Walking to Everest Base Camp is, for many people, the trekking dream of a lifetime. You don't need to be a mountaineer or do any technical climbing: it's a long high-altitude hike, demanding but within reach of anyone in good physical shape, that climbs from Lukla up the Khumbu valley to 5.364 metres, at the foot of the roof of the world. Along the way you cross suspension bridges draped in prayer flags over glacial rivers, sleep in stone Sherpa villages, visit Buddhist monasteries clinging to the mountainside and see giants like Nuptse, Lhotse, Ama Dablam and Everest itself up close.
The classic itinerary passes through places that are mountaineering legend: Namche Bazaar, the Sherpa capital tucked into an amphitheatre of mountains; Tengboche monastery, with Ama Dablam as its backdrop; Dingboche and Lobuche, already in the bare high mountains; and the Khumbu glacier, a chaos of ice and moraine. The high point isn't base camp itself (a camp of tents at the foot of the icefall) but sunrise from Kala Patthar (5.545 m), the viewpoint where Everest appears whole, huge and golden in the first light.
This guide helps you plan it sensibly: how much the permits and the Lukla flight cost, how many days you need, how to acclimatize so altitude sickness doesn't knock you out (the big risk of the trek, which you have to take very seriously), what to pack, where to sleep and how to look after the porters and guides who make the trip possible. You don't conquer Everest by walking to its base: you contemplate it, with respect, from the heart of Sherpa country.
The Khumbu, the Everest region, was for centuries a remote valley inhabited by the Sherpa, a people of Tibetan origin who crossed the Himalayas some 500 years ago and settled at the foot of the mountain they called Chomolungma, 'mother goddess of the world'. The mountain had no Western name until 1865, when the British named it Everest after a surveyor. In 1953, New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached the summit for the first time, and ever since the Sherpa name has been tied to Everest. The creation of Sagarmatha National Park in 1976 and the arrival of trekking transformed the region's economy. The full story —the Sherpa, the great expeditions, the tragedies on the mountain and today's tourism— is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The roof of the world: the Khumbu region, home of the Sherpa and of Everest, scene of the 1953 first ascent and of the modern epic —and tragedy— of mountaineering.
Read the history of Himalaya and Everest (high mountains) →They depart from Bhaktapur, 145 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before any Westerner knew it existed, the highest mountain on Earth already had a name. Tibetans and Sherpas called it Chomolungma, usually translated as 'goddess mother of the world' or 'mother of the universe'. In Nepal it is also known as Sagarmatha, 'the forehead of the sky', a name coined in the 20th century. For the peoples who live in its shadow, the mountain was neither a sporting challenge nor a trophy: it was a divinity, a home of gods, a sacred place owed respect and offerings.
Today the summit marks the border between Nepal and Tibet (China) and rises to 8.849 metres above sea level, the official figure agreed by Nepal and China in 2020 after a new joint survey. It is the highest point on the planet, though not the hardest mountain to climb: that reputation belongs to neighbours like K2 or Lhotse itself and its walls.
The name 'Everest' is recent and foreign to the mountain. In 1865, Britain's Royal Geographical Society named 'Peak XV', as it was labelled on their maps, after George Everest, a Welsh surveyor who had led the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, even though Everest himself objected to the mountain bearing his surname, which he also pronounced differently. And so the sacred mountain of the Tibetans and Sherpas entered world history under the name of a colonial official who never saw it up close.
The Khumbu region, through which the base camp trek runs, is home to the Sherpas, a people whose name literally means 'people from the east' (shar-pa) in Tibetan. According to their own tradition, the Sherpas migrated from the Kham region in eastern Tibet some five centuries ago, crossing the high Himalayan passes to settle in the upper valleys of present-day Nepal. They brought with them the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, which is still the heart of their culture: that is why the Khumbu is dotted with monasteries, chortens, mani walls and prayer flags.
For centuries, the Sherpas lived from herding yaks, growing potatoes and barley on high-altitude terraces and trading with Tibet over passes such as the Nangpa La. Namche Bazaar was the great market where Tibetan salt, grain and goods changed hands. Genetically adapted to life at altitude over generations, the Sherpas developed an extraordinary tolerance for the thin air of high altitudes, something that would prove decisive once the mountaineers arrived.
With Nepal opening up to the world in the mid-20th century and the rise of mountaineering, the word 'sherpa' ended up becoming, in expedition jargon, a synonym for high-altitude porter and mountain guide. It is important to tell the two apart: 'Sherpa' is, first and foremost, a people and an ethnic group with its own language, religion and culture, not a job. Many —though not all— of Nepal's great high-altitude climbers belong to this community, and their role in the history of Everest has been as central as it has often been overlooked.
The race for Everest was one of the great epics of the first half of the 20th century. From the 1920s onwards, the British mounted expedition after expedition from the Tibetan side. In 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared near the summit; no one ever knew for sure whether they reached the top before they died, and Mallory's body was not found until 1999. Mallory is credited with mountaineering's most famous line: when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, he is said to have answered, simply, 'because it's there'.
On 29 May 1953, after decades of failed attempts and several deaths, two men finally reached the summit: New Zealander Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper with a passion for mountains, and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa born in the Khumbu who had taken part in several earlier expeditions. They were part of a large British expedition led by John Hunt, which climbed from the Nepali side via the Khumbu Glacier. The news reached London just in time to coincide with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and went around the world.
Hillary and Tenzing always refused to say which of them set foot on the summit first, insisting they had arrived together, as a team. The feat made them famous worldwide. Hillary spent much of the rest of his life giving something back to the land of the Sherpas: through his foundation he built schools, hospitals and bridges in the Khumbu, including the Lukla airstrip, which today is the gateway for almost every trekker. Tenzing Norgay became a national hero in Nepal and India and a symbol of the Sherpas' role in the mountain's history.
The 1953 ascent opened a new era. Nepal, which had been almost closed to foreigners, began receiving expeditions and, over the years, trekkers from all over the world who wanted to walk to the foot of the planet's highest mountain. To protect the fragile high-mountain ecosystem and its wildlife —the snow leopard, the Himalayan tahr, the monal (Nepal's national bird)—, Sagarmatha National Park was created in 1976 and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979. The park covers the whole of the upper Khumbu, including the Nepali face of Everest.
Tourism completely transformed the Sherpa economy: the old trade routes gave way to tea houses, trekking agencies and expedition work. For many Khumbu families, trekking and mountaineering became the main source of income. But that progress came at a high human cost. The Sherpas who work on the mountain —fixing ropes, carrying gear, guiding clients through the dangerous Khumbu Icefall— are the ones most exposed to Everest's dangers.
Two recent tragedies laid this bare. In April 2014, an ice avalanche in the Khumbu Icefall killed sixteen Nepali workers, most of them Sherpas, in the worst accident recorded on the mountain up to that point. A year later, on 25 April 2015, the great Nepal earthquake triggered an avalanche that swept through base camp and killed around twenty people, while also devastating villages and monasteries across the country. Every climbing season also brings deaths among climbers attempting the summit, often from altitude sickness, exhaustion or the crowds that pile up in the 'death zone', above 8.000 metres.
In the 21st century, Everest has become a global phenomenon with its bright side and its dark side. Every spring, hundreds of people attempt the summit, paying tens of thousands of dollars to commercial expeditions. Images of long lines of climbers waiting their turn on the ropes of the final ridge, more than 8.000 metres up and with their oxygen running out, went around the world and sparked debate about overcrowding, safety and the ethics of turning a sacred mountain into an attraction for clients with little experience.
The problem isn't only human. Decades of expeditions have left tonnes of rubbish, abandoned tents, empty oxygen bottles and waste on the slopes, as well as the bodies of climbers who died and could not be brought down. Nepal has gradually tightened the rules: it requires expeditions to bring their waste back down, charges rubbish deposits and organises clean-up campaigns in which Sherpas themselves collect litter from the glacier. Even so, the environmental impact and the retreat of the glaciers due to climate change are a growing concern.
For the traveller doing the base camp trek, all of this is an invitation to walk with humility. You are not going to 'conquer' anything: you are going to gaze, from the Kala Patthar viewpoint or from the edge of the glacier, at a mountain that for the Sherpas is still a goddess. Respecting the Buddhist culture of the Khumbu, treating porters and guides fairly, leaving no rubbish, taking care of the water and accepting the rhythms and risks of altitude is the only dignified way to approach Chomolungma. Everest doesn't need to be defeated; what it asks for, rather, is respect.
