every day, and return every few days to rebuild what the ice has shifted or collapsed. The name is not official and it is not ancient: it was coined relatively recently, and the story of how it stuck says something about how Everest operates. This post traces that history: who the Icefall Doctors are, how the role is organised, what they are paid, what gear they carry, and why the work is as respected as it is dangerous. If you have ever looked at a photograph of ladders strung across a blue-white void and wondered who put them there, this is the answer.
"Green Boots", the landmark that was a person For roughly three decades, climbers on the northeast ridge of Everest passed a man in a bright-green mountaineering boot and used him as a waypoint. He had a name, almost certainly Tsewang Paljor. He was an Indian Border Security Force constable who died on the mountain during the May 1996 storm, but on the route he was known by the colour of his footwear. The body is now expected to be removed. A retrieval expedition is planned, and the circumstances that kept him there for so long are, for the first time, being addressed in public.
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