Trek Guide
The Khumbu Icefall is the most lethal stretch of the Everest climb — a moving glacier of collapsing seracs. Here is what makes it deadly, the…
By Dawa Sherpa · Aug 28, 2026
I have walked to the foot of the Khumbu Icefall more times than I can count, and I have never once stepped onto it. That is not caution. That is the whole point. The Icefall is the single most dangerous piece of ground on the standard route up Everest, and…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
People ask whether Everest is dangerous as if the whole mountain were one thing. It is not. The risk is concentrated in specific zones, and the deadliest of them sits surprisingly low. Here is the climb ranked by where the danger actually lives. Notice the…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
The Icefall is not a cliff of ice you climb once. It is a river of ice, frozen mid-collapse. The Khumbu Glacier pours off the Western Cwm and breaks over a steep step in the valley, shattering into a chaos of house-sized blocks called seracs, split by…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
At around 6:45 in the morning on 18 April 2014, a serac broke off a hanging glacier on Everest's western shoulder and swept down through a section of the Icefall while Sherpa teams were ferrying loads for the season's commercial expeditions. Sixteen Nepali…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
The one time in living memory that Base Camp — the place trekkers actually reach — became the deadliest ground on the mountain was not caused by trekking at all. On 25 April 2015 a magnitude 7.8 earthquake, the strongest in the region in over 80 years, shook…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
The path through the Khumbu Icefall does not exist until people make it. Each spring a specialist team known as the Icefall Doctors, working under the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, goes ahead of every expedition to find and fix a line through the…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
Here is the part that surprises people: Everest overall is far less deadly than it used to be, and yet the Icefall's danger has barely changed. The reason is simple. Most of what has made the mountain safer — fixed ropes on the standard route, far better…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
Not really — and the industry's attempts to work around it tell you how intractable it is. After 2014, some expedition operators began using helicopters to ferry loads over the lower Icefall from Base Camp up to Camp I or Camp II, so that Sherpa teams would…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
Through the end of 2025, the Himalayan Database records 339 deaths on Everest since record-keeping began in 1921. That number sounds enormous, and each name in it is real. But a toll is not a rate, and confusing the two is the most common mistake people make…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
This is the sentence I want every prospective traveller to hold onto: you never climb Everest with us, and you never enter the Khumbu Icefall — you safely trek to Base Camp, stand at 5,364 metres at the foot of the ice, and walk back down. Base Camp is not…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
If the mountain's risks interest you, we have written honestly about them elsewhere. For the physiology of why the summit zone is lethal, see Why Do People Die on Everest? The Death Zone Explained . For why K2 is statistically far deadlier than Everest…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
This ground still takes people. One of the five climbers who died on Everest in 2026 was lost between Base Camp and Camp 1 on an acclimatisation rotation, and another higher up on the Lhotse Face. No. The Everest Base Camp trek ends at Base Camp (5,364 m)…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
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