How far is the Everest Base Camp trek?

The classic round trip from Lukla to Everest Base Camp and back is 109.5 to 134 km, or 68 to 83 miles, measured by adding up every leg as our source itineraries publish it.1 That figure includes the two acclimatization walks. Leave those out and the corridor itself is 102.5 to 123 km, or 64 to 76 miles.

Acclimatization means letting your body get used to less oxygen before you climb any higher. Two days of the walk are spent doing exactly that, going up a few hundred meters and coming back down to sleep. They are walking days and they carry real distance, so a total that quietly drops them is a different measurement of a different thing.

Split the walk in two and the way up from Lukla to base camp is 64.5 to 82 km, or 40 to 51 miles. The way out is 45 to 52 km, or 28 to 32 miles. It is shorter because it is packed into fewer and much longer days. You climb 2,504 m (8,215 ft) from Lukla to base camp along the way.

We publish a range rather than a number because every honest source we have is a range. If somebody hands you one figure for the trek to Everest Base Camp with no source next to it, they have picked a round number and stopped. Ours comes with the legs it was built from, and those are in the table below.

The route is one valley corridor with one sensible line through it. You fly into Lukla, 2,860 m (9,383 ft), and walk north up the Dudh Koshi river until the river runs out of valley, which happens at the foot of the Khumbu Glacier.

The first night is Phakding, 2,610 m (8,563 ft), which is lower than Lukla. The trail then climbs past the national park gate at Monjo to Namche Bazaar, 3,440 m (11,286 ft). Namche is the main town of the Khumbu and the first stop with a rest day built into it. From there the trail drops to the river and climbs again to Tengboche, 3,860 m (12,664 ft), where the monastery sits on a saddle facing Ama Dablam.

Above Tengboche the trees stop. Dingboche, 4,410 m (14,469 ft), is the second rest stop and the first place where most people notice the air. Then Lobuche, 4,910 m (16,109 ft), on the lateral moraine of the Khumbu Glacier, which is the ridge of rock and rubble the ice pushed aside. Then Gorak Shep, the last place on the route with beds, at 5,140 to 5,180 m (16,864 to 16,995 ft).3 Four different heights are published for it, so we print the range instead of picking one.

Base camp itself, 5,364 m (17,598 ft), is a day return from Gorak Shep. So is Kala Patthar, 5,545 m (18,192 ft), the small brown hill opposite it. Kala Patthar is the highest point you stand on, and it is the only one of the two from which you actually see the summit. You sleep at neither. The Kala Patthar page covers why that hill matters more than the destination does.

The shape of that line is the thing worth reading twice. The climb is not steady. It is front loaded at Namche, flat for two days on purpose, and then relentless above Dingboche where each leg is short and every one of them hurts more than its length suggests. That is why walking time and distance stop agreeing with each other in the top third of the route, and it is most of what the difficulty page is about.

Each leg below is printed as our source itineraries publish it, low end to high end, with the number of itineraries that published a figure for it.1 None of these distances sit in our fact store, because our fact store holds settled figures and these are not settled.

Two rows cover a whole day rather than a single leg, because that is how the corpus publishes them. The base camp day runs Lobuche to Gorak Shep, on to base camp and back to Gorak Shep, and it is published as one figure. The Kala Patthar day runs up the hill before dawn and then down the valley to Pheriche, and it is published as one figure too. Breaking either into pieces would mean inventing numbers nobody wrote down.

The walking hours are wider than the distances, and that is not sloppiness. The climb out of Phakding is published at 5 to 8 hours because the same ground takes one walker the low end and the next walker the high end. Above Dingboche the hours stop tracking the kilometers altogether. Use the hours as your planning number and the distance as the sanity check.

What happens on each of these days, in order, with where you sleep, is on the day by day itinerary. What the lodges at the end of each leg are actually like is on the tea house page. A tea house is a family run lodge on the trail, and you sleep and eat in one every night.

Published totals disagree because the people publishing them are measuring four different things and calling all of them the trek. The trail has not changed. The definition keeps changing.

Where the measuring starts

Most totals begin at Lukla, because most people fly in. A total that begins at Jiri or at Salleri is measuring a walk that takes days longer and covers ground the flying route never touches. Both are real routes and both are described further down this page.

Whether the acclimatization days count

Our own legs come to 109.5 to 134 km with the two acclimatization walks in and 102.5 to 123 km with them out. That single editorial choice moves the answer by about the length of a full trail day, and almost nobody says which one they made.

Whether a day return counts once or twice

Base camp and Kala Patthar are both day returns from Gorak Shep. Some itineraries publish the round trip and some publish the outbound half. The same is true of the two acclimatization walks, which is why one page can put the Namche walk at half of what another puts it at and neither is lying.

How the trail was measured at all

A distance read off a map is shorter than the same trail walked with a GPS on your wrist, because the map does not know about the switchbacks or the detour around the landslide. We have not found a published total for this route that states its method. Until one does, a single figure is a guess with a decimal point on it.

Here is the same problem inside our own company. The drive from Kathmandu to the airstrip at Ramechhap, before the walk even starts, is published across our own pages at 130, 132, 144 and 145 km.2 Four numbers, one road, and nothing changed but the writer. That is why this page publishes ranges and counts, and why we would rather look less certain than be confidently wrong.

There is no loop. You come down the valley you walked up, on the same trail and through the same villages. It is 45 to 52 km from the Kala Patthar morning back to Lukla, against 64.5 to 82 km on the way in.

The one place the line changes is low in the Imja valley. The way up sleeps at Dingboche and the way down usually comes through Pheriche, which is the next village along in the neighboring fold of the same valley. The two trails rejoin below. Pheriche also has the Himalayan Rescue Association aid post on it, which is a reason the descent goes that way rather than an accident.

Four things make the same ground feel different on the way out. There is more oxygen in every step you take, and that change is immediate. The days are far longer: the final leg to Lukla is published at 18 to 20 km against the 8 to 12 km you were walking above Dingboche. Your knees become the part that hurts instead of your lungs. And you are walking toward the valley rather than away from it, so the view is green and the mountains are behind you.

People underestimate the descent because they think of it as the easy half. It is faster, not easier. The two longest walking days on the whole route are both on the way down, and they arrive after you have already spent your reserves getting to base camp. Plan the descent as walking days rather than as a victory lap.

Sagarmatha National Park is the protected area the whole upper route sits inside. The boundary is the gate at Monjo, on the leg between Phakding and Namche Bazaar, and from there to Everest Base Camp at 5,364 m (17,598 ft) you are inside it.

That gate is where your park permit is checked, along with the separate Khumbu municipal permit. Both are needed and neither replaces the other. The fees, the two issuing authorities and where each permit is actually sold are on the permits and fees page. There is no version of this route that goes around the park, because the park is the route.

The corridor changes character three times, and you can read the change off the leg table. Below Namche it is river gorge, wet, forested and busy with suspension bridges. Between Namche and Tengboche it is rhododendron and pine. Somewhere on the leg from Tengboche to Dingboche the trees give out for good, and everything above that is grass, then scrub, then rock and glacial moraine. The last two legs cross the rubble the Khumbu Glacier pushed aside.

On wildlife we will be careful. Our own company pages name the Himalayan tahr, the musk deer, the pika and the Himalayan monal along this corridor. We have not checked that list against the park authority, so read it as what to look for rather than as what you will see. What you will certainly see are yaks. They are working animals here and they always have the right of way, so stand on the uphill side of the trail when one passes.

The classic route has four places where the line splits. Each branch adds days and altitude, two of them cross passes higher than anything on the classic route, and none of them is a shortcut.

Gokyo and the Cho La

The Gokyo variation leaves the main line at Namche Bazaar and climbs a parallel valley to the Gokyo lakes. It then crosses the Cho La at 5,420 m (17,782 ft) and drops back onto the base camp corridor at Lobuche. What it adds is a second valley, a glacier crossing at Ngozumpa and a viewpoint above the lakes. What it costs is several extra days and one genuinely hard pass. The full version is on the Gokyo and Cho La route page.

The Three Passes

The Three Passes circuit strings together the Kongma La at 5,535 m (18,159 ft), the Cho La at 5,420 m (17,782 ft) and the Renjo La at 5,360 m (17,585 ft). Three passes turn the out and back into a loop around the Khumbu. The Kongma La is the highest of them and generally the hardest day of the three. It is a different trip with a different fitness requirement, and it is described on the Three Passes page.

Chhukung, Kongma La and Ama Dablam Base Camp

Chhukung, 4,730 m (15,518 ft), sits up the Imja valley above Dingboche and is the way to the Kongma La and to Island Peak. Ama Dablam Base Camp is a day return from Pangboche, low on the main line. Both are covered on the Kongma La and Ama Dablam page.

Jiri and Salleri are road heads west and south of the Khumbu, and both let you reach the base camp trail without flying to Lukla. Both add days. Both start far below Lukla, low enough that the walk in doubles as acclimatization.

Jiri is the start of the classic 1953 approach, and our own route ledger records it that way.3 The trail from there crosses a run of ridges and river valleys before it joins the Lukla route lower down. Our own Jiri product runs 20 days. What you buy with the extra days is a long low approach and a much gentler altitude curve. What you pay is time.

Salleri is the road head for the version that drives in instead. A vehicle takes you as far as the road goes, and you walk from there to meet the main trail. It exists because the Lukla flight is the part of this trip most often disrupted, and some people would rather spend a long day in a jeep than lose days to weather. What the flight actually involves, and what happens when it does not fly, is on the Lukla flight page.

Neither approach changes the route above Lukla. They change how you get onto it. Once you are on the Dudh Koshi trail, everything on this page applies exactly as written, and the distances in the leg table are measured from Lukla whichever way you arrived there.

We draw the route ourselves because an embedded map is somebody else’s numbers, and we cannot check them. The diagram above is generated from our own elevation store at build time, which means it cannot say anything the store does not hold.

That has a visible consequence. A stop whose height every source agrees on draws as a solid point. A stop whose height is still disputed draws as an open ring with its published range attached, which is why Gorak Shep looks different from the rest. No map image we could embed does that, because a map image has one value per label and no way to admit doubt. Ours admits it in the picture.

It also means the diagram cannot go stale in one place and not another. The homepage summary, this page and the elevation ledger all read the same store. Change a height there and all three change together. Change a supplier map image and you have to remember every page it sits on.

A printed map is not a navigation tool

Do not plan to navigate by anything you print off this page, or off any page. This diagram is a schematic of the order and the altitude. It has no scale, no contours, no side valleys and no bridges on it, and it is not trying to have them. It exists so you understand the shape of the climb before you commit to it.

On the ground the trail is a single well trodden corridor with villages every couple of hours, and you walk it with a licensed guide who has walked it before. That is the navigation. If you want a paper map for the pleasure of having one, buy a proper contoured trekking map of the Khumbu in Kathmandu and carry it as a map, not as your plan. Weather, early darkness and fresh snow above Dingboche are the conditions that make a schematic worthless, and those are exactly the conditions in which people reach for one.

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.