I can’t imagine having a hobby that involves passing by, and in some cases climbing over, the exposed remains of others who died doing that same activity.
Back in the 90s, I went to see an IMAX film about climbing Everest and at the beginning, I was thinking, “I could do this,” but as it continued my view turned into, “I will never do this. This is insane.”
What’s really scary now is that it’s turned into something where people have to literally stand in line to reach the summit.
If you like hiking and tough, but rewarding, trails, consider the one to the base camp of Everest, or the roundtrip around the Annapurna. I did both and they are truly amazing without the craziness that has become climbing those Mountains. When I reached the basecamp it really felt like being in a weird Venice or Florence, with "tourist groups" and their guides. Crazy stuff.
Especially the Annapurna one, you still climb up to 5+k meters in altitude, and seeing the actual mountain still towering over you is crazy once you realize.
With today tech - cameras, drones - the tragedy would unfold like a reality TV.
Several months ago a woman broke her leg and stuck as a result at 6800m on Pobeda Peak in Russia and died in several days while the whole country was watching
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbr02F36YdQ
For context: One climber died and a helicopter crashed trying to rescue her. No one's ever been rescued before at that altitude on that mountain range.
A good friend of mine is a professional alpinist who focuses only climbing eight-thousanders with no supplementary oxygen. Through him I’ve met others and learned about this whole community. A number of people are as weird and eccentric as us here in computer-nerd circles; one is tempted to armchair-diagnose some as autistic and climbing as their fixation, so something like Green Boots or the death of peers just won’t stop them. (I envy them that their fixation gives them the physique of a Greek god and stories that can impress any listener, so they often manage to be very socially successful in spite of their quirks.)
From another perspective, nobody lives forever. And so long as somebody isn't e.g. leaving behind young children or whatever, what would be better than going out while looking at beautiful scenery doing something that you love? And it's not like it's fatalism or whatever. Everest is now up to a > 99% survival rate, and even the really deadly climbs are becoming more manageable over time. Better weather forecasting, gear, knowledge, etc.
A climber who was pivotally involved in the failed rescue efforts for the dead person in this article immediately left on a solo climb of a nearby mountain. He died just over a year later in another climbing incident.
From what I read, the 1996 Everest disaster involved two completely separate groups: Adventure Consultants/Mountain Madness, who ascended via the South Route (from Nepal), and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition, who came via the North Route (from Tibet), so if they ever met, it was only at the summit. "Green Boots" was part of the latter group.
For passing by, that says some about the danger of the hobby and much more about the effort of getting the body back. There's lots of common activities where you might pass by a spot someone died while doing it. Notably, driving a car nearly guarantees it.
Or taking a walk. There’s an intersection two blocks from me where a pedestrian was killed in a hit and run accident shortly after I moved to town. The roadside memorial remained in place for nearly two years (I remember thinking that the people who lived in the house at the corner where the memorial was would probably like to remove it, but didn’t want to appear callous).
The worst part is that even though the intersection has been a 4-way stop for over a decade (the additional stop signs added after the hit and run), I’ve twice nearly been struck by drivers blowing the stop sign after I’ve entered the intersection as a pedestrian.
There's a pretty stark difference been "someone died in this spot" and them still being there for you to see. Most people don't react nearly as viscerally to hearing that someone died as they do to literally seeing a corpse.
As a firefighter/EMT I occasionally have to deal with death, and I will even put myself in somewhat dangerous situations (that I've been trained for, and for which I have appropriate PPE) if there's a chance I can save a life.
But putting myself in a situation where the likelihood of dying is quite high for no reason other than to say I did it? No thanks.
Nevertheless I'm glad the family of Mr. Morup is no longer wondering what happened to him.
I mean you do firefighting because you like something about it, maybe the feeling of doing something good. So it should be understandable doing something dangerous for some good internal feeling. Your driving feel good feeling is just different from theirs. The fact you dismissed it to just be "to say they did it" doesn't mean that's how they feel about it. There's ways to be dismissive about being a firefighter too, but they aren't fair.
I do do some things just to say I did them. Or to compete with myself so I can push farther. But for the most part those things have much lower risk of death than climbing Everest. And it's easy for my family to retrieve my body in the unlikely event that I die.
If I ever climbed Everest it would only be to recover some of the bodies or preferably bring down somebody still alive who needs medical attention. I would not consider it "fun" but that's just me.
The stepping over the dead bothers me little, frankly. As a mountaineer, it's hard to imagine a nicer end than dying at the top of a beautiful mountain. Beats the care home for sure.
What horrifies me is the idea of stepping past people who are alive and dying, because... Meh? Because I paid to go the top, not rescue stragglers? People often say they can barely walk forwards, never mind rescue someone, and it's true. But surely if you have any energy left in you, it should go to saving a life. And if it is so touch and go for you, then don't go.
Especially after viewing those sad photos of crowded Disneylandesque queues that look like Instagram Influencers lining up in a flash crowd outside of a suddenly popular café in Amsterdam to photograph stroopwafels, climbing Mount Everest like an orographic theme-park ride seems like such a self-indulgent, narcissistic, attention-starved, over-entitled, high-cost, societally unhelpful, environmentally abusive, privileged pastime for bored rich kids with nothing better to do than leave frozen turds and dead sherpas behind as territorial status markers, fake imaginary bone spurs to defraud insurance companies into conveniently flying them down in helicopters after they've snapped their selfies, pin on another mass-produced badge of exceptionalism, then check off another performative achievement of conspicuous consumption on their luxury failson bucket lists.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to send them all to queue up and gawk at the Titanic in a deep-sea Disneyland Autopia traffic jam of carelessly built, overpriced, high-tech, clown-car CyberSubs?
From what I understand, the queue is not there always.
There is a very narrow window in spring during which the ascent is possible, due to weather (enough ice to get over some sections, but weather not leathal). If you go too early you freeze or get blown off in 0 visibility, if you go too late, the ice has thawed too much and you get washed off in the rapids.
Sometimes the window is only something like 10 days during which you (and everyone else) have to ascent and descent from basecamp.
I thought the Guardian might decide not to show a photo of a corpse of someone probably with living friends and close relatives.
Nope, they do it too, like the Daily Mail, but with a big yellow GUI control to reveal it, like a weird macabre vintage "multimedia".
> Use the slider below to show a picture of the body of the climber known as Green Boots where it lies on Mount Everest. Some readers may find the image distressing
Just because the photo has been shown before doesn't mean it needs to be shown now, especially now that it's been identified, in in this context.
If poor Green Boots was staring up at the camera, empty eye sockets and all, I'd understand this. But there is nothing distressing in the image; the out-of-focus fuzziness makes the photo seem if anything substantially more macabre than it actually is.
Given Green Boots' fame, it was interesting to see what the actual scene climbers experience was. So I think the inclusion of the photo was justified, in these unusual circumstances.
> Nope, they do it too, like the Daily Mail, but with a big yellow GUI control to reveal it, like a weird macabre vintage "multimedia".
What a weird description. You make the content warning sound like it's a bad thing. Slider versus button hardly matters.
> I thought the Guardian might decide not to show a photo of a corpse of someone probably with living friends and close relatives.
You can't see anything but his clothes and this happened decades ago. A hidden by default photo isn't going to hurt those people. Maybe we could argue the article and attention itself could be distressing and shouldn't exist, but I think the news value wins out there.
I don't understand why we should not show photos of dead people, esp. famous ones like is the case here? And his face isn't even visible? What's the harm?
Known simply as 'Green Boots' because of his distinctive bright green mountaineering footwear still protruding from the snow and ice, the remains have now been identified as Indian climber Dorje Morup, 47.
For decades, many mountaineers believed the body belonged to fellow Indian climber Tsewang Paljor, 28. The DNA comparison has now ended that long-running mystery.
The identification was confirmed by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) ahead of a bid to recover the body from Everest's notorious 'death zone' at an altitude of more than 8,000 metres.
Let us pay tribute to the courage of our Tibetan friends.
"The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) is a central armed police force in India, under the Ministry of Home Affairs. It is responsible for guarding India's border with Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It was formed in the aftermath of the Sino-Indian War of 1962"
Slightly off topic, but I first heard of Green Boots in the book The Climb. I picked it up completely randomly from a used book store six states away from home and wow what a find! It is a riveting story start to finish and I recommend it to everyone who is looking for a great read. My partner got her hyper fixation on high altitude mountaineering from it despite having no interest in ever actually climbing a mountain herself from reading it.
If you haven’t yet I highly recommend checking it out.
I've only read Into Thin Air, but that book makes Boukreev (author of The Climb) seem like an unreliable narrator. I have zero interest in high altitude mountaineering (I prefer lower altitude rock climbing) but I should probably check out The Climb to get both sides.
The Climb was a great response to it and according to my partner who then read more books about that year’s expeditions it is much closer to what happened than Into Thin Air.
Well, rest in peace. If they do remove him, I hope nobody else loses their lives in the process. I understand they often don't bring people down because of the difficulty and danger of carrying something has heavy as a person at that altitude.
"Rainbow Valley" is a region near the top with many bodies, so-called because of the variety of coats and other gear. Most photos on Google are AI-generated, though.
Greenboots is so iconic. Other people use him as a marker. Glad he got some attention. It’s always seemed a shame that it’s impossible to give him a proper burial.
Greenboots has been laying there frozen in the snow since the 90s. It even became a landmark for other climbers. Im glad they managed to at least identify the poor soul. Who knows how much longer he’s going to rest there..
> The Indo-Tibetan Border Police is soliciting bids from high altitude recovery agencies for a mission to retrieve the remains of a climber long known only as "Green Boots" from the mountain's northern slope
Conrad Anker covered his body in scree. Subsequent expeditions have been unable to locate it. There's speculation that it was secretly removed from the mountain for political reasons.
Serious question. When climbers are walking by bodies, do they check if they are still alive or need help? Is there nothing that could be done anyways? Face down means don’t bother checking?
Any human not moving in Rainbow Valley is presumed dead?
I imagine you’re trying to keep yourself alive and keep your eyes forward, and realize you can’t do anything to help them anyways.
There was a case of a climber (David Sharp) that was having issues and found shelter in the vicinity of green boots, and the theory was that part of why he died is that the 40 climbers who passed by him without stopping just assumed he was green boots and didn't pay attention.
I can’t imagine having a hobby that involves passing by, and in some cases climbing over, the exposed remains of others who died doing that same activity.
Back in the 90s, I went to see an IMAX film about climbing Everest and at the beginning, I was thinking, “I could do this,” but as it continued my view turned into, “I will never do this. This is insane.”
What’s really scary now is that it’s turned into something where people have to literally stand in line to reach the summit.
If you like hiking and tough, but rewarding, trails, consider the one to the base camp of Everest, or the roundtrip around the Annapurna. I did both and they are truly amazing without the craziness that has become climbing those Mountains. When I reached the basecamp it really felt like being in a weird Venice or Florence, with "tourist groups" and their guides. Crazy stuff.
Especially the Annapurna one, you still climb up to 5+k meters in altitude, and seeing the actual mountain still towering over you is crazy once you realize.
I could absolutely not do this, but "Into Thin Air" (which mentions Green Boots many times) is a great book. Highly recommended.
With today tech - cameras, drones - the tragedy would unfold like a reality TV.
Several months ago a woman broke her leg and stuck as a result at 6800m on Pobeda Peak in Russia and died in several days while the whole country was watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbr02F36YdQ
> 6800m on Pobeda Peak in Russia
I thought, “There’s no way a peak in Russia can be that high”, and indeed, you got the unit wrong, this is 3,003 m. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_Pobeda_(Sakha)
There was a video-stream company that got famous live-streaming a technician who fell when dismounting a condor-egg camera.
Text: https://meduza.io/en/news/2025/09/03/stranded-russian-climbe...
Link at the bottom has previous update
For context: One climber died and a helicopter crashed trying to rescue her. No one's ever been rescued before at that altitude on that mountain range.
A good friend of mine is a professional alpinist who focuses only climbing eight-thousanders with no supplementary oxygen. Through him I’ve met others and learned about this whole community. A number of people are as weird and eccentric as us here in computer-nerd circles; one is tempted to armchair-diagnose some as autistic and climbing as their fixation, so something like Green Boots or the death of peers just won’t stop them. (I envy them that their fixation gives them the physique of a Greek god and stories that can impress any listener, so they often manage to be very socially successful in spite of their quirks.)
From another perspective, nobody lives forever. And so long as somebody isn't e.g. leaving behind young children or whatever, what would be better than going out while looking at beautiful scenery doing something that you love? And it's not like it's fatalism or whatever. Everest is now up to a > 99% survival rate, and even the really deadly climbs are becoming more manageable over time. Better weather forecasting, gear, knowledge, etc.
Aren't there only a dozen or so mountains above 8000 m? Can you really do that without supplementary oxygen? Amazing.
14 of them. The first person to climb them all did so without supplemental oxygen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Messner
Ok. This is the most interesting man in the world. Literally.
If you're ever in Northern Italy the Messner museum in Kronplatz is absolutely worth a visit.
https://www.messner-mountain-museum.it/en/discover/corones/
In some cases leaving people behind to die as well.
https://apnews.com/article/pakistan-porter-death-k2-norwegia...
A climber who was pivotally involved in the failed rescue efforts for the dead person in this article immediately left on a solo climb of a nearby mountain. He died just over a year later in another climbing incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Boukreev
From what I read, the 1996 Everest disaster involved two completely separate groups: Adventure Consultants/Mountain Madness, who ascended via the South Route (from Nepal), and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition, who came via the North Route (from Tibet), so if they ever met, it was only at the summit. "Green Boots" was part of the latter group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Mount_Everest_disaster#Li...
I mean Everest is so gauche also, only rich morons do it.
Yeah and also knowing if something happens your team will definitely leave you
The movie Touching the Void is highly recommended.
As for most book-based movies, the book is IMO better.
Is climbing over something that happens?
For passing by, that says some about the danger of the hobby and much more about the effort of getting the body back. There's lots of common activities where you might pass by a spot someone died while doing it. Notably, driving a car nearly guarantees it.
Or taking a walk. There’s an intersection two blocks from me where a pedestrian was killed in a hit and run accident shortly after I moved to town. The roadside memorial remained in place for nearly two years (I remember thinking that the people who lived in the house at the corner where the memorial was would probably like to remove it, but didn’t want to appear callous).
The worst part is that even though the intersection has been a 4-way stop for over a decade (the additional stop signs added after the hit and run), I’ve twice nearly been struck by drivers blowing the stop sign after I’ve entered the intersection as a pedestrian.
There aren't any common activities where visible corpses serve to remind you that around 1% of participants don't make it back
There's a pretty stark difference been "someone died in this spot" and them still being there for you to see. Most people don't react nearly as viscerally to hearing that someone died as they do to literally seeing a corpse.
Yeah, that's my point. That it's about the [lack of] burial rather than the actual death.
You do often see flowers put at the site of a death.
As a firefighter/EMT I occasionally have to deal with death, and I will even put myself in somewhat dangerous situations (that I've been trained for, and for which I have appropriate PPE) if there's a chance I can save a life.
But putting myself in a situation where the likelihood of dying is quite high for no reason other than to say I did it? No thanks.
Nevertheless I'm glad the family of Mr. Morup is no longer wondering what happened to him.
I mean you do firefighting because you like something about it, maybe the feeling of doing something good. So it should be understandable doing something dangerous for some good internal feeling. Your driving feel good feeling is just different from theirs. The fact you dismissed it to just be "to say they did it" doesn't mean that's how they feel about it. There's ways to be dismissive about being a firefighter too, but they aren't fair.
I do do some things just to say I did them. Or to compete with myself so I can push farther. But for the most part those things have much lower risk of death than climbing Everest. And it's easy for my family to retrieve my body in the unlikely event that I die.
If I ever climbed Everest it would only be to recover some of the bodies or preferably bring down somebody still alive who needs medical attention. I would not consider it "fun" but that's just me.
"The fact you dismissed it to just be "to say they did it" doesn't mean that's how they feel about it"
But they don't do it for other people. They do it, to say they did it. To overcome the challenge, to do what they are good at.
The most other people get out of climbing stories is being entertained (or inspired).
The most people get out of firefighters work is having their lives saved.
The stepping over the dead bothers me little, frankly. As a mountaineer, it's hard to imagine a nicer end than dying at the top of a beautiful mountain. Beats the care home for sure.
What horrifies me is the idea of stepping past people who are alive and dying, because... Meh? Because I paid to go the top, not rescue stragglers? People often say they can barely walk forwards, never mind rescue someone, and it's true. But surely if you have any energy left in you, it should go to saving a life. And if it is so touch and go for you, then don't go.
Especially after viewing those sad photos of crowded Disneylandesque queues that look like Instagram Influencers lining up in a flash crowd outside of a suddenly popular café in Amsterdam to photograph stroopwafels, climbing Mount Everest like an orographic theme-park ride seems like such a self-indulgent, narcissistic, attention-starved, over-entitled, high-cost, societally unhelpful, environmentally abusive, privileged pastime for bored rich kids with nothing better to do than leave frozen turds and dead sherpas behind as territorial status markers, fake imaginary bone spurs to defraud insurance companies into conveniently flying them down in helicopters after they've snapped their selfies, pin on another mass-produced badge of exceptionalism, then check off another performative achievement of conspicuous consumption on their luxury failson bucket lists.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to send them all to queue up and gawk at the Titanic in a deep-sea Disneyland Autopia traffic jam of carelessly built, overpriced, high-tech, clown-car CyberSubs?
From what I understand, the queue is not there always.
There is a very narrow window in spring during which the ascent is possible, due to weather (enough ice to get over some sections, but weather not leathal). If you go too early you freeze or get blown off in 0 visibility, if you go too late, the ice has thawed too much and you get washed off in the rapids.
Sometimes the window is only something like 10 days during which you (and everyone else) have to ascent and descent from basecamp.
If you are averse to the Daily Mail, you can try this article instead:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/22/mt-everest-gre...
Everyone should be averse to the daily mail
> If you are averse to the Daily Mail, you can try this article instead..
The irony of this though is that you just become bucketed in another consumer group.
Resist the packaging of yourself by media firms and marketing.
Try and consume news through the sources like AFP or Reuters (unfortunately not free anymore)
> ... bucketed in another consumer group ... Resist the packaging of yourself by media firms and marketing.
> Suggests some different buckets.
I thought the Guardian might decide not to show a photo of a corpse of someone probably with living friends and close relatives.
Nope, they do it too, like the Daily Mail, but with a big yellow GUI control to reveal it, like a weird macabre vintage "multimedia".
> Use the slider below to show a picture of the body of the climber known as Green Boots where it lies on Mount Everest. Some readers may find the image distressing
Just because the photo has been shown before doesn't mean it needs to be shown now, especially now that it's been identified, in in this context.
If poor Green Boots was staring up at the camera, empty eye sockets and all, I'd understand this. But there is nothing distressing in the image; the out-of-focus fuzziness makes the photo seem if anything substantially more macabre than it actually is.
Given Green Boots' fame, it was interesting to see what the actual scene climbers experience was. So I think the inclusion of the photo was justified, in these unusual circumstances.
> Nope, they do it too, like the Daily Mail, but with a big yellow GUI control to reveal it, like a weird macabre vintage "multimedia".
What a weird description. You make the content warning sound like it's a bad thing. Slider versus button hardly matters.
> I thought the Guardian might decide not to show a photo of a corpse of someone probably with living friends and close relatives.
You can't see anything but his clothes and this happened decades ago. A hidden by default photo isn't going to hurt those people. Maybe we could argue the article and attention itself could be distressing and shouldn't exist, but I think the news value wins out there.
I don't understand why we should not show photos of dead people, esp. famous ones like is the case here? And his face isn't even visible? What's the harm?
FTA:
Known simply as 'Green Boots' because of his distinctive bright green mountaineering footwear still protruding from the snow and ice, the remains have now been identified as Indian climber Dorje Morup, 47.
For decades, many mountaineers believed the body belonged to fellow Indian climber Tsewang Paljor, 28. The DNA comparison has now ended that long-running mystery.
The identification was confirmed by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) ahead of a bid to recover the body from Everest's notorious 'death zone' at an altitude of more than 8,000 metres.
The natural next question... where is Paljor?
Buried in snow?
He was one of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police.
Let us pay tribute to the courage of our Tibetan friends.
"The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) is a central armed police force in India, under the Ministry of Home Affairs. It is responsible for guarding India's border with Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It was formed in the aftermath of the Sino-Indian War of 1962"
Slightly off topic, but I first heard of Green Boots in the book The Climb. I picked it up completely randomly from a used book store six states away from home and wow what a find! It is a riveting story start to finish and I recommend it to everyone who is looking for a great read. My partner got her hyper fixation on high altitude mountaineering from it despite having no interest in ever actually climbing a mountain herself from reading it.
If you haven’t yet I highly recommend checking it out.
I've only read Into Thin Air, but that book makes Boukreev (author of The Climb) seem like an unreliable narrator. I have zero interest in high altitude mountaineering (I prefer lower altitude rock climbing) but I should probably check out The Climb to get both sides.
The Climb was a great response to it and according to my partner who then read more books about that year’s expeditions it is much closer to what happened than Into Thin Air.
Well, rest in peace. If they do remove him, I hope nobody else loses their lives in the process. I understand they often don't bring people down because of the difficulty and danger of carrying something has heavy as a person at that altitude.
"Rainbow Valley" is a region near the top with many bodies, so-called because of the variety of coats and other gear. Most photos on Google are AI-generated, though.
Greenboots is so iconic. Other people use him as a marker. Glad he got some attention. It’s always seemed a shame that it’s impossible to give him a proper burial.
> Indian climber Dorje Morup, 47.
Greenboots has been laying there frozen in the snow since the 90s. It even became a landmark for other climbers. Im glad they managed to at least identify the poor soul. Who knows how much longer he’s going to rest there..
Looks like they might retrieve the body.
> The Indo-Tibetan Border Police is soliciting bids from high altitude recovery agencies for a mission to retrieve the remains of a climber long known only as "Green Boots" from the mountain's northern slope
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mount-everest-green-boots-body-...
That's mentioned in the article
A lot of people come to HN for the comments. It’s often useful to gauge a story by public sentiment first.
That said, you’re ultimately correct that it’s in the article, but I appreciated it. :)
I think Mallory's body was left until 1999. He died in 1924.
Conrad Anker covered his body in scree. Subsequent expeditions have been unable to locate it. There's speculation that it was secretly removed from the mountain for political reasons.
Political? That sounds odd.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/01/it-doe...
The location of Mallory's body was unknown until 1999. The location of this one has been known pretty much the whole time.
I think another climber spotted him in the 1930s, but didn't mention it, because he didn't want to have a media circus.
Is this an AI generated comment?
I think—no
Serious question. When climbers are walking by bodies, do they check if they are still alive or need help? Is there nothing that could be done anyways? Face down means don’t bother checking?
Any human not moving in Rainbow Valley is presumed dead?
I imagine you’re trying to keep yourself alive and keep your eyes forward, and realize you can’t do anything to help them anyways.
There was a case of a climber (David Sharp) that was having issues and found shelter in the vicinity of green boots, and the theory was that part of why he died is that the 40 climbers who passed by him without stopping just assumed he was green boots and didn't pay attention.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/david-sharp
It's why green boots was moved (and is no longer a landmark), and David Sharp was also moved.
Interesting, I always thought it was the younger guy. Here's kudos to Dorje for flossing in those bright green boots at 47.
honestly just leave him. it's a more metal burial place than any other he'll get anywhere else.