Where Is Everest Base Camp?

Nepal is a country in Asia. Its northern border runs along the Himalaya and separates it from Tibet, which is part of China. Mount Everest stands on that border. Base camp is on the Nepal side of it.

Working from the outside in, the full address has five layers. The country is Nepal. The province is Koshi Province. The district is Solukhumbu. The local government is Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality, whose office is at Chaurikharka in Solukhumbu 2. And the land itself is Sagarmatha National Park.

Nothing in that list is a town. Base camp is not a settlement and it has no postal address. The walk that joins Kathmandu to it is the walk to Everest Base Camp.

Khumbu is the name of the high country in the upper half of Solukhumbu district. The district name is two regions joined together. Solu is the lower country, with roads and farms and the administrative center of the Solu region at Salleri. Khumbu is everything above it. Almost every sentence written about this trek happens in the Khumbu.

The villages along the trail are Sherpa villages. Sherpa is the name of a people, not a job title. Kunde Hospital, above Namche Bazaar, was built at the request of the Sherpa community and is staffed by Sherpa doctors and nurses, which tells you something about who actually runs this valley.

Namche Bazaar at 3,440 m (11,286 ft) is the hub 4. It has the market, the lodges and the shops, and it is where almost every trek through this region stops for its first acclimatization day. Khumjung at 3,790 m (12,434 ft) sits on the shelf above it. Tengboche at 3,860 m (12,664 ft) holds the largest monastery in the Khumbu. Above Tengboche the trees stop, the villages get smaller and further apart, and the walking gets slower.

Sagarmatha is the Nepali name for Mount Everest, so the park is named after the mountain at the top of it. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site, which means an international body has listed it as worth protecting and Nepal has agreed to protect it.

For a trekker that protection is not an abstraction. It shows up four times on your trip.

You need a permit to walk in, and it gets checked. The park gate is at Monjo, which most people reach on their second day of walking. You do not slip past it. The park is run by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, a government department, not by any trekking company 3. What the permits cost and where you buy each one is on the page about the permits and fees for the Khumbu.

There is no road inside it. Everything above the gate moves on foot, on the backs of animals, or by air. That is the single biggest reason this trip takes as long as it does.

What you carry in, you carry out. There is no municipal garbage collection that high up. The lodges and the expeditions that work up there operate under park and municipality rules about waste and fuel, and your guide will tell you what applies on your route.

The boundary is a real line. It is not a label on a map. It has a gate on it, staff behind the gate, and a record of who went through.

A glacier is a river of ice. It looks still. It is not. The Khumbu Glacier comes down from the Khumbu Icefall at the head of the valley and runs south past Gorak Shep, the last settlement before base camp. Everest Base Camp is a patch of ground on that glacier.

The last couple of hours of the walk are on the moraine of the Khumbu Glacier. Moraine means the loose rock the ice carries along and piles up at its edges. So you are walking on rock, and under the rock there is ice, and the ice is moving. It cracks and settles under you while you walk on it. It is the strangest surface on the whole trek.

This is why base camp is not a fixed address. There is no building. There is no permanent marker set in concrete. It is a stretch of glacier that climbing expeditions set up on in spring and take down again afterwards, and the ice it sits on is not the same ice from one year to the next. The height we publish for it is 5,364 m (17,598 ft) 4, and that figure is the one number in this whole subject that every source we checked agrees on. The full set of heights for the route is on the page about the elevation of Everest Base Camp.

A lot of people search for the coordinates of Everest Base Camp. We are not going to print a pair, and we would rather tell you why than quietly copy one from somewhere else.

The first reason is our own rule. We publish figures we can trace back to the body that issued them, and we have not checked a latitude and longitude for base camp against a survey authority. Every number on this site is either sourced or absent.

The second reason is the glacier. A coordinate carried to five decimal places says the spot is fixed, and that you could go back and stand on it again in ten years. Base camp is on moving ice. The precision would be real and the meaning would not.

What is fixed is the address in the section above and the route in the section below. Between them they will get you there.

Mount Everest sits on a border, so it has a base camp on each side. They are two different places, in two different countries, reached two different ways. People book the wrong one.

The south base camp is in Nepal, at 5,364 m (17,598 ft), inside Sagarmatha National Park. You reach it on foot, walking up the valley from Lukla. It is the one this whole site is about, and the one we guide.

The north base camp is in Tibet, inside China. It is reached by road, on a different set of permits, from a different capital city. It is a different holiday with a different shape, and we do not run it. If somebody has offered you a vehicle ride to Everest Base Camp, they are either talking about the north side or they are wrong.

The longer version of that difference, and what the place actually looks like when you arrive, is on the page about what Everest Base Camp is.

Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal and the city every version of this trip starts in. It sits at 1,400 m (4,593 ft), which is low, green and warm compared with everything that follows 4. From there the journey has two halves, a flight and a walk.

First the flight. You fly east to Lukla at 2,860 m (9,383 ft), which is the airstrip the whole Khumbu runs on. The flight is short. In the busiest months it does not leave from Kathmandu at all, and you drive to another airport outside the city first. That detail, and what happens when weather cancels the flight, decides whether your trek starts on the day it is meant to, so it has a page of its own: the Kathmandu to Lukla flight.

Then the walk. Down from Lukla to Phakding at 2,610 m (8,563 ft), up through the park gate to Namche Bazaar at 3,440 m (11,286 ft), on to Tengboche at 3,860 m (12,664 ft), Dingboche at 4,410 m (14,469 ft), Lobuche at 4,910 m (16,109 ft), and finally Gorak Shep, which is the last place with beds. Base camp is a few hours beyond Gorak Shep, and you walk back to Gorak Shep to sleep. Our standard trek is 15 days from Kathmandu back to Kathmandu.

No road reaches Everest Base Camp. The versions of this trek that drive instead of flying finish their driving well below the national park, and everything above that is on your own feet.

The trail is not a line drawn across open country. It is a walk up one river, then up a second river, then onto the glacier that feeds them. Once you see that, the map stops being a jumble of village names.

The Dudh Koshi is the first. It drains the Khumbu southward, and the trail from Lukla follows it upstream. You cross it repeatedly on suspension bridges strung high above the water, including the Hillary Suspension Bridge on the climb up to Namche Bazaar. Everything below Namche is forest, farmland and bridges.

The Imja Khola is the second. You cross it below Tengboche on the way up to Pangboche and Dingboche. It comes down from the east, out of the Imja valley, which runs up to Chhukung at 4,730 m (15,518 ft) and to Island Peak beyond it 4. Most trekkers never go up that valley. It is still worth knowing it is there, because the peaks you stare at from Dingboche are standing on the far side of it.

Above Dingboche the greenery runs out. Both rivers are fed by snow and by melt from the glaciers above them, and the highest of those glaciers is the one base camp stands on.

Mount Everest is 8,848.86 m (29,032 ft), measured by a joint survey carried out by Nepal and China 1. It is the reason you came. It is also not the mountain you will look at most, and on the day you reach base camp you will not be able to see the top of it at all.

Here is the part most itineraries leave out until you are standing there. You cannot see the summit of Mount Everest from Everest Base Camp. Nuptse is in the way. From the ground at base camp that long wall hides the top of the mountain completely.

The view you have been picturing comes the next morning instead, from Kala Patthar at 5,545 m (18,192 ft), which is a shoulder on the south side of Pumori 4. You climb it in the dark, and the sun reaches Everest while you are still getting your breath back. That is where the photographs are taken, and it is covered on the page about Kala Patthar, the Everest viewpoint.

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.