Posts tagged #history · All posts
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.
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.
Forty years ago, on 16 October 1986, Reinhold Messner stood on Lhotse and became the first person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders, every one without bottled oxygen. Seven weeks later he finished his own version of the 7 summits on Vinson.
Beck Weathers was left for dead twice on the South Col in May 1996, woke from a hypothermic coma and walked into Camp IV. A Polish retelling this week starts years earlier: a Dallas pathologist who climbed his way out of depression, and a marriage that came through the storm.
CNN reported on 10 October 2026 that DNA testing has confirmed the climber known to generations of Everest mountaineers as "Green Boots" was Dorje Morup, an Indian climber who served in the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and died in a storm on the north side in May 1996. Samples were taken from the body by a small Sherpa team and analysed at a laboratory in India. A recovery operation is now being planned, and it would be one of the hardest retrievals ever attempted above 8,000 metres.
Apple Original Films has confirmed that Tenzing, a drama about Tenzing Norgay and the 1953 first ascent of Everest, opens in select cinemas on 9 October 2026 and streams globally on Apple TV from 16 October. Jennifer Peedom directs, with Genden Phuntsok as Tenzing and Tom Hiddleston as Edmund Hillary. Apple released the trailer on 16 September. Here is what the studio has confirmed about the cast, the crew and the story the film tells.
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.
7summits.com spent twenty years as an expedition operator and now organises no trips at all. What it does instead is keep the record: who climbed what, and when. This is the site's own story. One expedition up Kilimanjaro on Christmas Day 1998, a company name that was too long, and two decades of guiding the same eight mountains, which is where the route guides here come from, including three that started life as printed Rucksack Readers guidebooks and have since been expanded and brought up to date, free to read. It is also what the site is today, after being rebuilt from nothing. It holds 798 7 summits finishers, several hundred guide pages in four languages, route tracks built from real GPS recordings, and a directory of who actually runs each trip on each peak. Everything free today stays free, and what comes next is doing more with what is already here.
"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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