Everest Base Camp elevation

Base camp is about 3,485 m below the summit of Everest, which is 8,848.86 m, and about 280 m below the prayer-flag summit of Kala Patthar, the viewpoint above Gorak Shep.

Kilimanjaro’s summit, 5,895 m, is higher than both.

Because the camp sits on a moving glacier. It stretches more than a kilometre along the Khumbu Glacier, so Cicerone’s guidebook prints 5,275 m and the painted boulder says 5,364 m, and both are about right.

The Kathmandu Post describes the camp as a shifting, melting river of ice and boulders. Where you stand on it changes the height you read.

Near base camp the glacier was thinning by about 1 m a year, a 2018 Leeds University study found, as the BBC reported. Crevasses open under the tents, and teams level the rocky ground again as the ice moves.

In June 2022 Nepal said it would move the camp 200 to 400 m lower, off the melting ice. As of December 2025 it was still at 5,364 m, and a new five-year action plan proposed a study of moving it.

In Nepal’s Khumbu, the Everest region, at the foot of the Khumbu Icefall and inside Sagarmatha National Park (Sagarmatha is the Nepali name for Everest). The walk starts at the mountain airstrip at Lukla: about 42 km to Gorak Shep, the last village, then along the glacier to the camp.

Lukla is a flight of 30 to 35 minutes from Kathmandu. How to get to Everest Base Camp covers the flights and the walk in, and Everest Base Camp trek distance and days the walk stage by stage.

Everest has two base camps. The south camp in Nepal, 5,364 m, can only be reached on foot; the north camp in Tibet, about 5,150 m, is at the end of a paved road.

We run treks on the Nepal side.

Not the summit. From the camp, the top of Everest is hidden behind Nuptse; you look up at the Khumbu Icefall instead. For the summit, trekkers climb Kala Patthar above Gorak Shep the next morning.

Nobody lives there. In the spring climbing season, from March to the end of May, climbing teams pitch a tent city of up to about 1,500 people on the glacier; trekkers visit by day.

The Kathmandu Post describes a dense tent city of climbers and support staff, with stoves, heaters and generators. Our groups sleep at Gorak Shep, 5,164 m, and walk to the camp and back on day 8. To climb on from it, see our Everest expedition.

On our plan, day 8 is the long one: about three hours from Lobuche to Gorak Shep, then the walk along the glacier to base camp and back, 7 to 9 hours in all.

The Nepal Tourism Board calls the glacier treacherous ground: the route can be hard to find, and there is always a risk of slipping on the ice. That stretch alone can take up to five hours there and back.