"New" Graphic Depicts Bodies on Everest

If you've ever seen a slideshow about climbing Mount Everest, you will likely have seen an image of "Green Boots."

Green Boots is the title given an unnamed body on the standard northeast ridge route—so named for his big, green Koflach mountaineering boots. Green Boots' body slopes downwards into a shallow alcove.

The climber has never been identified, but it is believed to be Head Constable Tsewang Paljor of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), although some have conjectured it might be his colleague, Lance Naik (i.e., Lance Corporal) Dorje Morup.

Both Paljor and Morup were members of a three-man ITBP climbing team that perished in the infamous blizzard of May 1996, which also took the lives of six other mountaineers.

For decades, Green Boots was a grim landmark along the route. Worse, in 2006, Green Boots became something of a decoy.

That year, British mountaineer David Sharp, in a hypothermic state, took shelter in either Green Boots' or a similar cave (although the location is unclear). It's estimated that as many as three dozen climbers passed Sharp not realizing he wasn't Green Boots. Sharp died there.

An excellent graphic showing bodies on Mount Everest has recently been circulating on social media, and since it's so well done, I thought I'd share.

As you can see, there are bodies all over the mountain. And, they're mostly in very high locations.

According to Big Think , "over 330 people are known to have died while attempting to climb Everest. Around 200 are still on the mountain. Recovering their bodies is somewhere between impractical and impossible."

What I found interesting was the apparently pretty big number of people who died around the base of the mountain.

Although I'm not sure how new the graphic is—I found references dating back to January—it certainly depicts a rather grim statistic on the world's tallest peak.

And, as some are wont to say, "all of them used to be highly motivated individuals."