Home/The Twelve Steps/Step 03

Everest Base Camp at blue hour: hundreds of yellow tents across the Khumbu glacier, one lit from inside with a figure sitting up in it, and a climber in an orange jacket walking between them by head torch.

Everest Base Camp

Meet the man who has to climb the other nine

Country
NepalKhumbu Valley, Nepal
Duration
12–14 daysSeason Two
Grade
Moderate 2BGet High scale
Max altitude
5,364 m17,598 ft
Daily activity
Approx 5–8 hours walking
Season
Oct–Nov, Mar–May
Skill required
Trekking fitness
Months on the plan
One monthof 24 planned

Step 03Everest Base Camp5,364 m / 17,598 ft

Altitude profile: 12 steps, 1,400 m to 8,849 m at Mount EverestA line chart of every step in order. Step 1, 12 Days of Silence, is the lowest at 1,400 m / 4,593 ft, Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. Every step is higher than the one before it, up to step 12, Mount Everest, 8,849 m / 29,032 ft. Everything above 8,000 m is the death zone, marked in red: step 11, Cho Oyu; step 12, Mount Everest. Each point is a link to that step. You are on step 3, Everest Base Camp, 5,364 m / 17,598 ft.

You have been performing a version of yourself for so long that you have lost track of which parts are load-bearing. Thin air settles it in about nine days.

What you are walking into

Lukla, then north for two weeks — Namche, Tengboche, Dingboche, Lobuche — climbing slowly enough that your blood has time to change, which is the one process on this entire list that money cannot speed up by a single day.

Base Camp is several hundred tents on a glacier that moves underneath you, below an icefall that cracks and resettles all night like something breathing in the next room. Then Kala Patthar at 5,644 m in the dark, and the sun comes over the Tibetan border and lights the top of Everest before it lights anything else on the planet. You will stand there and realise you are actually going to try this.

What it takes out of you

Somewhere around Dingboche you will run out of things to say, you will not have slept properly in a week, and there will be nobody to fix it. Good. That is the appointment you came for.

Write it down at Base Camp. All of it. Every person you burned, every year you cannot account for, every version of the story you have been telling that you know is not the true one. You are further from your own publicist than you have been since you were a teenager, and it will not be this quiet again for a long time.

The logistics

Duration
12–14 days
Skill required
Trekking fitness
Season
Oct–Nov, Mar–May

The trek profile

Left, elevation only: no horizontal axis, so its width means nothing. Right, air: bar length is the one thing here that does.

Trek profile: Lukla at 2,840 m to Everest Base Camp at 5,364 m, 2,524 metres of verticalA vertical elevation chart with no horizontal axis. The scale runs from 2,000 m at the foot to 6,000 m at the top. Lukla is marked at 2,840 m and Everest Base Camp at 5,364 m, a difference of 2,524 metres. No intermediate camps are sourced for this one. The elevation part of the chart has no horizontal axis because the horizontal distance is published only as 65 km Lukla to base camp, one way, which is stated as a figure but is not used to position anything. Its width carries no meaning. Cumulative ascent over the route is not sourced and is not shown. To the right, a bar hangs off each of those elevations and its length is that altitude's share of the air at sea level, which a dashed bar across the full track marks as 100%: Lukla 72%; Everest Base Camp 53%. The bars shorten as the elevation rises.
Start
Lukla, 2,840 msource
Finish
Everest Base Camp, 5,364 msource
Vertical, start to finish
2,524 mthe difference of the two elevations above, nothing more
Horizontal distance
65 kmLukla to base camp, one way · source
Cumulative ascent
Not yet sourcedThe up-and-down of the whole route, which is more than the vertical above. Nobody publishes it for any of the twelve.

Lukla is quoted at 2,840 m, 2,846 m and 2,850 m by different sources. The same page that gives the 65 km also gives a 2,524 m “total height gained”, which is 5,364 minus 2,840 exactly — the difference relabelled, not cumulative ascent, so it is not recorded as such.

The highest point is Everest Base Camp, 5,364 m, where the air is 53% of what it is at sea level. Everything you carry gets there. The air does not.

The part we will not lie about

Thousands of ordinary people reach Base Camp every season — it is by a distance the most achievable thing on this list. It is also where plenty of people find out they wanted the story rather than the mountain. Finding that out here costs a fortnight. Finding it out on step eleven costs considerably more.

From inside a tent at dusk: a half-open zip, boots and a sleeping bag along the bottom edge, a glacier and one lit tent beyond.
The glacier moves under the tent all night. This is where you write it down.

Who you do it with

This is where you write the whole thing down, on a glacier that moves under the tent. Nobody to hand it to, no publicist to take a pass at it first. A dai is the person you can say it out loud to and still be spoken to normally at breakfast.

What the word means, and where it came from

$2,400,000 at the plan's pace — $100,000 a month, charged monthly, for as long as it takes. All twelve steps. One client at a time.

Request a call
A white helicopter flying above a grey glacial moraine, a crevassed icefall and a dark summit pyramid behind it.
Over the moraine, below the icefall and the dark summit at the head of the valley.
The Khumbu Icefall at dawn, empty of people, its seracs and crevasses tumbling from the Western Cwm under a thin band of sunrise on the ridge above.
A tent zip frozen shut under hoar frost, a plain carabiner and a knotted guy line clipped alongside it on yellow nylon.

All twelve steps

Request a call