Destination of the Week Trekking to Mt Everest

Mt. Everest rises to an imposing 8850 meters (29,030 feet), and after 29 years of numerous attempts, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first people to stand on the elusive summit on May 29,1953. . Since then, the South Col has seen over 1,000 ascents. It is by far, the most successfully climbed route on the mountain.
Called Chomolungma (“goddess mother of the world”) in Tibet and Sagarmatha (“goddess of the sky”) in Nepal, Mount Everest once went by the pedestrian name of Peak XV among Westerners. That was before surveyors established that it was the highest mountain on Earth, a fact that came as something of a surprisePeak XV had seemed lost in the crowd of other formidable Himalayan peaks, many of which gave the illusion of greater height.
In 1852 the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India measured Everest's elevation as 29,002 feet above sea level. This remarkably accurate figure remained the officially accepted height for more than one hundred years. In 1955 it was adjusted by a mere 26 feet to 29,028 (8,848 m). The mountain received its official name in 1865 in honor of Sir George Everest, the British Surveyor General from 18301843 who had mapped the Indian subcontinent. He had some reservations about having his name bestowed on the peak, arguing that the mountain should retain its local appellation, the standard policy of geographical societies.

Once the North and South Poles had been reached by explorers, the next geographical feat to capture the international imagination was Everest, often called the Third Pole. Attempts to climb Everest began in the 1921, when the forbidden kingdom of Tibet opened its borders to outsiders. On June 8, 1924, two members of a British expedition, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, attempted the summit. Famous for his retort to the press“because it's there”when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, Mallory had already failed twice at reaching the summit. The two men were last spotted “going strong” for the top until the clouds perpetually swirling around Everest engulfed them. They vanished for good. Mallory's body was not found for another 75 years, and it did not clear up the mystery as to whether the two men made it to the top before the mountain killed them. 

Ten more expeditions over a period of thirty years failed to conquer Everest, with 13 losing their lives. Then, on May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper, and Tenzing Norgay, an acclaimed Sherpa climber, became the first to reach the roof of the world. Their climb was made from the Nepalese side, which had eased its restrictions on foreigners at about the same time that Tibet, invaded in 1950 by China, shut its borders. World famous overnight, Hillary became a hero of the British empirethe news reached London just in time for Elizabeth II's coronationand Norgay was touted as a symbol of national pride by three separate nations: Nepal, Tibet, and India. So far more than 1500 people climbed Mt. Everest and many of them have made their record in the categories of first, fastest, without oxygen, women, numbers of time he climbed.