The Body on Everest That Climbers Used as a Landmark for 30 Years Finally Has a Name

For thirty years, climbers on Everest's north side stepped past a pair of green mountaineering boots sticking out of a limestone alcove at 8,500m, just below the First Step, and kept walking. Everyone called him Green Boots. Almost nobody knew his name. In 2026, DNA testing by India's Indo-Tibetan Border Police finally gave it back to him: Lance Naik Dorje Morup, a 26-year-old ITBP soldier who died in one of the deadliest storms in Everest's history — and who is now, at last, being brought home.

Morup was one of three Indo-Tibetan Border Police climbers — alongside Subedar Tsewang Smanla and Head Constable Tsewang Paljor — who reached the summit from the north side at around 3:45pm on May 10, 1996, already dangerously late in the day. A blizzard closed in on the descent. None of the three ever radioed their high camp again, and none made it back to 8,300m. The same storm, hitting the south side of the mountain that same night, killed guides Rob Hall and Scott Fischer and three of their clients — the disaster later told in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. Eight people died on Everest in that single storm; three of them were Morup's team, and only his body stayed visible.

Thirty years as a waypoint

British filmmaker Matt Dickinson filmed the body for his documentary Summit Fever the same year Morup died, and from then on, guides used the green Koflach boots as an unofficial altitude marker on the North Ridge route — climbers reported passing him roughly 90 minutes below the summit. In 2006, a British climber named David Sharp collapsed and died in the same cave while dozens of summit-bound climbers passed him, a tragedy that reignited a global argument about triage above 8,000m that has never really settled. In 2014, a Chinese expedition quietly moved the body to a less visible spot nearby, but it was never brought down — recovery above 8,000m is its own separate, extremely dangerous undertaking, not a simple side errand for a passing team.

Why bringing him down needs Nepal

The recovery itself is where this story becomes ours as much as India's. ITBP's 2026 tender calls the mission a Phase II retrieval operation and specifies that the winning contractor must field at least six Sherpas experienced in technical work above 8,000m, secure Chinese permission to operate on the Tibet side, and route the remains south through Nepal for onward transport to Delhi by October. Everest's north side has no equivalent of the Khumbu's guiding infrastructure — every serious high-altitude recovery on that mountain still runs, in practice, through Nepali mountaineering expertise, whichever flag is on the summit permit. It is the same expertise that guides roughly 100,000 trekkers a year up the south-side trail to Everest Base Camp, a route that never goes near the death zone Morup's body has marked since 1996. We covered the team that does the mountain's other invisible high-altitude work in our piece on the Icefall Doctors — the same culture of technical mountain craft is what this recovery leans on.

Source: CBS News

Cover photo: Martin Chan via Pexels (Pexels License).