The Everest Base Camp trek itinerary, day by day

Start Kathmandu. Sleep Phakding. Sleeping altitude 2,610 m (8,563 ft). Published at 7.5 to 8 km and 3 to 4 hours on foot.1 Net drop from the airstrip at Lukla, 250 m (820 ft).

The day starts in the dark. In the busy months the Lukla flights do not leave from Kathmandu (1,400 m (4,593 ft)) at all. They leave from Ramechhap, a road drive east of the city, and our own product pages publish that drive at four different distances between 130 and 145 kilometers and at 4 to 6 hours.1 The flight that follows is published at 18 minutes, at 20 minutes, at 20 to 25 minutes and at 30 to 35 minutes.1 All four are short. The waiting is the long part, and the page about the flight to Lukla is where that whole problem lives.

You land at Lukla, 2,860 m (9,383 ft). You will not feel the height. The first walk is a net descent, following the Dudh Koshi downstream to Phakding, 2,610 m (8,563 ft). You finish the day lower than you landed.

This surprises people who expected the Everest trek to begin by going up. It is a gift. Your body gets an easy first night at a height it can handle, and the walking is three or four hours of river path, prayer wheels and suspension bridges. What the lodge you sleep in is actually like is on the page about tea houses on this route.

Start Phakding. Sleep Namche Bazaar. Sleeping altitude 3,440 m (11,286 ft). Published at 10 to 12 km and 5 to 8 hours on foot.1 Net climb from Phakding, 830 m (2,723 ft).

Six of our products publish this day, and between them they publish the walking time as 5 hours, as 6, as 7 and as 8.1 That three hour spread is not sloppiness. It is the truth about this day. It is the day that sorts a group out, and two people who leave the same lodge at the same time can arrive two hours apart.

The morning is easy. You cross and recross the river on suspension bridges. At Monjo you enter Sagarmatha National Park and your permits are checked at the gate. Then comes the Hillary Suspension Bridge, high above the river, and on the far side the climb starts and does not stop. It is a long, steady uphill with no flat in it.

Namche Bazaar, 3,440 m (11,286 ft), is built into a horseshoe bowl facing the mountains. It has bakeries and gear shops and it is the last place on the route that can sell you what you forgot. It is also higher than most people arriving have ever slept, and that is why the next day exists. This is one of the three hardest days on the route, and the other two are named on the page about how hard this trek really is.

Start Namche Bazaar. Sleep Namche Bazaar. Sleeping altitude 3,440 m (11,286 ft). Published at 3 to 5 km and 3 to 5 hours on foot.1 You sleep at the height you slept at last night.

You do not leave Namche. You come back to the same bed. That is the entire point, and it is explained properly in the section on the two acclimatization days below.

The walk is a loop above the town to the Everest View Hotel, published at 3 to 5 kilometers and 3 to 5 hours for the round trip.1 The hotel is a building on a ridge with a terrace, and the terrace is where most people get their first long look at Everest and at Ama Dablam. Groups order a pot of tea and sit there for an hour. It is worth the money and it is worth the time.

The hotel’s own elevation is published at 3 different heights, from 3,880 m (12,730 ft) to 3,962 m (12,999 ft) across the itineraries we reconciled, so we do not state one figure for it. Every published value, with its source, is on the elevation page.

Many groups come back through Khumjung, 3,790 m (12,434 ft), a Sherpa village of green roofs in a high side valley, and then drop to Namche for the night. Up in the morning, down in the afternoon, sleep at the height you slept at last night. That is the whole method.

Start Namche Bazaar. Sleep Tengboche. Sleeping altitude 3,860 m (12,664 ft). Published at 9 to 12 km and 4 to 6 hours on foot.1 Net climb from Namche Bazaar, 420 m (1,378 ft).

The net climb on this day is modest and the profile lies about it. You start on a high traverse with Ama Dablam in front of you, then the trail throws that height away and drops hard to the Dudh Koshi. The climb to Tengboche starts at the bridge, and all of the day’s gain happens in it, at the point where you are already tired.

Tengboche, 3,860 m (12,664 ft), sits on a saddle with the mountains arranged around it. The monastery here is the religious center of the Khumbu and the home of the Mani Rimdu festival, which falls in the autumn and is covered on the page about when to go.

If you get in before the late afternoon you can sit in on the prayers. Take your boots off at the door, sit at the back, keep your camera down. Nobody will ask you to leave and nobody will explain anything to you either. This is the one afternoon on the trek where the right thing to do is stop planning and sit in a cold room listening to horns and drums until it gets dark.

Start Tengboche. Sleep Dingboche. Sleeping altitude 4,410 m (14,469 ft). Published at 11 to 12 km and 4 to 6 hours on foot.1 Net climb from Tengboche, 550 m (1,804 ft).

This is the day the landscape changes. You walk down through forest to Deboche, follow the river past Pangboche, and somewhere above it the trees stop for good. That boundary has a name, the treeline, and crossing it is the clearest signal on the whole route that you are now somewhere else. Nothing taller than your knee grows from here to base camp.

Dingboche, 4,410 m (14,469 ft), is a scatter of lodges among stone walled fields in a side valley. It looks down the Imja valley in one direction and at the back of Ama Dablam in the other, which is a different mountain from this side.

Most people notice the air properly for the first time here. Not dramatically. You stand up too fast and have to wait a second. You walk across the yard and are slightly out of breath. That is ordinary, and it is exactly why the next day is what it is.

Start Dingboche. Sleep Dingboche. Sleeping altitude 4,410 m (14,469 ft). Published at 4 to 6 km and 2 to 5 hours on foot.1 You sleep at the height you slept at last night.

The second acclimatization day, and the same method as the first. The objective is Nangkartshang, the ridge directly above the village, published at 4 to 6 kilometers and 2 to 5 hours for the round trip.1 You will also see it written as Nagarjun Hill and as Nagarjuna. Our own itineraries treat the three names as one place.

A three hour spread on a walk of four to six kilometers tells you what this hike is. It is steep from the first step, at a height where nothing is easy, and people finish it at very different speeds. Its summit elevation is published at 2 different heights, from 5,000 m (16,404 ft) to 5,100 m (16,732 ft), so again we do not state one.

Then you come down and sleep in Dingboche, in the same bed, several hundred meters below the high point of your day. If your route stages through Pheriche instead, the Himalayan Rescue Association runs a free altitude talk at its aid post, Daily at 3:00 pm at its aid posts during the trekking season2. Go to it. It is the best hour you will spend on this trek.

Start Dingboche. Sleep Lobuche. Sleeping altitude 4,910 m (16,109 ft). Published at 8 to 12 km and 5 to 6 hours on foot.1 Net climb from Dingboche, 500 m (1,640 ft).

A gentle start along the valley shoulder, then lunch at Dughla below the moraine, then the part everyone remembers. Moraine is the rubble a glacier leaves behind, and the trail goes straight up the wall of it. It is short, steep and loose, and it is the hardest hour of the trek so far.

At the top of that wall, on the crest, is Chukpo Lari. Rows of stone memorials to people who died on Everest, strung with prayer flags, facing the mountain. Guides, climbers and Sherpas, some of them known to the whole world and most of them known only to the families who built the stones. Groups that have been noisy for a week go quiet on this crest and stay quiet for a while afterward. Your guide will slow down here, and you should let him.

The rest of the day is a cold walk along the edge of the Khumbu Glacier to Lobuche, 4,910 m (16,109 ft). There is no village here. There is a row of buildings that exist because trekkers and climbers have to sleep somewhere.

Start Lobuche. Sleep Gorak Shep. Published at 12, 14 and 15 km and 7, 8 and 9 hours on foot.1

The day you came for, and the longest one on the route. Our itineraries publish the whole of it as 12 kilometers, as 14 and as 15, and as 7 hours, as 8 and as 9.1 We print all three of each rather than an average, because an average of three figures nobody measured is still a figure nobody measured.

It comes in two halves. Lobuche to Gorak Shep is 3 to 4 hours along the lateral moraine of the Khumbu Glacier,1 which is uneven, grey and slower than it looks. You drop your bag at the lodge, eat something, and go out again for another 3 to 4 hours to Everest Base Camp and back.1

Everest Base Camp itself is 5,364 m (17,598 ft). It is the one elevation on this whole route that every source we checked agrees on, which is why it is the one number this site states flatly. In the spring climbing season it is a town of tents. Outside it, it is rock, prayer flags and a great deal of space.

Base camp is not where you see Everest. The mountain is hidden from the ground here. What is in front of you is the Khumbu Icefall, the broken blue staircase the climbers go up in the dark. Tomorrow morning is when you actually see Everest.

You sleep at Gorak Shep, which is published at 4 different heights, from 5,140 m (16,864 ft) to 5,180 m (16,995 ft). Our sources cannot agree on one figure for the last place with beds before base camp, so we state none of them and show the whole range on the elevation page. It is the highest and, honestly, the worst night of the trek. Cold, thin, and nobody sleeps well.

Start Gorak Shep. Sleep Pheriche. Published at 13 to 14 km and 2 to 3, then 5 to 8 hours on foot.1

You get up in the dark and climb the brown hill above the lodges. Kala Patthar is 5,545 m (18,192 ft), and the ascent is published at 2 to 3 hours.1 It is not technical. It is steep, freezing and very high, and for most people it is the hardest two hours of the whole trek.

This is the payoff. From up there Everest is in front of you with nothing in the way, and the light comes onto it while you stand and shake. Almost every Everest photograph you have seen from this side of the mountain was taken from this hill. There is a full page on what Kala Patthar is and why it works, including the two places that share the name.

Then you turn around and go down all day. The day is published at 13 to 14 kilometers, and the descent from the high point to Pheriche at 5 to 8 hours.1 Going down is the treatment for everything altitude has been doing to you, and you will feel better with every hour of it.

You sleep at Pheriche, published at 2 different heights, from 4,240 m (13,911 ft) to 4,371 m (14,341 ft). The Himalayan Rescue Association aid post there sits at 4,250 m (13,944 ft) and has been running since 19732. A lot of people sleep properly here for the first time in a week.

Start Pheriche. Sleep Namche Bazaar. Sleeping altitude 3,440 m (11,286 ft). Published at 14 to 18 km and 6 to 8 hours on foot.1

A long day that undoes three days of climbing. You retrace the valley past Pangboche and Deboche, cross the Dudh Koshi, make the last climb of the whole trek back up to Tengboche, and then traverse to Namche Bazaar, 3,440 m (11,286 ft).

Two things happen on this day. The trees come back, and so does your appetite. People who have been picking at food for a week eat two dinners in Namche. The air feels thick and wet and wonderful, and you will notice that you are walking faster than you have all trip without trying.

Start Namche Bazaar. Sleep Lukla. Sleeping altitude 2,860 m (9,383 ft). Published at 18 to 20 km and 7 to 9 hours on foot.1 Net drop from Namche Bazaar, 580 m (1,903 ft).

The longest single trail day on the standard itinerary, published at 18 to 20 kilometers and 7 to 9 hours.1 It is a net descent and it still hurts, because your legs have been walking for ten days and the hill below Namche is a long way down onto knees that know it.

You cross the Hillary Suspension Bridge again, pass back through the park gate at Monjo, and walk the river path you started on, this time in the other direction and with nothing left to be nervous about. Lukla is 2,860 m (9,383 ft).

The last night is in Lukla, and it is usually loud. This is the evening where the group, the guides and the porters eat together and the trip stops being a schedule.

The walk ends at Lukla. What happens next is a flight back to Kathmandu or to Ramechhap, and it is the part of the trip nobody can schedule with confidence, because the Lukla airstrip closes for weather without notice. That is not a footnote. It is the reason a serious itinerary carries a spare day, and it is covered properly on the Lukla flight page.

Then a night in Kathmandu, 1,400 m (4,593 ft), a hot shower you will remember for years, and a departure day. Add those to the 11 trail days and you have the 15 days our classic trek is published at.