The Everest route

Ascent follows the real South Col route up Mount Everest, the route Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay took in 1953. Each checkpoint has a nickname, an altitude and a true story.

Checkpoint	Altitude	Why it's famous
⛺ Tent City Base Camp	5,364 m	In peak season it's a small town of hundreds of tents. Yaks haul the supplies up.
🪜 The Ladder Maze Khumbu Icefall	5,700 m	Climbers cross crevasses on aluminium ladders lashed end to end. Go before sunrise, before the ice shifts.
🧊 Crevasse City Camp I	6,065 m	Tents on a snowfield ringed by crevasses. At night you can hear the glacier creak.
🤫 Valley of Silence Camp II	6,400 m	The Western Cwm is so sheltered from wind it's called the Valley of Silence. On sunny days it bakes like an oven.
🧗 The Blue Ice Wall Lhotse Face	6,800 m	About 1,100 m of hard blue ice, climbed on fixed ropes.
🪢 Cliffhanger Camp Camp III	7,160 m	Tents cut into ledges on a sheer ice wall. You stay clipped to a rope even outside your tent.
🟨 The Golden Stripe Yellow Band	7,500 m	Everest's rock was once the floor of an ancient sea. Marine fossils turn up near the top.
🇨🇭 The Swiss Rib Geneva Spur	7,800 m	Named by the 1952 Swiss expedition. A rib of black rock on the way to the South Col.
☠️ The Death Zone South Col	7,950 m	Above 8,000 m each breath holds about a third of the oxygen at sea level. Nobody acclimatises up here.
🌅 Sunrise Ledge The Balcony	8,400 m	A small platform where summit climbers rest and swap oxygen bottles, often as the sun comes up.
🎭 The False Peak South Summit	8,749 m	It looks like the top. It isn't. The real summit is still along a knife-edge ridge.
🪨 Hillary's Step Hillary Step	8,790 m	The last hurdle before the summit, named after Edmund Hillary, who climbed it in 1953.

The summit of Mount Everest is 8,849 m above sea level. In Ascent, nobody reaches it. The best climbers get to the Hillary Step, 59 m short.

Altitudes are the commonly cited approximate figures.

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