Why India is launching a mission to recover 'Green Boots' from Mount Everest site after 30 years

India is reportedly launching a mission to recover "Green Boots" because officials have finally identified him, and now want to bring him home. DNA testing has confirmed that the body, frozen on Mount Everest for nearly 30 years and known worldwide by its bright lime-green boots, belongs to Dorje Morup, an Indian police climber who died in a 1996 storm near the summit. With his identity settled, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police has invited specialist high-altitude agencies to retrieve his remains from a rocky ledge at roughly 8,500 metres on the Northeast Ridge, with the operation expected to be completed by October, a report by The Guardian said.

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For three decades, climbers heading up Everest's northern route walked past this body without knowing his name, using it instead as an informal checkpoint on the way to the top. Now that mystery is solved, and India is preparing one of the most difficult recovery missions the mountain has ever seen, one that could finally give Morup's family the closure they have waited 30 years for.

Not Just Any Rescue Job

This will not be a simple pickup. The official tender demands agencies with a proven history of similar high-altitude recoveries, ideally with recent Everest experience. Every team must include at least six Sherpas who have summited multiple times, and every stage of the job must be documented in detail. Officials expect the entire mission, from planning to execution, to stretch across 40 days — a necessity given how brutal the "death zone" becomes even in the more forgiving months of summer and early autumn.

The Boots That Became a Landmark

Tucked into a small alcove just below the section climbers call the First Step, the body has been impossible to miss for decades, largely because of its bright lime-green Koflach mountaineering boots. Climbers trekking to the summit used the spot as an informal marker, some even radioing base camp the moment they passed it. Over the years, without anyone officially naming him, "Green Boots" turned into one of Everest's strangest and most photographed fixtures.

Until now, even his identity was disputed — for years, nobody was sure whether the body was Morup's or that of fellow climber Tsewang Paljor, who died on the same expedition. The DNA test has finally settled that question.

What happened on the deadly night in 1996

While the world remembers the 1996 Everest disaster for what happened on the mountain's southern side, a season immortalised in books and films, a separate tragedy played out quietly on the north face involving an Indian police team led by Mohinder Singh.

On 10 May that year, seven members set out to become the first Indians to summit from the Tibetan side. Four turned back partway due to worsening weather and fatigue. The remaining three, Tsewang Smanla, Dorje Morup, and Tsewang Paljor, pushed on and radioed base camp that evening to say they had reached the top. Thick cloud and zero visibility later cast doubt on whether they had truly summited or stopped roughly 150 metres short, though official mountaineering records still count it as a successful climb.

Then the storm hit. Trapped in the death zone overnight, the climbers battled hurricane-force winds and freezing temperatures with no shelter.

When Help Never Came

The next morning, a Japanese climbing team following the same route encountered the three Indians, alive, but severely frostbitten and fading fast. The Japanese climbers continued upward without stopping to help in any major way. All three Indian mountaineers later died from exposure.

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The incident sparked outrage back in India, with accusations that the Japanese team had ignored a basic duty to assist climbers in danger. Those formal complaints were eventually dropped, but the ethical question they raised, whether reaching the summit should ever come before saving a life, has never fully gone away. Even the Himalayan Database, in its own review of the tragedy, questioned whether cultural attitudes toward unsolicited help may have shaped how events unfolded that day.

Bringing a Body Down From the Death Zone

Very few operations on Earth are as physically demanding as an Everest body recovery. Thin air affects both strength and judgment, and a frozen body, stiff, heavy, and still strapped into decades-old gear, is brutally hard to move across icy, technical terrain.

There is also a cultural dimension to consider. Many of the Sherpas who will carry out the mission come from Buddhist traditions that call for great care and respect when handling human remains.

Guy Cotter, a New Zealand-based expedition leader who helped coordinate an Everest body recovery back in 1997, has seen this kind of mission up close. Speaking to The Guardian, Cotter said the recovery "would have been a good thing to have done a long time before now." He pointed out that bringing a climber's remains home can give grieving families real closure, but only if the operation doesn't put more lives on the line. Recovery missions, he warned, have sometimes claimed lives themselves, and the margin for error on a mountain like Everest stays razor-thin.

A Mountain Still Full of the Missing

Green Boots is far from alone up there. An estimated 200 bodies remain scattered across Everest, many in spots too dangerous or too expensive to reach. Recent cleanup efforts have managed to bring a few down when conditions cooperated, but each mission takes months of careful planning and no small amount of luck with the weather.

For the families of the 1996 Indian expedition, this could finally be the mission that brings one of their own home. Whether it actually goes ahead now depends on two things: finding a team qualified enough for the job, and a narrow window of Everest weather willing to cooperate.