Mount Everest carries marine fossils on its summit: the pale limestone crowning the highest point on Earth was a tropical sea floor some 450 million years ago, lifted skyward when the Indian and Eurasian plates collided. That collision is not finished — the mountain still rises a few millimetres a year. Its summit stands 8,848.86 metres above sea level, the figure Nepal and China agreed on after jointly resurveying the peak and announcing it in December 2020. Everest sits on their shared border in the Mahalangur Himal of eastern Nepal, and it goes by older names than the British one it bears today: Sagarmatha, head of the sky, to Nepalis, and Chomolungma, goddess mother of the world, to Tibetans. To the Sherpa who farm the valleys below, it is holy ground.
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top first on 29 May 1953, and the climb is still mountaineering's ultimate test — though most people who come here never mean to summit. What draws them is the Everest Base Camp trek, a two-week walk up the Khumbu valley to the tented camps at the mountain's foot. It begins on the cliff-edge airstrip at Lukla and climbs more than two vertical kilometres through Sherpa villages and past hillside monasteries, the air thinning until breathing turns deliberate. The trail is lined with carved mani stones and wind-worn chortens, and the higher you go the quieter it grows. From Kala Patthar or Tengboche you wait for the moment before daybreak, when the first sun strikes the summit and turns it to fire while the valley below still lies in shadow. Far above, in the death zone over 8,000 metres, climbers still queue in the short spring weather windows for a turn on the final ridge.