Everest Base Camp with Lobuche Peak, with the climbing guide and gear included

Most of the combined trip is the Everest Base Camp trek. Same flight into Lukla at 2,860 m (9,383 ft), same climb to Namche Bazaar at 3,440 m (11,286 ft), same nights at Tengboche and Dingboche, same base camp at 5,364 m (17,598 ft), same cold morning on Kala Patthar at 5,545 m (18,192 ft). The climb is added onto that, from the same stretch of valley the trek already passes through.

The village of Lobuche sits on the main trail at 4,910 m (16,109 ft), and the peak rises directly above it. Climbing parties leave the village, walk up to a high camp on the mountain and sleep there in tents, then go for the summit in the dark and come back down the same day. Our own record for the combined product puts its highest point at 6,119 m (20,075 ft), which is the summit rather than anything on the trek.2

We publish no height for the high camp. Our ledger holds no settled figure for it and we would rather leave a gap than fill it with a number nobody checked.

Everything up to the village is walking. From the high camp it is not. Here is what summit day involves, with the technical words explained as they arrive.

You sleep on the mountain first. A high camp is tents pitched above the last lodge, with a cook tent and no heating. Sleeping that high is part of the difficulty. Most people sleep badly at that altitude, and summit day starts out of a bad night rather than a good one.

You start in the dark. You are woken in the middle of the night and leave camp by head torch. Snow that is frozen hard at night goes soft and unreliable once the sun reaches it, so the safe hours are the cold ones.

You wear crampons. Crampons are metal spikes that strap to stiff boots so you can move on hard snow and ice without sliding. They change how you walk, and the time to find that out is not on a slope in the dark.

You are roped to other people. Moving as a rope team is what catches somebody who slips, and on glaciated ground it is what catches somebody who breaks through into a hidden crack in the ice. It also means your pace stops being only yours.

You climb a fixed rope on the steep section. A line is anchored down the steepest part in advance, and you clip onto it with a harness and a rope clamp and move up it. It is hard work at a point in the day when you are already tired and breathing roughly half the oxygen you get at sea level.

The top is a snow ridge. Standing on it is the point of the trip. Getting back down the steep section afterward is where tired people make mistakes, which is exactly why the identity of your climbing guide is not a detail.

By mountaineering standards this is at the approachable end. That is not the same as easy, and it is a long way from being a walk. Our own estate grades the standalone climb of this peak two different ways in two different places, which tells you how loosely these words get used across the industry. Judge the trip by what the day contains rather than by the adjective on a card.

There is a version of this answer that sells more trips, and it is the one that says a fit person can be shown how on the day. Here is the other one.

There is no single published price for this trip yet. The price comes to you in writing, in the quote for your dates, before you pay anything.

How to book. Send us your dates and an honest account of what you have climbed through the quote request for Everest Base Camp with Lobuche Peak. We reply within 24 hours. A booking takes a deposit of 30 percent of the trip price, and the full cancellation schedule is in our booking terms.

The length. Our own product record for this trip gives three different lengths, in three different places on the same page. Picking one of them to publish would be picking at random, so we publish none. The quote for your dates sets out the days. Our standalone climb has the same problem in a smaller form, with its trip facts and its own question block disagreeing.

There is a second trap in trip lengths that is nobody’s fault. A product length counts trip days, from landing in Kathmandu to leaving it, while our itinerary page counts trail days, Lukla to Lukla. Those two schemes count different things. When any operator quotes you a length, ask which of the two they mean before you compare it with anybody else’s.

A summit adds a permit and raises the height your insurance has to cover. Read both parts before you buy a policy.

A trek with a climbing summit on the end is not for everybody, so here are three alternatives, in the order most people should consider them.

The standalone climb of the same summit, as a separate trip. Our Lobuche Peak Climbing goes up and climbs Lobuche East without being packaged with the base camp walk. It is a different product with its own inclusion list, which also names the climbing guide and the personal climbing gear. It is a separate trip and a separate quote, not this page’s trip with a discount. Ask us about it and we will tell you exactly where it stands today.

Everest Base Camp with Island Peak. A different summit at 6,189 m (20,305 ft), also combined with the walk to base camp, described in full on the Everest Base Camp with Island Peak page.

The walk, with no climb on it. If the summit is not the point and the high country is, the three pass circuit is the hardest thing in this valley that is still a walk. It is on the Everest three passes trek page, and its version with a summit added is on the three passes with Island Peak page. Every format we run on this route, compared side by side, is on the Everest Base Camp tours and formats 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.