Nepal Is Rebuilding the Exact Route Hillary Used in 1953 to Bypass Everest's Deadliest Section

Every climbing season since 1953, everyone heading for the summit of Mount Everest from the Nepal side has walked into the same 700-metre stretch of moving glacier ice above Base Camp: the Khumbu Icefall. It shifts, it groans, and every spring Nepal's Icefall Doctors rebuild its ladders and ropes from scratch because the ice underneath has already moved since the year before. For the first time in 73 years, that is about to change.

Nepal's Department of Tourism has thrown its official backing behind a project to reopen the very route Hillary and Tenzing used on their first ascent could reach it soon after the icefall proved, on balance, easier to patch each spring than to blast permanent rock infrastructure. Seventy-three years and thousands of icefall crossings later, Nepal is reconsidering that trade-off.

The project has been led for years by Marc Batard, the French alpinist who set an unassisted Everest speed-ascent record in 1988, working with Nepali partner Kaji Sherpa and a small French-Nepali team. Rather than fixing ladders across ice that keeps moving, they are bolting permanent steel steps and fixed rope directly into rock on the shoulder of Nuptse, crossing a point Batard has named Sundar Peak (5,880m) before dropping into the Western Cwm to rejoin the standard route at Camp 1. Himal Gautam, director of Nepal's Department of Tourism, told reporters the new line is meant to be much safer and more reliable than the icefall crossing it bypasses.

The icefall was never optional. For decades, a small team known as the Icefall Doctors funded by the expedition operators themselves has spent every early spring rebuilding ladders lashed together with rope, because the crossing built the previous year has already shifted, sagged or collapsed. It is recalculated from scratch each season, since the glacier underneath is flowing downhill at up to a metre a day in places. A permanent rock route does not have that problem, which is exactly why Batard's team chose to drill into stone instead.

The reason this matters goes well beyond convenience. The Khumbu Icefall is the deadliest short stretch of terrain on the mountain. On 18 April 2014, a collapsing serac on Everest's West Shoulder triggered an avalanche that killed 16 Nepali climbing guides inside the icefall, still the single deadliest day in Everest's history, a tragedy that led many Sherpas to boycott the rest of that season over pay and safety. Unlike summit-day risk, which a client accepts once, Sherpas cross the icefall repeatedly each season ferrying oxygen, tents and food for clients who cross it only a handful of times. A fixed, non-moving route removes exactly the hazard that killed those 16 men.

Not everyone is convinced it will replace the icefall outright. Some commercial expedition leaders have publicly worried the Nuptse line is unnecessarily exposed to rock and ice falling directly off the Nuptse face, and at least one senior Sherpa guide has said flatly he does not support using it. Nepal's government has authorised construction up to 6,100m elevation but has not mandated the new route over the traditional one, so for now the two will likely run side by side.

What this means for trekkers

Source: Alan Arnette, Everest historian and mountaineering journalist. For how the icefall itself is being monitored in the meantime, see our earlier report on drone-mapping of the Khumbu Icefall.

Cover photo: Clinton Weaver via Pexels (Pexels License).