Everest Base Camp Trek

The trek begins at the Tenzing-Hillary airport in Lukla, 2,840 meters, with the hum of a Twin Otter engine and a runway that tilts eleven degrees into the mountainside. From there the trail drops through pine forest to Phakding, then climbs the Dudh Koshi gorge across nine suspension bridges — the last of them, the Hillary Bridge, strung 125 meters above the river and named for the man who walked this valley in 1953.

Namche Bazaar sits in a natural amphitheater at 3,440 meters. Two nights here, with an acclimatization hike to the Everest View Hotel above Khumjung, where the summit cone appears for the first time. Above Namche the forest thins through rhododendron and juniper to Tengboche, where the largest monastery in the Khumbu stands with Ama Dablam's fluted ice face directly behind it.

Past Tengboche the treeline gives out. Dingboche at 4,410 meters is the second acclimatization stop — two nights, with a rest-day climb up Nagartsang Hill. From there the trail walks the lateral moraine of the Khumbu Glacier through Lobuche and onto Gorak Shep, a cluster of stone lodges on what feels like the far side of a weather system.

Everest Base Camp itself is reached as a day trip from Gorak Shep, a rocky walk along the glacier's edge to the prayer flags that mark the foot of the Khumbu Icefall. Kala Patthar — the highest point anyone walks on this trek at 5,545 meters — is done the next morning before sunrise, headlamps on, for the clearest close view of Everest, Lhotse, Nuptse, and Pumori the route offers.

Fourteen days. 130 kilometers. Nine suspension bridges. One mountain you already know the name of.

What's it actually like

Steep stone stairs for the first four days, loose glacial moraine for the last four, and a long stretch in the middle where the forest opens up and Ama Dablam is the only thing you look at. Gorak Shep has no heated rooms and no hot showers. Kala Patthar is a dark rock ridge you climb in the dark. The silence above 5,000 meters is a kind of silence most people have never heard.