Erasing a Macabre Landmark: India’s Costly Mission to Retrieve ‘Green Boots’

For three decades, a pair of lime green mountaineering boots protruding from a limestone cave near the summit of Mount Everest has served as a grim waypoint for climbers. The frozen remains, colloquially known to the international climbing community simply as Green Boots, are a stark monument to the mountain's lethality. Now, the Indian government is preparing to dismantle this macabre landmark. The Indo-Tibetan Border Police is currently financing a highly complex operation to recover the body of Dorje Morup, the man who has spent thirty years frozen at an altitude of 8,500 metres.

The push to bring Morup down from the so-called death zone is a perilous exercise in state prestige and delayed closure. Morup was a forty-eight-year-old lance corporal in the Indo-Tibetan Border Police who perished during a historic 1996 expedition. While three members of his six-man team wisely turned back in the face of an encroaching snowstorm, Morup and two colleagues, Tsewang Smanla and Tsewang Paljor, pressed upward. They achieved their goal, reaching the 8,849-metre summit, before a blizzard struck during their descent and killed all three. The bodies of his two companions were never located, leaving Morup alone to mark the route on the steep Chinese-governed side of the peak.

Retrieving a frozen corpse from such an extreme altitude is an undertaking fraught with immense logistical hurdles and physical danger. Temperatures routinely plummet to minus forty degrees Celsius, and oxygen levels are roughly a third of those found at sea level. The northern slope, where Morup lies, is notoriously steep and lacks the established support infrastructure present on the more frequently traversed southern Nepalese route. According to local mountaineering guides, bringing a body down from this specific location is exceptionally difficult even during the relatively calm spring climbing season, let alone in the unpredictable weather of autumn.

Despite these formidable obstacles, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police intends to complete the recovery by September. The organisation is actively seeking specialist Sherpa rescue teams capable of executing the extraction. The identification of Morup, confirmed in recent years through his specific clothing and climbing equipment, has catalysed the current effort. An anonymous official from the border police indicated that recovering the remains is now a priority for the force.

For the family waiting in the Indian-administered territory of Ladakh, the mission represents the end of a thirty-year limbo. Morup had promised his wife he would return a hero. Instead, his legacy was reduced to a few photographs, assorted medals, and a certificate from the Chinese government confirming he reached the summit at half past five in the evening on the tenth of May, 1996.

His son, Punchok Dorjai, intends to hold a funeral near the Martyrs Park in Leh if the extraction succeeds. The family views his sacrifice as an act of national service deserving of formal martyrdom. Whether dispatching a modern rescue team into the death zone to retrieve a man who gambled his life thirty years ago is a rational deployment of resources is secondary; for the Indian border police, institutional pride dictates that Green Boots must finally be brought down from the mountain.

Written by Sandy van Dongen sandy.vandongen@alpineweekly.com