Everest Base Camp Packing List: What to Bring, and Why Each Thing Is on It

Every packing list on the internet gives you a porter weight limit, a flight baggage allowance and a pack size in liters. We give you the first one, next to the figure it should be judged against. We give you neither of the other two, because we checked our own published pages and they do not agree with each other.

A layer is one piece of clothing you can take off or put on without unpacking anything. People talk about layers on this trek for one plain reason. You will be too hot and too cold several times in the same day, and one thick coat cannot handle both, while three thin things can.

The day usually goes like this. You start cold, in everything you own, at a temperature that makes your hands hurt. Twenty minutes uphill and you are too warm, so you stop and take two things off. At the top of the climb the wind hits you while you are damp with sweat, and you put them back on before you sit down. At lunch you take them off again. By four in the afternoon the sun is behind a ridge and you put on everything you have. That is four changes in a day, which is why everything has to be reachable rather than packed.

The boot that fits you and that you have already walked in for weeks beats the better boot you bought last week. Every year people arrive in Kathmandu with new boots they were talked into, and by Namche Bazaar they are walking on blisters with most of the trek still in front of them.

Breaking in is two things happening at once. The boot softens and takes the shape of your foot, and the skin where the boot touches you toughens up. Neither happens in a weekend. It takes weeks of ordinary walking, in the socks you will actually trek in, carrying the pack weight you will actually carry. Put that into your training plan from the start rather than in the last two weeks.

Why it matters more here than on a weekend hill walk: this trek is long days, one after another, with no shop to replace anything and no day off, because the acclimatization days are walking days too. Much of it is stone staircases, and most of the damage to feet happens going down rather than up, when your toes are pressed into the front of the boot for hours. The difficulty page explains what the descents actually do to you.

You need your own sleeping bag. The lodge gives you a blanket and the blanket is not enough above Dingboche at 4,410 m (14,469 ft), on any night, in any season. What we are not going to give you is a temperature rating, and the reason is that we checked our own pages and found four different answers.

What the rooms are actually like, village by village, is on the tea houses page.

This is the part of the list people skip and then regret. High up there is less air above you to take the sting out of the sunlight, and on snow and glacier the light comes at you twice, once from the sky and once off the ground. You can burn on a cold day, in a breeze, with a cloud over you, and people do.

The burns are in odd places, because the light is coming upward as well as downward. Under the nose, under the chin, inside the ears, on the parting in your hair, and on the inside of your lips. Nobody expects the underside of their own nose to blister, and then it does.

Eyes are the serious one. Strong mountain light on snow, over hours, burns the surface of the eye, and that is painful and it stops you walking. Sunglasses on this trek are safety equipment rather than an accessory, and a spare pair weighs almost nothing. There is no optician above Namche Bazaar.

You have three ways to drink safely up here. Buy bottled water, buy boiled water by the liter from the lodge kitchen, or treat the tap water yourself. Bring the kit for the third one, use the second when it is cold, and skip the first, because every plastic bottle in the Khumbu walked in on somebody and has to walk back out again.

Bring the treatment method you have already used at home and can operate with cold hands and gloves on. This is not the trip to learn a new gadget. Bring a backup that needs no battery, because an ultraviolet pen with a flat battery at the top of the valley is a pen you cannot use, and the same is true of a filter that has frozen overnight.

How much to drink is a question we deliberately leave without a number. The daily figure in our own corpus is an operator claim rather than a medical finding, so it stays off this page until a medical authority states one. What water is for at altitude, and what happens when you get it wrong, is on the altitude sickness and acclimatization page.

Where the water comes from in each village, and what the kitchen sells, is on the tea houses page.

A first aid kit travels with the group, and your guide is trained to use it. Your own kit is therefore not a medical kit. It is the small, personal, boring things that you will want at ten at night and that nobody else can size for you.

Ask us what is in the group kit for your trip and we will send you the list, so that you are not carrying a second one of everything for two weeks. That is a real weight saving and almost nobody thinks to ask.

One thing this page will not do is give you medical advice. We are a trekking company. Anything to do with altitude medicine, including whether you should carry a prescription for it, is a conversation with your own doctor before you fly, not a decision made in a shop in Kathmandu the day before. Take our altitude sickness page to that appointment if it helps.

Carry your passport, your insurance policy and your cash on your own body, in a waterproof pouch, in the pack you are wearing. Not in the duffel, and not in a hotel room in Kathmandu. Above Namche Bazaar at 3,440 m (11,286 ft) there is no reliable way to get money and almost nothing takes a card.

Namche has the last cash machines on the route. They are the last ones, they are used by everybody going up and everybody coming down, and they run out of money. A machine that is empty on a Saturday in high season is an ordinary event, not bad luck. Draw your cash in Kathmandu, where the machines are many and reliable, and treat anything you get at Namche as a bonus rather than a plan.

Bring it in small notes. Every lodge purchase up there is small, the till is a tin, and a village at altitude cannot change a large note for you. Split the money between your pack and your duffel so that losing one bag does not lose all of it. We are not printing a figure for how much to bring, because no verified one exists and the honest answer depends on how much wifi, charging and hot water you buy.

You do not need to buy your own permits. We arrange both of them for our own clients and hand them over before you walk. Which permits exist, what each one costs and who issues them is on the permits and fees page.

Do not buy a full mountain wardrobe for one trek. Two or three of the most expensive items on this page can be rented in Kathmandu in an afternoon, and two of them we lend you anyway. What you should own, and own well before you arrive, is the short list that has to fit you.

We are not printing rental or purchase prices. The figures in our corpus came from other people's pages rather than from our own staff walking into shops on a dated visit, and a price nobody checked is exactly the kind of number this site exists not to publish. Ask us and we will tell you what the shops near our office were charging the week you asked.

Electricity exists in the lodges and it is sold by the hour rather than included, it gets more expensive as you climb, and it is least reliable exactly where you want it most. Cold also flattens batteries fast, so a phone that lasts two days at home lasts most of one day here.

The answer is a large power bank carried up and charged down low, at Lukla at 2,860 m (9,383 ft) or Namche, rather than a scramble for a socket at Lobuche at 4,910 m (16,109 ft). Keep the power bank and your phone inside the sleeping bag at night, because a battery left out in a cold room is half empty by morning.

The list above is the list for the two busy seasons, spring and autumn. The changes for other months are smaller than people expect, and they are all about insulation and traction rather than about different kit.

In the coldest months you want more of the warm layers rather than different ones, a warmer bag, and something for ice on the shaded sections of trail that never see the sun. In the monsoon months everything is about staying dry and drying out: a shell that really works, a pack cover, dry bags, and the acceptance that nothing you wash will dry. In late autumn the days are clear and the nights are the coldest part of the trip.

We are not attaching temperatures to any of that, on this page or any other, and the weather page explains why at length. It is the largest single gap on this site and we would rather name it than fill it with numbers nobody checked. Which month suits you, and what each one is actually like to walk in, is on the best time to go page.

This section exists because a porter carries the result of it. Every list on the internet tells you what to add. Here is what our guides watch people carry up and carry back down again, untouched.

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.