That is the path that British climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine used in 1924 during what may, in fact, have been the first ascent. Some climbers opt for the northern ridge, which is known for having harsher winds and colder temperatures. It is from the South Col that most expeditions launch their final assault on the summit, following a route up the southeastern ridge. Climbing up the Lhotse face leads to the South Col, the low point in the ridge that connects Everest to Lhotse. Next, climbers reach a bowl-shaped valley-a cirque-called the Western Cwm (pronounced coom) and then the foot of the Lhotse Face, a 1,125-meter (3,691-foot) wall of ice. It is the one that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay followed in May 1953 when they became the first climbers to reach the summit and return safely.Ĭlimbers who follow this route begin by trekking past Khumbu glacier and through the Khumbu ice fall, an extremely dangerous area where ice tumbles off the mountain into a chaotic waterfall of ice towers and crevasses. The southeastern ridge is the most widely used climbing route. Meanwhile, glaciers have chiseled Mount Everest’s summit into a huge, triangular pyramid, defined by three faces and three ridges that extend to the northeast, southeast, and northwest.
Rather, they are perched on softer sedimentary rock formed by the skeletons of creatures that lived in a warm ocean off the northern coast of India tens of millions of years ago. In other words, when climbers reach the top of Mount Everest, they are not standing on hard igneous rock produced by volcanoes. If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence this is the one I would choose.” This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the Earth. Pulitzer-winning journalist John McPhee summed up the wonder of the mountain’s history when he wrote Annals of the Former World: “The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone. The edges of two continents jammed together and pushed up the massive ridges that make up the Himalayas today. The Nepalese name for the mountain is Sagarmatha: “mother of the universe.”Įverest’s geological story began 40 million years ago when the Indian subcontinent began a slow-motion collision with Asia. The tallest of these “eight-thousanders” is Mount Everest, the standard to which all other mountains are compared.
Fourteen mountain peaks on Earth stand taller than 8,000 meters (26,247 feet).
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