Everest Base Camp

Everest Base Camp sits at 5,364 m on the Khumbu Glacier, at the foot of the world's highest mountain — 8,849 m by the 2020 joint Nepal-China survey, still commonly cited at the older 8,848 m in older material. It is the trek that everything else in this series gets compared to, and it earns the comparison: roughly 30,000 to 50,000 people a year make the walk from Lukla, following almost the exact route Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay used in the spring of 1953, when their expedition became the first to stand on the summit. What most first-time trekkers don't know going in is that Base Camp itself, for all its fame, offers no direct view of the mountain it's named for — Nuptse and the wall of the Khumbu Icefall block the summit completely, and the actual view everyone has seen in photographs comes from Kala Patthar, a separate viewpoint above the tiny outpost of Gorak Shep, climbed on a different day. The trail runs entirely inside Sagarmatha National Park — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979 — through Sherpa villages, dense pine and rhododendron forest give way to alpine scrub and then bare rock and moraine, past the region's largest monastery at Tengboche and its unofficial capital, Namche Bazaar, whose Saturday market has run as a Tibet-Nepal trading post for centuries, long before a single trekker walked through. The route reaches no altitude requiring technical climbing, but it reaches serious altitude all the same — Kala Patthar tops out around 5,545 m, higher than Kilimanjaro's summit — and the trek's real risk is not the trail underfoot but the air overhead: acute mountain sickness accounts for nearly every serious incident reported on this route, almost always the result of ascending faster than the body can adapt. Managed with proper acclimatisation, it's a walk completed successfully by trekkers from age twelve to their seventies. Managed carelessly, on a compressed schedule with the acclimatisation days cut to save time, it's the single most common reason trekkers turn back — or worse — short of their goal.