A History of Mount Everest: From First Attempts to Today

Why is Mount Everest named after a British surveyor?

Mount Everest is named after Sir George Everest, a former Surveyor General of India, a name the Royal Geographical Society formally assigned in 1865 even though the mountain already carried two long-established local names. Nepal's Sagarmatha and Tibet's Chomolungma both predate the English name by centuries, and both remain the names used in their respective countries today; "Everest" is essentially the international and English-language name layered on top of names that were never actually missing. George Everest himself never saw the mountain that carries his name; the peak was identified and measured by the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India under his successor, Andrew Waugh, who proposed the English name specifically because no single local name had yet reached British survey records, an assumption later shown to be incomplete once Nepali and Tibetan names became better documented.

This naming history is a genuinely contested point in how the mountain is discussed today, and Nepal-based operators like ours use Sagarmatha and Everest largely interchangeably depending on context, a reflection of that layered history rather than a preference for one name over the other.

Who made the first attempts to climb Mount Everest?

The first serious Everest expeditions came from British teams in the early 1920s, approaching from the north (Tibet) side because Nepal remained closed to foreign travelers at the time. The 1921 expedition was a reconnaissance mission to map possible routes; the 1922 expedition pushed higher but ended after an avalanche killed seven Sherpa porters, an early and sobering demonstration of the mountain's danger. These expeditions established the north-side approach through Tibet as the only viable route for the next three decades, since Nepal's south side simply wasn't accessible to foreign climbers until the country opened its borders after 1949.

Equipment and knowledge of high-altitude physiology were far more limited than they are today; supplemental oxygen use was still controversial among climbers of the era, with some considering it an unsporting aid rather than a safety tool, a debate that shaped strategy on several of these early attempts.

What happened to Mallory and Irvine in 1924?

George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared high on Everest's north side on 8 June 1924, during a summit attempt, and whether they reached the top before dying remains one of mountaineering's genuinely unresolved mysteries. A search expedition found Mallory's body in 1999 at roughly 8,155 m, with some of his personal effects intact, but no camera was recovered that could confirm whether the pair had summited; Irvine's body has never been found. The absence of definitive proof either way means Mallory and Irvine's fate is still debated among mountaineering historians today, three decades after Mallory's body was located, rather than a question that's been settled.

Mallory is also remembered for one of mountaineering's most quoted lines: asked by a reporter why he wanted to climb Everest, he reportedly answered "because it's there," a phrase that's been attached to mountaineering motivation broadly ever since.

When was Mount Everest first successfully climbed?

Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa climber, and Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper and mountaineer, reached Everest's summit together on 29 May 1953, the first confirmed ascent, as part of a British expedition led by John Hunt. The team approached from Nepal's south side, the same general route this site's own Everest Base Camp treks follow today, made possible because Nepal had opened to foreign travelers a few years earlier after decades of the Tibet-side approach being the only option. News of the successful summit reached London on 2 June 1953, the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and became closely associated with that day in British public memory even though the climb itself had happened days earlier in Nepal.

Tenzing Norgay's role is a point worth stating plainly given how often older accounts centered Hillary alone: both men reached the summit together, and neither has ever definitively said which of them stepped onto the highest point first, a detail both treated as unimportant to the shared achievement throughout their lives.

How did Everest climbing become a commercial industry?

Everest climbing grew from a handful of national expeditions per decade through the mid-20th century into a much larger commercial guided industry from the 1990s onward, once companies began selling guided summit attempts to paying clients with a range of prior climbing experience. This shift brought far more people onto the mountain each season than the original expedition-era climbers ever anticipated, along with the fixed-rope infrastructure, established camps, and support-Sherpa systems that make a guided summit attempt logistically possible for a wider range of climbers today. It also introduced new questions around crowding on summit day, environmental impact, and the working conditions of the Sherpa guides and support staff who make the modern industry function, questions this site's own Sherpa guides and porter wages and welfare guides address directly rather than glossing over.

The trekking side of the Everest region, including the Base Camp trek this company runs, grew alongside the climbing industry but remains a separate activity: far more people visit Base Camp each year as trekkers than ever attempt the summit itself, a trend our own Everest Base Camp trek and its 74 departures since 2008 reflect directly.