Lying frozen on Mount Everest for nearly 30 years, wearing 'Green Boots', one man's body is now at the center of a risky mission undertaken by India

For nearly three decades, climbers ascending Everest from the Tibetan side passed the same grim landmark: a frozen body, curled inside a small rocky alcove, clad in bright lime-green boots. Many radioed base camp as soon as they arrived there. Now, that landmark is finally being given a name and a way home. According to CBS News, India is planning a “high-risk” mission to retrieve the remains, which were identified through DNA testing after three decades of uncertainty.

“Green Boots”, as the body has been called since 1996, is one of Everest’s most photographed landmarks. This summer, an Indian government agency is sending a team back up the mountain to finally bring him down.

Who was Green Boots, really?
For years, most people thought Green Boots was Tsewang Paljor, a young Indian climber who perished near the summit in 1996. That assumption turned out to be wrong. According to CBS News, tender documents reviewed by The Guardian and AFP showed that DNA testing identified the climber as Dorje Morup, one of Paljor's own teammates from the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), who died in the same storm.


Morup was a member of an ITBP team trying the first Indian ascent of Everest from the Tibetan north side. According to Wikipedia's documented timeline of the case, the formal identification was made in 2026 through DNA testing, ending a decades-long debate over the body's identity.

A storm that became one of Everest's deadliest seasons
Most people are familiar with the 1996 Everest disaster through Jon Krakauer’s best-selling book “Into Thin Air,” which describes the deaths on the south side of the mountain. Fewer are aware of the parallel tragedy on the north side that took the lives of Morup and two teammates, Tsewang Smanla and Tsewang Paljor.

The three climbers had pushed on for the summit late on May 10th, 1996, and radioed in that they had reached the top. Soon after, a violent storm blew in, and they were caught in savage wind and cold above 8,000 meters. Not one of them ever came back alive. According to Explorersweb, the Indian climbers were found the next day by a Japanese team that was climbing the same route. The Japanese continued their ascent without offering substantial help. The Indians were alive but badly frostbitten. This sparked a debate lasting years about climbing ethics at extreme altitude.

Why nobody attempted this sooner
It’s a good question: if the body had been out in the open for nearly 30 years, why hadn’t someone recovered it earlier? The truth is, almost nothing about this mission is easy.

Green Boots rests at about 8,500 meters, or roughly 27,890 feet, up in what mountaineers call the "death zone," where the oxygen levels are just a fraction of what they are at sea level and the human body begins to deteriorate the longer it stays there. The Tribune says the ITBP’s retrieval tender calls for a team of highly experienced Sherpas because the technical skill needed at that altitude is rare.

Then there is the simple physical problem of moving a body that has been frozen solid for decades; ice-locked remains can be considerably heavier than a living person and difficult to move across exposed, technical terrain. And then there is geopolitics: the body lies on the Tibetan side of the mountain, which is under Chinese administration, so the operation requires coordination with Chinese authorities before the remains can be transported towards Nepal and eventually flown home to India.

A narrow window, a thin margin for error
The Tribune reports that the ITBP’s tender schedules the mission for June to September 2026, before snow and weather once again render the route inaccessible.

The delicate balancing act at the core of this kind of mission was summed up by New Zealand mountaineer Guy Cotter, who led a similar Everest recovery in 1997. Recovering bodies has cost more lives than it has saved in the past, Cotter told Explorersweb, calling it “a very thin line.”

What this means for the families left behind
If the mission is successful, Morup’s family will finally be able to perform the religious rites that have been impossible for nearly three decades. He’s not the only one in his story. There are thought to be more than 200 bodies scattered on Mount Everest, many of them left where they fell because it is too dangerous or too expensive to recover them

For now, it’s a question of having the right team, the right clearance from Chinese authorities, and the weather holding out long enough this summer to finally bring Dorje Morup home.