Green Boots on Everest: The True Story Behind the Mountain's Most Famous Landmark

Green Boots is the nickname climbers gave to a human body that rested in a limestone alcove at roughly 8,500 m on Mount Everest's northeast ridge for nearly three decades, identified by the distinctive green mountaineering boots still on its feet. DNA testing commissioned by the Indian government identified him in 2026 as Dorje Morup, not Tsewang Paljor as had been assumed for three decades.

• Who he is: Lance Naik Dorje Morup of India's Indo-Tibetan Border Police, confirmed by DNA testing in 2026.
• Who he was thought to be: Tsewang Paljor, a 28-year-old ITBP Head Constable who died on the same slope.
• When he died: the storm of 10 and 11 May 1996, which killed eight people across two routes.
• Where he lies: a limestone alcove at roughly 8,500 m, just below the First Step on the Northeast Ridge.
• What happens next: an Indian government recovery mission was reported to be targeting around October 2026.

For most of that time, mountaineering literature and guiding lore treated the body as almost certainly Tsewang Paljor, a 28-year-old Head Constable with India's Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) who died in the same storm that killed eight people across two routes on 10 and 11 May 1996.

Who were the three ITBP climbers lost in 1996?

Three men from the ITBP expedition's six-person summit team never came back down: Subedar Tsewang Samanla, Lance Naik Dorje Morup, and Head Constable Tsewang Paljor. All three were from Ladakh, and all three had built real mountaineering careers inside the paramilitary force that patrols India's high-altitude borders with China, the kind of institutional access to glaciers and thin air that produced strong technical climbers long before any of them set foot on Everest. Their expedition, led by Commandant Mohinder Singh, was attempting the mountain's north side, the Tibetan approach that climbs the Northeast Ridge rather than the Nepali south side most trekkers associate with Everest Base Camp. This site's companion piece on the Everest death zone covers why the mountain keeps its dead at all; this piece stays with one specific body, the storm that created it, and the identification announced in 2026.

What happened in the storm of 10 May 1996?

Ten May 1996 was the day two Everest disasters overlapped on opposite sides of the mountain. On the south side, storm conditions killed climbers from Rob Hall's and Scott Fischer's commercial expeditions, the tragedy Jon Krakauer documented in Into Thin Air. On the north side, the ITBP's summit party of Samanla, Morup, and Paljor radioed their expedition base at around 15:45 Nepal time claiming they had reached the top, becoming the first Indians to summit Everest from the Tibetan side. Krakauer's own account disputes the claim, placing the group closer to 8,700 m, roughly 150 m short of the true 8,849 m summit, based on the timing of their radio call and the terrain they described. Two other members of the six-person team, Harbhajan Singh and Jodh Singh, had already turned back with frostbite before the summit push. No further radio contact came from Samanla, Morup, or Paljor after that final call. Descending into darkness and a worsening blizzard, none of the three reached their 8,320 m high camp. A Japanese team climbing the same route the following day reported passing one or two motionless, severely frostbitten climbers near the Second Step, and continuing toward the summit rather than attempting a rescue, an account that itself became a smaller, disputed footnote inside the larger tragedy. By the time the weather cleared, three ITBP climbers were confirmed dead, bringing the total lost across both sides of the mountain that weekend to eight, the deadliest single-season toll Everest had recorded up to that point.

Where is Green Boots' Cave on Everest?

One of the three bodies came to rest in a small limestone alcove at approximately 8,500 m, tucked beneath a rock overhang just below the route's First Step, roughly 350 vertical metres short of the summit. Climbers on the Northeast Ridge route pass directly beside this alcove on both the ascent and the descent, and within a few climbing seasons the cave had acquired an informal identity separate from whoever lay inside it: guides and clients alike began referring to the spot simply as "Green Boots' Cave," using it as a psychological and physical waypoint the way hikers elsewhere might use a distinctive boulder or a switchback. "We're past Green Boots, keep moving" became a real sentence spoken at 8,500 m by people focused entirely on their own survival, a detail that says as much about the death zone's effect on ordinary compassion as it does about the man himself. The nickname stuck for one practical reason: the boots were green Koflach plastic mountaineering boots, a distinctive and recognisable brand and color combination among climbers who had never met the man wearing them and, for three decades, did not reliably know his name.

The First Step and Second Step are the two rock bands that define the technical crux of the Northeast Ridge above 8,500 m, short vertical or near-vertical sections of exposed rock and ice that every climber on the north side route must free-climb or ascend on fixed ropes and, in the case of the Second Step, a permanently fixed ladder installed by a Chinese expedition in 1975. Green Boots' Cave sits just below the First Step, meaning it is one of the last features climbers pass before the technical climbing begins in earnest, and one of the first they reach on the way back down when exhaustion, low oxygen, and often full darkness are at their worst. That position, at the boundary between the ridge's technical section and its more straightforward upper snow slopes, is part of why the cave functioned so naturally as a mental waypoint despite what it contained.

What happened to David Sharp at Green Boots' Cave?

Ten years after the 1996 storm, the same cave became the site of a second death that turned Green Boots from a grim curiosity into the center of a genuine ethics debate inside mountaineering. On 15 May 2006, David Sharp, a 34-year-old British climber attempting Everest alone and with a limited oxygen supply, became immobile from exhaustion and frostbite inside Green Boots' Cave during his descent from the summit. Over the following hours, more than 40 climbers are reported to have passed him, ascending or descending the same fixed ropes, before he died. At least one climber, Maxime Chaya, radioed for help and attempted to give Sharp supplemental oxygen, but was told there was nothing more that could be done at that altitude with the resources on hand. When the story broke, it produced sustained public criticism of the modern guided-climbing industry, with Sir Edmund Hillary himself among the most prominent voices expressing dismay that a dying man could be passed by so many people without a rescue attempt. The Sharp case remains the sharpest illustration of why the death zone above roughly 8,000 m is treated as a genuinely different environment from the rest of the mountain: above that altitude, a rescue attempt can cost a would-be rescuer their own life, and the mountaineering community has never fully resolved what obligation, if any, that reality removes from climbers who encounter someone dying.

Why was Green Boots misidentified for 30 years?

For most of the period between 1996 and 2024, "Green Boots" and "Tsewang Paljor" were treated as effectively the same fact in guidebooks, documentaries, and trekking blogs, this site's own earlier coverage in the Everest death zone guide included. The identification rested on circumstantial reasoning rather than forensic proof: Paljor was one of three ITBP climbers who died on that stretch of the mountain on the same day, his equipment was consistent with what remained visible on the body, and no competing claim carried enough evidence to dislodge the assumption. But circumstantial reasoning is not the same as certainty, and mountaineering researchers and journalists, including Krakauer, noted for years that the body could just as plausibly have belonged to Dorje Morup, the other ITBP climber who vanished on the same slope that day. Without DNA testing or a clear match to expedition photographs, there was no way to settle the question definitively, and the mountaineering world largely settled for the more famous name instead. Mistaken or unresolved identity is not unique to Green Boots on this mountain: George Mallory's own body went unidentified on Everest's north side for 75 years after his 1924 disappearance, found in 1999 only through a clothing label sewn into his jacket, at roughly 8,160 m, itself not far below where Green Boots would later come to rest. Extreme cold preserves remains at these altitudes for decades, which is precisely why definitive identification so often has to wait for physical evidence like DNA or documented personal effects rather than memory or assumption.

What did the 2026 DNA test reveal?

In 2026, government documents and reporting from outdoor journalism outlets including Outside revealed that a quiet Indian government mission had collected a DNA sample from the remains in 2024, part of preparations for a formal identification and recovery effort. The result reversed three decades of assumption: Green Boots is Dorje Morup, not Tsewang Paljor. Morup, a Lance Naik in the ITBP, had summited alongside Samanla and Paljor on the same radio call and died in the same storm; the physical evidence that had long been read as confirming Paljor's identity turned out to confirm his teammate's instead. Following the identification, the Indian government began planning a specialist recovery mission, reported to involve an experienced team of Sherpas tasked with extracting Morup's remains from the ice at roughly 8,500 m and transporting them down the mountain and on to Delhi, with a target of around October 2026. Recovery missions at this altitude are exceptionally difficult and expensive: a comparable multi-body recovery effort in 2024 was estimated at $75,000 to $80,000 per body, reflecting both the technical climbing required to reach remains encased in ice at extreme altitude and the risk taken on by the recovery team itself. If the mission succeeds, the cave beneath the First Step that has served as an involuntary landmark since 1996 will, for the first time in 30 years, be empty. Recovering Morup's remains is reported to matter to his family well beyond a scientific correction, since Hindu and Buddhist funeral rites practiced across Ladakh generally require the body itself, rites that have been impossible to perform for nearly three decades while Morup lay on the mountain under another man's name. The identification carries a harder edge for Tsewang Paljor's family, too: if Green Boots was Morup all along, Paljor's own remains are not confirmed to be in that cave, or reliably located anywhere else on the route, leaving his family's search effectively back where it stood in 1996.

How did Green Boots become so widely known?

Two productions did more than anything else to fix Green Boots in public memory outside the climbing world. Discovery Channel's reality series Everest: Beyond the Limit, which ran from 2006 to 2009 following Russell Brice's commercial expeditions on the north side, captured footage from the same 2006 season in which David Sharp died near the cave, introducing the landmark and its grim nickname to a mainstream television audience for the first time. A separate 2007 documentary from New Zealand broadcaster TV3, Dying for Everest, interviewed climbers and expedition leaders directly involved in the 2006 season and examined the Sharp case and the broader culture of summit-focused climbing that had grown up around landmarks like Green Boots' Cave. Between these two productions and the extensive newspaper coverage the Sharp case generated at the time, Green Boots crossed over from a piece of insider mountaineering shorthand into one of the most recognisable individual death-zone stories on Everest, discussed in outdoor media, university ethics courses, and mountaineering memoirs well beyond the small community of climbers who actually pass the cave each season.

What Green Boots Means for Everest Base Camp Trekkers

Everest Base Camp itself sits at 5,364 m, and the highest point most trekkers on this site's itineraries reach, Kala Patthar, tops out at 5,644 m; both are more than 2,800 vertical metres below Green Boots' Cave and the Northeast Ridge route it sits on. Trekkers to Everest Base Camp never approach the death zone, the fixed ropes, or the route where Paljor, Samanla, and Morup died, and the standard Everest Base Camp Trek involves no technical climbing at all. The relevance for trekkers is the lesson in altitude and judgment the story carries, a theme this site's altitude sickness guide covers in practical terms for the elevations trekkers actually reach. Readers planning their own trip to the region can see exactly how a well-paced itinerary manages that altitude gain on the main Everest Base Camp Trek page, and the broader question of why so many climbers besides Paljor, Samanla, and Morup remain on the mountain is covered in full in this site's guide to dead bodies on Everest.