How a number gets on this site, and what we do when we cannot check one

A number gets on this site by being a row in a file before it is ever a word in a sentence. The row holds the value, the body that published it, the date we read that source, and a status. Anything that is not a row cannot become a number on a page.

The order matters, so here it is in full. Someone finds a figure. Someone checks it against the body that actually sets it, which for a park fee is the park authority and for an elevation is a survey, never another trekking company. The row then gets its status. Only after that does a writer touch it.

When the writer does touch it, they do not type the number. They write a reference to the row, and the software looks it up while the site is being built. That is why one fee cannot read one way on the permits page and another way on the cost page. There is a single row, and both pages are quoting it.

The software refuses to print any row that is not marked verified. It does not warn and print it anyway, and it does not fall back to the raw figure. It stops the build, and the page never exists. We made it impossible to publish an unchecked number by accident, because care is not a system and a system is what survives a busy week.

The store holds 675 rows as this page is built. 317 of them are settled and may be printed. The other 358 may not, and sorting a figure into the right pile is most of the work behind this site.

Every row carries one status, and only the first of the five below lets a figure reach you. The others are all different ways of saying that somebody published a number and nobody checked it.

The table gives each status, what it means in plain words, whether a page may print it, and how many rows sit in it today. The counts move as we clear work, because they are read out of the store rather than written down here.

The file carries a few more labels for its own bookkeeping, such as a recorded alternative spelling, or a figure noted as sitting outside what this site covers. The ones above decide what you see. One further label exists only to record claims that are false, and 13 rows sit in it, so that nobody on our side can republish one by mistake.

Two small marks appear next to figures across this site, and each one tells you something about the number rather than about the mountain. They are the only symbols we use and they always mean the same thing.

A hollow circle, like the one after this phrase, we have not settled it, means the figure is unfinished. Something about it is unresolved, most often the height or the date the measurement applies to. A figure carrying a hollow circle is allowed on a page only when the sentence beside it says what is missing. The store holds 50 rows in that state.

A half circle, like this one, two authorities disagree, means exactly that. Two bodies we take seriously give different values, and we are showing you both rather than choosing quietly on your behalf. The store holds 66 rows in that state.

Both marks are explained again at the foot of every page on this site, under the date. You should not have to remember what a symbol means, and you should not have to come back here to look it up.

Two authorities disagreeing about a number means we publish both values with their sources and say which body gives which. We never split the difference. An average of two measurements is a third number that nobody measured, and it reads as more certain than either of the real ones.

Kala Patthar is the clearest example on this trek, and it is worth walking through, because the disagreement turns out not to be a disagreement. The trekking industry publishes four different heights for it. We spent a long time trying to work out which one was right before noticing that the question itself was wrong.

Two of those figures measure two different places that share one name. The viewpoint you stand on at dawn, where the photographs are taken, is 5,545 m (18,192 ft).1 The high point of the rocky ridge above it, which the standard walk does not go to, is 5,643 m (18,514 ft).2 Each number is correct about the thing it measures.

So we hold them as two rows with two sources and print them separately, each attached to its own place. Averaging them would have produced a height that describes neither, and it would have told a reader who stopped at the viewpoint that they had fallen short of something. The full account is on Kala Patthar, where you actually see Everest.

The same rule costs us a figure at Gorak Shep, the last village before base camp. We hold four published elevations for it, spread across 40 m, and no survey settles them. No second place is hiding inside that one, so the pages that need the height show the published spread and call it a spread. You are told the disagreement exists instead of being handed the middle of it.

Some numbers are missing from this site on purpose, and the largest one is temperature. We publish no temperature figure for the Everest Base Camp trek at all. Not one village, not one month, not one night.

Every temperature we can find for this route traces back to somebody’s estimate rather than to an instrument. The figures we hold came from our own parent company’s articles. Two of those articles give different ranges for the same villages. A third is arranged by month and never states the height its numbers apply to. On a route where your height changes every day, a temperature with no height attached describes nowhere.

Settling it needs a station record from a meteorological authority, or any published Khumbu record that states the altitude of its instruments. Until one of those exists, our Everest Base Camp weather page, which publishes no temperature table explains the gap instead of filling it. Every rival page on this subject has a temperature table. Ours has the reason there is not one.

Two other absences are permanent rather than temporary. There is no coordinate pair for Everest Base Camp here, because the camp sits on a moving glacier and has no fixed point, which where Everest Base Camp is and what surrounds it sets out in full. There is no oxygen percentage either, because the share of oxygen in air does not change with height. The pressure does, and how high Everest Base Camp is explains what that actually does to a person walking up into it.

The rest of the withheld set is a working list rather than a policy. Below are the five figures the store is holding back today, each with the body that can settle it. When one is settled it leaves this table by itself, because the table is read from the store.

One of those rows deserves a sentence of its own. The porter weight limit is a welfare number, and our own group has published it several different ways across its trip pages. A welfare number gets published once and correctly or it does not get published, so this site prints none of those old figures. It prints two settled figures instead, side by side. Loads of 25 to 30 kg are common on this route, which describes the market rather than what we do. Our own cap is 20 kg, and over the cap we add another porter rather than put more on one back.

Our own older marketing carried claims that were not true, and the honest place to say so is the page where we ask you to trust our numbers. These were not a competitor’s errors that we noticed. They were ours, and we found them by auditing ourselves.

The first was a review count. Our pages showed a number of customer reviews higher than the number the review platform’s own profile holds, and several individual trek pages carried counts of their own that no visible reviews supported. We will not repeat any of those figures here, because repeating a retired claim is how it survives. They are gone from every page we control.

The second was a company age. Our marketing described a length of experience as though it belonged to the business. It did not. The business was registered on 21 October 2014.5 The long career belongs to our founder, Dil Bahadur Gurung, who has guided in Nepal since 2004. A career belongs to a person and a founding date belongs to a company, and swapping the two makes a young company look old.

Three smaller claims went with them. A site wide rating badge with no denominator and no method behind it. A registration number that did not match the one filed with our trade association. A trust mark for a review platform where no profile of ours has ever existed.

All of them now sit in the fact store recorded as false, with what was published beside what the reality is. That is deliberate. A deleted claim can be typed again by somebody who remembers it. A claim recorded as false cannot reach a page at all, because the software refuses to render it and the build fails instead.

Below are eight corrections this site has made to our own group’s published record, with what was wrong and where the settled answer now sits. The store has closed seven formal verification items so far, and each one changed at least one page.

None of these arrived because a competitor complained. They came from reading our own group’s pages against the bodies that set the figures, which is an uncomfortable exercise and the only one that works.

Every row there cost us something. The permit row cost us the easy sentence about what a trek costs. The medical row cost us a line that made the route sound wilder than it is. That is the trade this whole page describes, and we think it is worth making.

Write to us through our contact page, name the page and the figure, and tell us what you believe the right answer is. You do not need to prove it. A reader saying that a number looked odd is enough to send us back to the source.

What happens next is fixed, and it is four steps. We read the source that sets the figure, not another article about it. We change the row in the fact store, not the sentence on the page. Every page quoting that row updates the next time the site is built. Then we say on the page that it changed.

That last step is the one most sites skip. A quietly edited page teaches a reader nothing and it hides the fact that the old number was ever there. Where a figure on this site has moved, the page carries a short note saying what it used to be and what settled it.

We also re-read sources on a schedule rather than waiting to be told. Fees and regulations are checked every quarter, because the bodies that set them change them. Elevations are checked once and then whenever somebody challenges one. Flight rules and seasonal conditions are checked each season. The date at the foot of each page tells you when that last happened.

These pages are published under one name, Dil Bahadur Gurung, whose role in the company is Founder and team leader. He has guided in Nepal since 2004, and he is the person accountable for what appears here.5

The operational detail, meaning anything a page says about how the trips are actually run, comes from the people who run them. These are their names and their roles, taken from the same store the figures come from.

One credential in that table is checkable rather than asserted. Arjun Gurung holds a Bachelor's in tourism, Nepal Academy of Tourism and Hotel Management, which is a named institution and a named course. We list it because a credential you cannot look up is decoration.

Our guides are not yet named as authors on individual pages, and that is on purpose. We will not put somebody’s name on a page until they have read it and agreed to carry it, and those conversations are still happening. When a guide signs off on a route or a safety page, their name goes on it, and you will be able to tell which pages they have seen and which they have not.

Nobody here reviews clinical advice. We can be exact about what we do on the mountain, the pace we set, the rest days we build in and when we turn somebody around. We are not doctors, so a page that touches medication or diagnosis either cites a clinical authority or does not make the claim.

Software drafts and assembles these pages. It does not decide what is true. No figure on this site comes out of a language model, because the only route a figure has onto a page is a row in the fact store with a source attached to it.

That is the useful half of the disclosure, and it is worth more than a promise about who typed the words. A person writing a number from memory and a machine producing one from memory make the same class of mistake, and this site blocks both the same way. If a sentence needs a figure that no settled row supports, the sentence does not get published.

Checking is separate work, and it is done against the body that issues the figure, with the date recorded. Software cannot promote a figure from claimed to settled. A page that tries to print a claimed figure fails to build. That is not a matter of discipline on our side. It is the only behavior the software has.

Where a page describes something we do on the trail, that is a human account and it is checked with the people who do it. No guide observation, no client story and no quote appears on this site unless a named person here gave it to us.

We sell guided treks. This site is run by Nepal Unique Treks and Expedition Pvt Ltd, a licensed Kathmandu operator, and we earn money when you walk the Everest Base Camp trek with us. That is a commercial interest and it points one way.

Which is exactly why the mechanism above exists. The profitable thing to publish is always the confident number: the mild temperature, the short walking day, the rule that makes hiring a guide sound compulsory. Each of those is easy to write and none of them is checkable, and a company that will invent a temperature to close a sale will invent a safety margin too.

So the offer here is narrow, and it is the only one worth making. You can check us. Every figure has a source you can open, every gap is stated rather than filled, and the errors we found in our own record are listed above rather than deleted. If that is not enough, walk the Khumbu with somebody else. We would rather be the company you trusted enough to come back to than the one that got this booking.

The date at the foot of every page on this site is 12 September 2026, and it is the day the fact store was last rebuilt. One date covers the whole site because the figures come out of one file, and that file is rebuilt whenever a row inside it changes.

It is not the date the words were written. It is the date the numbers were last reconciled with their sources, which is the more useful of the two, because prose does not go out of date at the speed a park fee does.

Beside it sit the same two sentences explaining the hollow circle and the half circle, on every page, so a mark never appears without its meaning within reach.

Every number above is listed here with the body that publishes it and the date we last read it. If a figure has changed since, write to us and we will correct the page and say that we did.