Everest Base Camp over the Kongma La, with Ama Dablam base camp

The Kongma La sits at 5,535 m (18,159 ft). The Cho La is 5,420 m (17,782 ft) and the Renjo La is 5,360 m (17,585 ft), so the Kongma La is the high one, and most people who have crossed all three will tell you it is also the hard one.1

Those three figures are worth looking at side by side, because a lot of pages give one rounded height for all three passes as though they were the same height. They are not. There is real distance between them, and the Kongma La is the outlier at the top.

Here is the thing that makes the pass land properly. Everest Base Camp is 5,364 m (17,598 ft). The Kongma La is 171 m (561 ft) higher than that. On this route you stand higher than base camp before you ever get to base camp, and you do it on a single day, carrying a day pack, with a long descent waiting on the far side.

Ama Dablam base camp is a wide grassy shelf at the foot of the mountain, reached on a day return from Pangboche. In the climbing seasons there are tents on it, a kitchen tent or two, and people doing the unglamorous work that goes on at the bottom of a mountain. Out of season it is a meadow with stone platforms on it and nobody there.

There is no lodge, no shop and nothing to buy. You carry water and something to eat, you walk up, you sit down, and you walk back to a bed in the valley. That is the whole trip. It is not a summit, it is not a viewpoint with a sign on it, and it does not appear on the list of things people photograph on this trek.

So why go. Three reasons, and they are all about the kind of day it is rather than the place at the end of it.

The first is the angle. For a week you have been looking at Ama Dablam from the valley floor, from far enough away that it looks like a picture. Standing under it, close enough that the ice above you is a real thing with a shape, is not the same experience at all, and there is no other day on the classic route that does this for any mountain.

The second is the quiet. The main trail up the Khumbu carries everybody, every day, in both directions. This spur carries almost nobody. If the number of people on the trail is part of what you were worried about, this is the one day of the trip that answers it.

The third is that it is a proper acclimatization day that goes somewhere. You climb a long way above the village, spend time up there, and come back down to sleep low. That is exactly the mechanism the rest days on this route use, and on this day you get it without walking in a circle.

What we will not tell you is how high it is. We hold a height for Ama Dablam base camp and it rests on one authority with nothing to check it against, so it does not meet the standard the rest of this site is held to and this page prints no figure for it.1 The same goes for Pangboche, the village you start from. Every height on this route that we have settled, and every one we have not, is listed with the reason on the page giving every elevation on the Everest Base Camp route.

Ask somebody who has walked this trail which mountain they remember and a good number of them will not say Everest. They will say the one with the ridges coming down like arms, which stands on its own in the middle of the valley and is in front of you for days. That is Ama Dablam.

It is in view for a long stretch of the classic route. You first get a proper look at it climbing toward Tengboche, it sits at the head of the valley behind the monastery, and it stays with you past Pangboche and on up to Dingboche, turning as you move around it until you are looking at a completely different mountain from the one you saw two days ago.

The reason it holds the eye is that it is on its own. Everest is far taller and spends much of this walk out of sight behind Nuptse, and even from base camp the Nuptse wall covers it. Ama Dablam stands clear of everything around it, so you see the whole shape at once, from the bottom to the top. That is unusual in this valley and it is why it ends up on the front of so many brochures.

We do not publish a height for it. Our store holds one and marks it as resting on a single authority, which on this site is not enough to print. That figure is in the queue for a second source.1

This is the part to think hardest about, and it is the part the pretty photos never cover. Acclimatization means letting your body get used to less oxygen before you climb higher. Putting a pass at 5,535 m (18,159 ft) into the middle of your walk in is not a small change to that process.

Start with the height itself. On the classic route, the highest you go before base camp is the acclimatization walk above Dingboche, and then you sleep your way up the valley. On this route you stand on the Kongma La, which is 171 m (561 ft) above Everest Base Camp and only a little below Kala Patthar at 5,545 m (18,192 ft), the highest point of the whole trip. You touch the top end of the trip early.

Now the part that works in your favor. You do not sleep up there. You sleep at Chhukung at 4,730 m (15,518 ft) before the pass and at Lobuche at 4,910 m (16,109 ft) after it, and both of those are well below the pass. Climbing high during the day and sleeping lower at night is the exact mechanism the rest days on the classic route use. A pass day is that mechanism, turned up a long way.

And the part that does not. A rest day above Dingboche is a few hours uphill with a bed waiting at the bottom, and you can turn around at any point. A pass crossing is a long day with a committing descent on the other side, and if the altitude starts to tell on you in the middle of it, your options are much narrower. The Ama Dablam base camp day gives you back some of that margin, because it is another climb high and sleep low day lower down the valley, but it does not cancel the pass.

So the fair summary is this. The extra days mean more time at altitude, and more time is good. The pass means a much bigger single ask than anything on the classic route, and it comes before your body has had the nights higher up that normally precede a day at that height. Whether that trade is right for you depends almost entirely on whether you have been high before and know how you respond to it.

What altitude does, why fitness does not protect you from it, and what the days on this route actually demand are all set out on the page on how hard the Everest Base Camp trek is. Read it before you decide on the pass rather than after.

This suits somebody who has already done multi day walking at altitude, who finished a trek like this one and wanted more of it, and who would rather have one big day than an easier fortnight. It is a second Himalayan trek, not a first.

It suits people who like a long day and do not mind an unpleasant hour in the middle of it. It suits people who are walking this route for the walking rather than for the photograph at the end. And it suits anybody who has looked at Ama Dablam in a picture and wanted to stand underneath it, which is a perfectly good reason to pick a trip and one nobody should feel silly about.

Now who should not take it. We would rather lose the booking than put the wrong person on this pass.

Do not take this route if the Everest Base Camp trek would already be near your limit. The pass day is longer and harder than anything on the classic route, and adding it to a trip that was going to be a stretch is how people end up descending early.

Do not take it if you have never been to high altitude and do not know how your body handles it. There is nothing wrong with finding that out. Find it out on a route where the hardest day has a lodge at both ends of it.

Do not take it if your return flight is tight. Weather closes passes, and the Lukla flight loses days of its own. This route has less slack in it than the classic one and needs more.

Do not take it if what you actually want is to climb Ama Dablam. That is a mountaineering expedition. We are not selling it here and this trip is not a step toward it.

And do not take it because it sounds more impressive. Standing at Everest Base Camp is the same experience whichever way you walked in, and nobody at home can tell the difference.

Our record for this trip gives it as 15 days and puts its maximum altitude at 5,550 m.2 Both of those figures need a sentence of explanation, because day counts and maximum heights are the two things trekking pages are least careful with.

The day count is trip days, Kathmandu to Kathmandu. That includes the day you arrive, the day you leave, and any day held in the city. Our itinerary page counts trail days instead, Lukla to Lukla, which is only the days you are walking. The two numbers are counting different things, so put them side by side before you compare this trip with anybody else’s. When an operator quotes you a length, ask which of the two they mean.

The maximum altitude is the Kala Patthar morning, not the pass. Our own height ledger settles Kala Patthar at 5,545 m (18,192 ft), and the maximum on the trip record is a rounding of that same point rather than a different place.1 We show you both instead of quietly picking the one that sounds better. The Kongma La at 5,535 m (18,159 ft) is the second highest point you reach, and the highest one you get to on the way in.

There is no single published price for this route yet. The price comes to you in writing, in the quote for your dates, before you pay anything, with what is included and what is not set out beside it. Tell us your dates and your group size and we will send it.

Permits are the ordinary ones. This route needs the same park and local permits as every other walk into the Khumbu, and it needs no climbing permit at all, because there is no climbing on it. What each permit costs, who issues it and where it is bought is set out on the permits and fees page.

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.