Bodies on Everest: Who They Are, Where They Rest, and Why They Stay

The body known as Green Boots is not Tsewang Paljor. It is Dorje Morup. A DNA test confirmed this in June 2026, thirty years after the body was found. Both men were members of the same Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition. Both died in the same storm. For three decades, every climber on the north face of Everest stepped around a body and called it by the wrong name.

This is how Everest works. The mountain does not correct its mistakes. The people eventually do.

The confirmation required a formal DNA analysis and a government announcement. It means that mountaineering's most recognised corpse had the wrong name for thirty years because a pair of lime-green boots happened to match the equipment manifest of the wrong man. Dorje Morup was forty-seven years old when he died. He had a family. He had a correct identity. For three decades, the climbing world did not know it.

This is not an isolated case. The mountain holds approximately 200 bodies, distributed across both faces at elevations ranging from base camp to just below the summit ridge. Most are unknown outside a small circle of researchers, expedition members, and climbers who have stepped around them on the route. Some are famous. All of them stayed because someone, at some point, made a calculation that bringing them down would cost more than the mountain would allow.

The numbers, plainly

Around 300 people have died attempting Everest since the first serious attempts in the 1920s. Wikipedia's List of People Who Died Climbing Mount Everest currently documents 346 deaths, though the figure is contested: records for the earliest attempts are incomplete, and the attribution of some deaths remains disputed.

Of those, approximately 200 bodies remain on the mountain. No precise count is possible. Some are buried under accumulated snow that has since shifted position. Others fell into crevasses and will not surface on any predictable timeline. A few have emerged decades after they were first recorded missing, carried gradually downhill by glacial movement.

The death rate across all Everest attempts is approximately one percent. This number is accurate. It does not account for what one percent produces when thousands of people attempt the same peak over a century: a mountain where the dead are part of the terrain. Sherpas and high-altitude support workers account for a disproportionate share of those deaths, dying at roughly 1.6 times the rate of foreign clients on the same routes. The 2014 Khumbu Icefall avalanche killed sixteen Sherpas in a single morning. In any given season, a climber on the upper mountain will pass bodies. The question is how many, and whose.

Why they stay

The death zone begins at 8,000 metres. Above this elevation, the human body is consuming itself faster than it can recover. Oxygen levels fall below a third of what is available at sea level. Acclimatisation helps but provides diminishing returns. Climbers moving through the death zone are on borrowed time.

Helicopters cannot operate reliably above approximately 6,500 metres. The air is too thin to generate the lift required for hovering near a body or carrying the additional weight of a recovery. Everything above that elevation is beyond mechanised reach. Climbers on the upper mountain carry everything they need, and everything they might recover, on foot.

Removing a single body from the death zone costs between $75,000 and $80,000. A full government-funded operation in 2024, covering multiple bodies and accumulated waste from high camps, exceeded $600,000 in total. When removal happens, the process is this: a team of twelve climbers, working in two-person rotations, chips a body free from the ice it has fused with over years or decades. They load it onto a lightweight plastic rescue sled and lower it 9,000 vertical feet over four days to base camp, where a helicopter can carry it out.

Insurance policies for Everest climbers typically cover the cost of a living rescue. They do not extend to corpse retrieval. An evacuation helicopter can reach an injured climber below 6,500 metres; the policy does not follow a dead climber above it.

In 1984, two Sherpa police officers, Ang Dorje and Yogendra Bahadur Thapa, died attempting to retrieve the body of Hannelore Schmatz from just above Camp IV on the south side. They were below the death zone. The altitude killed them anyway. Their deaths are the clearest available answer to the question of why bodies stay: removal is not simply a matter of will or resources. It is a risk calculation, and the mountain does not always resolve it in the climbers' favour.

The bodies you will pass

Everest has two main climbing routes. The south face approaches from Nepal through the Khumbu Icefall, the Western Cwm, and the Lhotse Face to the Southeast Ridge and summit. The north face approaches from Tibet through the North Col and along the Northeast Ridge. Climbers with experience on both routes know the bodies by location, if not always by name.

On the north side, at roughly 8,500 metres, Dorje Morup rests in the limestone alcove that became known as Green Boots Cave. His legs extend into the path. They have extended into the path since 1996. The Indian government has announced a forty-day recovery mission, with repatriation to Delhi planned for October 2026. It will be the first formal body repatriation from that altitude in the mountain's recorded climbing history.

The cave served as a navigational landmark: reaching it meant you were close enough to the summit to make a final decision. In May 2006, a British climber named David Sharp was found dying inside the same alcove. He had run out of oxygen and crawled to the only shelter available at that elevation. Up to forty climbers passed him over the course of that day. Several stopped, assessed him, and continued toward the summit. A number may not have fully registered what they were seeing: the cave already had a body in it. The mountain had been training climbers to expect a dead man in that alcove and step around him for a decade.

Sir Edmund Hillary said of the incident: 'On my expedition, there was no way that you would have left a man under a rock to die.' And: 'I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. People just want to get to the top.' Mark Inglis, one of the climbers who passed Sharp, said his party had given Sharp oxygen and radioed a distress call. His position: Sharp was in the death zone with no oxygen, and there was no survivable way to carry him to safety. Both accounts can be accurate simultaneously. That is the weight of decisions made at 8,500 metres.

Below the Northeast Ridge, between 8,000 and 8,400 metres, lies Rainbow Valley. The name comes from the colours of the dead: the red, green, yellow, orange, and blue mountaineering suits of climbers who fell from the ridge and came to rest on the snow below. Between five and twelve bodies are visible depending on snow conditions and the season. The suits are forty or fifty years old in some cases and still recognisably bright against the ice. The cold that killed these climbers has been preserving them ever since. Reaching Rainbow Valley is a psychological checkpoint as much as a physical one: a reminder, visible from the route, of what the mountain has already taken.

Lower on the north face, at approximately 8,155 metres, George Mallory lies in the position he was found in 1999, seventy-five years after his death in 1924. He died either on the way to the summit or returning from it. That question has never been definitively answered. It took five climbers more than an hour to chip him free from the ice. His camera, which might have contained evidence of whether he and Andrew Irvine reached the summit before Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953, was never found. His body was given a burial on the mountain.

On the south side, Hannelore Schmatz died in 1979 above Camp IV, frozen upright against her backpack. She was the first woman and the first German to die on Everest. Her last recorded words were: 'Water, water.' Her body remained visible to every climber passing that section for three years, hair moving in the wind, eyes open, until wind dislodged it in 1982.

Rob Hall, the New Zealand guide who died in the 1996 disaster, spent his final hours in radio contact with his wife Jan Arnold in Christchurch. She was eight months pregnant. The call was patched through by satellite phone. Hall was at approximately 8,800 metres, just above the Hillary Step, where he had stayed with his client Doug Hansen after Hansen reached the summit on his second attempt. Both men died on the mountain. Hall's body remains near the position of that last transmission.

For the full account of Francys Arsentiev, who died in 1998 and whose body stayed visible on the route for nearly a decade, read our piece on the Sleeping Beauty of Everest. Ian Woodall, who found her alive and could not save her, returned to the mountain nine years later. He wrapped her in an American flag and moved her from the fixed ropes.

What the mountain does to a body

Decomposition requires warmth, moisture, and microbial activity. Above 7,000 metres, temperatures fall below -30 degrees Celsius for most of the year. None of those conditions exist. Bodies do not rot. They dehydrate, they freeze, and they remain.

Some move. Glaciers flow downhill under their own weight, slowly, on timescales measured in decades. A body that fell into a crevasse in the 1970s may emerge at a lower elevation in the 2040s, carried down by ice that has been moving the entire time. As Everest's glaciers lose mass due to rising temperatures, what they surface becomes harder to predict. The 2023 and 2024 Nepal cleanup operations each recovered bodies that had not been visible for years.

Rainbow Valley's dead have been visible since the 1970s and 1980s. They are still recognisably human. They are still wearing the same suits. The mountain is preserving them, unchanged, in a way that no one planned and no one controls.

The ethics: who bears the weight

Nepal's government has funded formal body removal operations in recent years. The 2024 mission recovered five bodies and removed significant waste from high camps at a cost exceeding $600,000. The operations require specialised teams with high-altitude training and weeks of logistical preparation.

The Sherpa community's position on removal is specific. A Sherpa leader quoted in 2020 said: 'We have to bring them back as much as possible. If we keep leaving them behind, our mountains will turn into a graveyard.' The objection is not to the goal. It is to the distribution of risk. Sherpas already die at roughly 1.6 times the rate of foreign climbers on Everest. A body removal operation asks them to accept that risk again, for a body they did not put there, at a cost they did not create.

Elia Saikaly, the adventure filmmaker, wrote from Camp IV during his 2019 summit push: 'I cannot believe what I saw up there. Death. Carnage. Chaos. Lineups. Dead bodies on the route and in tents.' He described a specific body lying across the fixed ropes on the ascent line, which every climber heading for the summit had to step over. 'Is this what Everest has become?'

Dr. Peter Lowry, a radiologist from Colorado who summited that same year, had mentally prepared for the bodies he knew he would encounter, the old ones fixed in the landscape for years or decades. He told the Colorado Sun he had not prepared for someone who had died within the previous twenty-four hours. The proximity in time, not just in space, was hardest to process. 'I'm not sure I'm done processing that,' he said, weeks after returning home. An Australian climber, Jen Willis, encountered a body lying directly across the fixed ropes in 2023, the lines every climber clips to for safety, and had to route around the deceased. 'There's no way in Australia that I would walk past someone that was very unwell or deceased and continue my journey,' she said.

These accounts do not resolve the ethical question. They locate it more precisely. The question is not whether the bodies should come down. Nepal's government, the Sherpa community, and most of the climbing world agree that they should. The question is under what conditions, at whose cost, at whose risk, and whether each removal operation can be conducted without adding to the count it is trying to reduce.

Dorje Morup's family will have an answer in October 2026, when the recovery mission delivers him home. It took thirty years and a DNA test to give him his correct name. Getting him off the mountain required a government decision and a budget of $75,000. For the families of most of the other two hundred, neither has happened yet.

Frequently asked questions

How many bodies are on Mount Everest?

Approximately 200 bodies remain on the mountain, out of roughly 300 total deaths since the first serious attempts in the 1920s. Wikipedia's death list documents 346 deaths, though the figure is contested. No exact count of remaining bodies is possible: some are buried under ice or snow, some fell into crevasses, and new bodies emerge periodically as glaciers move and retreat.

Why can't bodies be removed from Mount Everest?

Above 8,000 metres, helicopters cannot operate reliably and extended time at that altitude is dangerous for rescuers. Removing a single body costs $75,000 to $80,000 and requires a team working across four days of technical high-altitude descent. The risk is documented: two Sherpa police officers died in 1984 attempting to retrieve one body from below the death zone.

How much does it cost to remove a body from Mount Everest?

Around $75,000 to $80,000 for a single body from the death zone. A full government-funded operation covering multiple bodies and high-camp waste exceeded $600,000 in 2024. Nepal's government has funded several retrieval missions, with the most significant recent operation in 2024.

Who is Green Boots on Mount Everest?

Green Boots was the nickname for a body in a limestone alcove at 8,500 metres on the north face, believed to be Tsewang Paljor for thirty years. DNA testing confirmed in June 2026 that the body is Dorje Morup, a different member of the same 1996 Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition. An Indian government recovery mission is planned for October 2026.

Are melting glaciers revealing more bodies on Everest?

Yes. As Everest's glaciers retreat due to warming temperatures, bodies buried in ice are emerging at lower elevations. Researchers and cleanup teams have documented an increase in remains appearing along the Khumbu Glacier and other sections of the mountain. The trend is expected to continue as temperatures rise.