Photo 23 - Everest Mount ( 8848 m )
Photo 23 - Everest Mount ( 8848 m )
Night still lingers. The sunrise over Everest must be earned. A few headlamps sway along the path from the lodge at Gorak Shep. The ascent, modest in elevation (+300 m), feels long and steep, and the heart races despite over a week of gradual acclimatization.
At the small summit of Kala Pattar, 5,600 m under Pumori (7,161 m), the view is striking, almost hypnotic. Just 2 km away, the highest peak on Earth rises to 8,848 m: a proud, powerful black rock, known as “Everest,” “Chomolungma” in Nepali, or “Sagarmāthā” in Chinese. Long coveted by humankind, it was finally reached on a round trip by Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary on May 29, 1953.