The lime-green boots shine vividly against the dazzling white of the snow. A man in a knitted fleece smiles as he carefully attaches his crampons for a historic ascent of the world’s tallest mountain. The footage is grainy and thirty years old, and CNN, which obtained it exclusively, describes it as the last known film of a climber whose identity remained a mystery to all but a small circle of mountaineers for three decades.
The storm that killed him struck Everest in 1996 and claimed eight lives, a disaster that filled Jon Krakauer’s best-selling first-hand account Into Thin Air. The deaths and astonishing survivals on the Nepal side overshadowed one of the enduring mysteries of that day: the fate of three Indian climbers attempting the summit from Tibet, the more challenging approach.
For decades, the frozen body of one of them lay exposed where he died, around 300 metres below the summit, curled up as if asleep. To generations of passing climbers he was known simply as “Green Boots,” after the green Koflach shoes protruding from the ice. Then, last year, in a covert high-altitude operation, a small team of Sherpas retrieved DNA samples from the corpse — and gave the landmark back his name. He is Dorje Morup, a mountaineer who grew up in northern India, near the border with Tibet, and served in a specialized Indian border police force. He was 47 when he died.
Now that India has confirmed who he was, the race is on to bring him home. This year the government began searching for an elite team of Sherpas willing to attempt one of mountaineering’s grimmest tasks: recovering a body frozen in ice for three decades from the death zone above 8,000 metres, where there is so little oxygen that humans cannot breathe unaided for long. Several diplomatic hurdles must be cleared before any recovery effort takes its first steps, and the mission asks a still harder question — do you risk more lives to bring home a dead body? “People knew ‘Green Boots’ as a landmark, but they didn’t know the person behind that title,” said Dawa Steven Sherpa, the Nepali mountaineer who heads the expedition company Asian Trekking.
The Border Police Who Climbed
It was the spring of 1996, and the climbers hoped to become the first Indian team to summit Everest by the northern route. Their day jobs were with the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, a specialized force raised in the aftermath of India’s disastrous 1962 mountain war with China to guard the 2,167-mile (3,488-kilometer) Himalayan frontier — some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth — and recruited prominently from the communities of India’s high mountains. Alongside Morup stood two climbers from Ladakh, the remote territory bordering Tibet: Tsewang Paljor and Tsewang Smanla. The three were “class-one mountaineers,” a fellow climber recalls, and close “like family.”
The never-before-seen expedition footage keeps their humor: inside a tent, one of the team leaders serves food from a steaming saucepan while the men joke about the inversion of hierarchy; beside the tents, a climber mimes a toast — “When I get up there, I’m going to do this.” Hundreds of miles from the ice, in a modest house on the plains of Punjab, a veteran mountaineer named Harbhajan Singh keeps the rest of the memory.
Singh, a leader of that ill-fated expedition and one of the last people to see the three alive, is 70 now, a retired ITBP inspector general; the medals, photographs and awards in his hall record a life spent never far from danger in the mountains. He had climbed with the three in the Indian Himalaya and marveled at their strength. “I have not seen them tired,” he said. When the team collapsed into their tents at the end of each grueling day on Everest, it was invariably Morup, Paljor and Smanla who still had the energy to brew tea and revive spirits, he remembered. Morup was easygoing, a “silent worker.”
“Whenever we were given any task, like fixing the ropes, he would always volunteer. He was technically very sound, physically very sound,” Singh said. The first sight of Everest stopped the whole team. “I bowed my head out of respect,” he added. “It was very beautiful.” But this was national service, not tourism; a successful Indian ascent from the north side “was a matter of pride.” Several other expeditions shared the mountain — from Japan, from Norway, a British team making a documentary with the actor Brian Blessed. “Everyone was excited.”
The Last Cup of Tea
On May 10, after weeks of arduous climbing, Singh led a six-man team — Morup, Paljor and Smanla among them — above the final camp at 8,300 metres (27,000 feet), just over 500 metres from the summit. Their task was to open a route to the Second Step, an almost vertical 40-metre bottleneck and the most technically challenging part of the climb, and to test the stability of a ladder fixed to the rock face. Beyond it lay the last stretch, in normal conditions about a four-hour climb. Late in the day, despite favorable weather reports, Singh saw clouds forming above the summit and read them as an omen. He decided not to proceed.
“If you try you will not be able to come back,” he told Morup, Paljor and Smanla. The three decided to push on, and later phoned base camp to say they were making an attempt for the summit. “I was the last one (to see them alive),” Singh said. “They had a cup of tea at the Second Step… As they were going up, I saw them fixing the rope. I thought, ok they will come back.” At such heights, with so little oxygen, he reflects, “you cannot judge whether you will be trapped... You have only one aim: I have to climb Everest.”
Singh and another climber turned back and reached the safety of the tents at 6 p.m. By then the three had radioed base camp: they had summited. “All of us were very happy,” said Singh. “But it was very short-lived.”
The storm rolled in quickly, catching climbers on both sides of the mountain off guard. On the Nepal side died the Americans Scott Fischer and Doug Hansen, the New Zealanders Rob Hall and Andy Harris, and Yasuko Namba of Japan. Down at Advanced Base Camp on the Tibetan side, the anxious Indian team could see two headlamps light up their descent, high on the mountain.
“One of the beams spiraling downwards, toward the Second Step. Then darkness, as they went out of our lives,” the expedition’s senior deputy leader, PM Das, wrote in his account of that night.
Descending the Second Step in those conditions would have been “very challenging,” said Jon Gangdal, a Norwegian climber leading a separate expedition on the north side who was in contact with the Indian team. “What hits the mountain so high are these jet stream winds,” he told CNN — winds laden with snow and ice, gusting at 150 to 200 kilometers per hour and plunging temperatures to minus 60 to 80 degrees Celsius (minus 79 to minus 112 Fahrenheit). “And the higher you are, the stronger the winds are.” Exposure, coupled with the lack of oxygen, rapidly becomes an “extremely dangerous” situation, he added.
Thirty years later, the name has come down the mountain ahead of the man. India intends to send Sherpas back into the death zone to bring Dorje Morup’s body home, a mission the reporting describes plainly as possibly impossible — the diplomatic hurdles first, then the physics of a frozen body at 8,000 metres, and behind both the question the mountain has always asked of the living: what is owed to the dead, and at what price.