What Everest Base Camp Is, and What Is Actually There

There is no building at Everest Base Camp. No lodge, no gate, no ticket office, no permanent structure of any kind. The camp is tents, and the tents are only there while expeditions are on the mountain.

The climbing season on the south side is spring. Nepal prices its climbing permits by season, and it prices spring, March to May, separately from every other season of the year.2 In those weeks the flatter ground on the glacier fills with expedition tents, kitchen tents, dining tents, stores and toilets, laid out team by team along a long stretch of rubble. In autumn and winter the same ground is close to empty.

The clearest evidence that the place is seasonal is the clinic. The Himalayan Rescue Association runs a clinic called Everest ER inside base camp at 5,350 m (17,552 ft). It has opened every spring since 2003 and it closes when the expeditions leave.3 A settlement with a permanent population does not have a clinic that packs up and goes home in June.

Nobody lives at base camp and nobody trekking sleeps there. The nearest beds are at Gorak Shep, the last settlement on the trail, back down the glacier. Gorak Shep is published at four different heights by four different operators, so this page does not pick one. Every overnight stop on the route, with the disagreement shown rather than hidden, is on the Everest Base Camp elevation page.

Everest Base Camp is not built on rock. It is on the Khumbu Glacier, which is a slow river of ice with a layer of loose stone lying on top of it.

That layer of loose stone is called moraine. The last stretch of the walk into camp is on it, which means walking on rubble laid over moving ice. It cracks and settles under you while you walk on it.

Because the ice moves, the camp has no fixed position. It is laid out again each season on whatever ground is flat and stable enough that year. There is no address, no platform and nothing built to last. Two photographs of base camp taken years apart are not photographs of the same ground.

Base camp is a staging post for a mountaineering expedition. Climbers move in for weeks. They wait for weather, go up the mountain, come back down to recover, and go up again. For that stretch the camp is their kitchen, their bed and their hospital.

Trekkers are the other group at base camp, and they behave completely differently. A trekker walks up the valley over several days, stands on the moraine at the edge of the camp for a while, and walks back down the same afternoon to sleep at Gorak Shep. You do not camp at base camp on the trek. You do not go any higher up the mountain. The walk ends at the bottom of the climb and turns around.

That is the most useful thing to understand about the place. The word camp suggests you camp there. On the walk to Everest Base Camp you do not. You walk to the foot of a climb that other people are doing, look at it, and go home.

You arrive on foot from Gorak Shep, along the moraine, and at some point your guide stops and tells you that you are standing in it. There is no line on the ground, no sign and no gate.

What there is, in spring, is a spread of tents below you and a wall of broken ice at the head of the valley. Out of season there is the same ground with almost nothing on it. Either way you are standing on rubble at 5,364 m (17,598 ft), looking up at the Khumbu Icefall.

The photograph everyone takes is of a rock. It is a boulder on the moraine with the words Everest Base Camp and an altitude painted on it, usually with prayer flags tied off it. It is worth being plain about what that rock is not. It is not an official marker. No authority placed it, no authority maintains it, and it carries no surveyed or legal standing. Trekkers and guides paint it, other people repaint it, and because it sits on moving ice it does not stay in one place from one year to the next. The altitude painted on it is whatever the last person holding a brush believed it to be. The figure we publish, and why it is the one height on this route that every source agrees on, is on the elevation page.

Then you walk back down. Base camp and the climb of Kala Patthar sit on consecutive days in almost every itinerary, because they are a pair, and the reason why is the next section.

The summit of Mount Everest is not visible from Everest Base Camp. Nuptse, the mountain standing immediately in front of it from this angle, hides the top completely. From the ground at base camp you see the Khumbu Icefall and the walls on either side of it. You do not see the summit.

This surprises most people, and plenty of operators do not mention it until a trekker is standing there asking which one is Everest. We would rather you knew before you paid for anything. It does not make the trek worse. It makes the itinerary make sense.

The view of the summit does exist, and it is the reason there is one more morning in the plan. It is from Kala Patthar, the dark hill above Gorak Shep, climbed in the dark so that you are on top of it at first light. That is where the photograph of Everest gets taken. What you see from it, what the climb asks of you and why the market publishes four different heights for one hill are on the page about Kala Patthar, where you actually see Everest.

The Khumbu Icefall is the broken, collapsing section of the Khumbu Glacier directly above Everest Base Camp, where the ice runs over a steep step and shatters into blocks and towers. It is the most visible thing from the camp and the first obstacle on the climb.

Trekkers do not enter it. The walk stops at base camp, which is the bottom of the icefall, and the icefall is where the climbing starts. Standing there you are looking at the beginning of somebody else’s route, not yours.

It moves all the time, which is what makes it dangerous for the people who do cross it. Blocks of ice the size of buildings topple without warning. A team of Sherpa climbers fixes a route of ladders and ropes through it at the start of each season and maintains it, and every foreign climber on the mountain pays for the use of that route. The Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee set that fee at 600 USD per foreign climber for spring 2026.4 No trekking permit covers it, because nothing on the trek goes through the ice. What the icefall means for a trekker’s actual risk, as opposed to a climber’s, is on the Everest Base Camp trek safety page.

The north base camp of Mount Everest is in Tibet, in China, on the opposite side of the mountain from the camp this site is about. If you arrived here from a crossword clue, the answer is Tibet.

Everest has two base camps because it has two ordinary climbing routes, one from each country. The south base camp is in Nepal, inside Sagarmatha National Park, at 5,364 m (17,598 ft), and it is the one trekkers walk to. The north base camp sits on the Tibetan side, near Rongbuk.

The two are different trips with nothing in common but the mountain. You reach the north side by vehicle rather than on foot. It is in China, so it runs on Chinese permits arranged in advance, and Nepali trekking permits have no standing there. There is no walking route from one camp to the other for a visitor, because the mountain is in the way.

Everything on this site is the south side, in Nepal. That is the route we guide. We do not arrange the Tibetan side and we do not write about it beyond this section.

Above base camp is a mountaineering expedition, and it is a different activity from the trek in every way that matters. The summit of Mount Everest is 8,848.86 m (29,032 ft)5, which leaves 3,485 m (11,434 ft) of vertical ground between the camp and the top.

Crossing that ground takes weeks and a set of high camps above the icefall. Climbers go up, come back down to base camp to recover, and go up again, then wait for a weather window. It needs bottled oxygen, fixed rope, a climbing Sherpa for support and a level of training the trek does not ask for. The trek does none of it.

The paperwork shows the gap plainly. A trekker buys two Nepali entry permits and walks in. A foreign climber on the normal south route in spring pays the government a royalty of 15,000 USD per person, effective 1 September 2025,2 and the icefall route fee above, before a single piece of equipment is bought. Different permits, different authority, different order of magnitude.

We do not sell Everest expeditions and this site prices none. What a summit attempt actually involves, including the line items that operators leave off their inclusions lists, is on the page about the Everest summit expedition, explained and not sold.

People walk to Everest Base Camp for the walk, not for the destination. The destination is a patch of rubble with tents on it. The days it takes to get there and back, through the valley, the forest, the suspension bridges, the monasteries and progressively thinner air, are what you are actually buying.

Three reasons hold up. The first is the mountain itself. Standing at the foot of the highest mountain on earth does land, even with the top of it out of sight. The second is the Khumbu, which is Sherpa country, and the fact that you walk through it and sleep in its tea houses, which are family run lodges on the trail, rather than looking at it through a window. The third is that the trek is hard enough to mean something afterwards and not so hard that it needs a skill you do not have.

What it is not is a mountaineering achievement, and it is worth not pretending otherwise. Nobody climbs anything. There is no rope, no ice axe and no technical ground at any point between Lukla, 2,860 m (9,383 ft), and the camp.

It is worth it if you want the walk. It is not worth it if what you want is a photograph of the summit of Everest, because base camp does not give you one, or a mountaineering credential, because walking to base camp is not one.

Here is a test that works better than any brochure. Take the destination out of it. If you would enjoy two weeks of walking five to seven hours a day, on hills, at altitude, sleeping in cold tea house rooms with the same few dinners on the menu, then the answer is yes and the destination is a bonus. If the walking sounds like the price you pay for the photograph, the photograph is not worth that price, and it is much cheaper to work that out now than on day nine.

Five to seven hours of walking a day, on consecutive days, is the real specification of this trip. Whether you can meet it, which three days do most of the damage and how to train for them are on the page about how hard this trek really is.

We do not publish an annual figure, because we could not verify one.

The number that would answer this properly is the visitor count for Sagarmatha National Park. Every trekker on this route enters the park and pays to enter it, so the park authority holds the only count worth quoting. The Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation collects it. We went looking for a current published series and did not obtain one.6

No annual visitor figure from the issuing authority is verified in our fact store, so this page states none. Figures do circulate elsewhere. None of the ones we checked traced back to the park authority, so this page repeats none of them. If the department publishes the series, the figure appears here with the date we read it, and the correction is logged rather than quietly applied.

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.