Everest's Most Famous Rock Wall Vanished in an Earthquake. Nepal Spent Years Saying It Hadn't.

In May 2017, a British mountain guide named Tim Mosedale climbed past the last real obstacle before Everest's summit and posted a photograph that Nepal's government did not want him to post. It's official, he wrote: the Hillary Step is no more. Nepali officials called it a false rumour. The argument that followed ran for years — and the ridge it happened on is back in the news in 2026, for a different reason.

The wall that made Hillary famous

Ask a mountaineer what stood between Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and the first summit of Everest in 1953, and most will name the Hillary Step before anything else. It was a near-vertical band of rock and ice roughly 12 metres tall, wedged into the ridge at about 8,790m, the last real technical move before the final snow slope to the top. Hillary forced a route up its side; every successful summit for the next six decades followed his line. It became Everest's most photographed 12 metres: a single-file rock climb in a down suit, at an altitude where the body is slowly dying, with a queue of oxygen-starved strangers waiting behind you.

Then, in April 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake tore through Nepal, killed close to 9,000 people, and triggered an avalanche at Everest Base Camp that killed 19 climbers in a single morning, the deadliest day in the mountain's history at that point. The entire climbing season was cancelled. Nobody stood on the Hillary Step again until 2017.

Before and after — and a government that said not to look

When climbers did return, several reported the Step had changed beyond recognition. Mosedale's post triggered the first public argument in May 2017. Days later, American guide Garrett Madison released a side-by-side comparison, the same rock face shot in 2011 and again in 2017, showing a large boulder simply missing from the upper wall. Veteran guide Dave Hahn called the evidence conclusive. Nepal's tourism officials disagreed, telling CNN the Step was intact and the reports were a false rumour.

The disagreement was never fully settled; it went quiet instead. By May 2018, the Kathmandu Post was still reporting that officials maintained the Step was fine while mountaineers who had climbed it kept saying otherwise — and that the Department of Tourism had told expedition guides they needed government approval before discussing the subject publicly at all. Whatever the bureaucratic reasoning, telling climbers not to talk about the condition of a rock face did more to confirm something had happened than any photograph could.

What isn't in dispute is that the terrain changed. Climbers today describe a 45-to-60-degree slope of snow and ice where the technical rock move used to be; some guides now call it the Hillary Slope rather than the Step. It isn't necessarily easier. On May 21, 2024, an ice cornice collapsed under a queue of climbers in that same stretch of ridge, at around 28,839 feet. Six people were caught; two, a Briton and a Nepali climber, fell to their deaths down the Kangshung Face. The danger simply moved from a single hard move to a longer, more exposed traverse.

None of this touches the trek most travellers actually book. Trekkers on the Everest Base Camp trek stop at 5,364m, more than 3,400 vertical metres below the Hillary Step, and never go near the summit ridge. But the mountain above base camp isn't a static backdrop; it changes, sometimes catastrophically, and the argument over whether it changed is as much a story about Nepal's tourism politics as it is about geology. For a closer, permit-free view of that same skyline, climbs like Island Peak and Ama Dablam Base Camp put you on real ridgeline above 6,000m, looking straight across at the ridge Hillary and Mosedale both stood on, seventy years apart.

Source: CNN — Everest's historic Hillary Step still intact: Officials; additional reporting from The Kathmandu Post.

Cover photo: Debasish biswas kolkata Derivative work MagentaGreen via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).