Mystery identity of 'Green Boots' climber is finally solved after DNA test

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15943905/Mystery-identity-Green-Boots-climber-macabre-landmark-frozen-ice-dying-Everest-finally-solved-DNA-test.html

by FireBeyond • 20 days ago

121 98 20 days ago

dailymail.com

onemoresoop2• 20 days ago

Greenboots has been laying there frozen in the snow since the 90s. It even became a landmark for other climbers. Im glad they managed to at least identify the poor soul. Who knows how much longer he’s going to rest there..

KomoD• 20 days ago

Looks like they might retrieve the body.

The Indo-Tibetan Border Police is soliciting bids from high altitude recovery agencies for a mission to retrieve the remains of a climber long known only as "Green Boots" from the mountain's northern slope

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mount-everest-green-boots-body-...

msephton• 20 days ago

That's mentioned in the article

ChrisMarshallNY3• 20 days ago

I think Mallory's body was left until 1999. He died in 1924.

bhickey2• 20 days ago

Conrad Anker covered his body in scree. Subsequent expeditions have been unable to locate it. There's speculation that it was secretly removed from the mountain for political reasons.

mkl• 20 days ago

The location of Mallory's body was unknown until 1999. The location of this one has been known pretty much the whole time.

gokhan2• 20 days ago

Is this an AI generated comment?

fsckboy• 20 days ago

I think—no

onemoresoop2• 20 days ago

For real? You’re pretty off at spotting the LLM patterns and feel.

satvikpendem• 20 days ago

Indian climber Dorje Morup, 47.

ferfumarma• 20 days ago

FTA:

Known simply as 'Green Boots' because of his distinctive bright green mountaineering footwear still protruding from the snow and ice, the remains have now been identified as Indian climber Dorje Morup, 47.

For decades, many mountaineers believed the body belonged to fellow Indian climber Tsewang Paljor, 28. The DNA comparison has now ended that long-running mystery.

The identification was confirmed by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) ahead of a bid to recover the body from Everest's notorious 'death zone' at an altitude of more than 8,000 metres.

HeatrayEnjoyer• 20 days ago

The natural next question... where is Paljor?

lukan3• 20 days ago

Buried in snow?

sillysaurusx2• 20 days ago

Greenboots is so iconic. Other people use him as a marker. Glad he got some attention. It’s always seemed a shame that it’s impossible to give him a proper burial.

Mistletoe• 20 days ago

Interesting, I always thought it was the younger guy. Here's kudos to Dorje for flossing in those bright green boots at 47.

IgorPartola2• 20 days ago

Slightly off topic, but I first heard of Green Boots in the book The Climb. I picked it up completely randomly from a used book store six states away from home and wow what a find! It is a riveting story start to finish and I recommend it to everyone who is looking for a great read. My partner got her hyper fixation on high altitude mountaineering from it despite having no interest in ever actually climbing a mountain herself from reading it.

If you haven’t yet I highly recommend checking it out.

blackguardx• 20 days ago

I've only read Into Thin Air, but that book makes Boukreev (author of The Climb) seem like an unreliable narrator. I have zero interest in high altitude mountaineering (I prefer lower altitude rock climbing) but I should probably check out The Climb to get both sides.

IgorPartola2• 20 days ago

The Climb was a great response to it and according to my partner who then read more books about that year’s expeditions it is much closer to what happened than Into Thin Air.

krunck• 20 days ago

If you are averse to the Daily Mail, you can try this article instead:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/22/mt-everest-gre...

neilv• 20 days ago

I thought the Guardian might decide not to show a photo of a corpse of someone probably with living friends and close relatives.

Nope, they do it too, like the Daily Mail, but with a big yellow GUI control to reveal it, like a weird macabre vintage "multimedia".

Use the slider below to show a picture of the body of the climber known as Green Boots where it lies on Mount Everest. Some readers may find the image distressing

Just because the photo has been shown before doesn't mean it needs to be shown now, especially now that it's been identified, in in this context.

Dylan168073• 20 days ago

Nope, they do it too, like the Daily Mail, but with a big yellow GUI control to reveal it, like a weird macabre vintage "multimedia".

What a weird description. You make the content warning sound like it's a bad thing. Slider versus button hardly matters.

I thought the Guardian might decide not to show a photo of a corpse of someone probably with living friends and close relatives.

You can't see anything but his clothes and this happened decades ago. A hidden by default photo isn't going to hurt those people. Maybe we could argue the article and attention itself could be distressing and shouldn't exist, but I think the news value wins out there.

epihelix• 20 days ago

If poor Green Boots was staring up at the camera, empty eye sockets and all, I'd understand this. But there is nothing distressing in the image; the out-of-focus fuzziness makes the photo seem if anything substantially more macabre than it actually is.

Given Green Boots' fame, it was interesting to see what the actual scene climbers experience was. So I think the inclusion of the photo was justified, in these unusual circumstances.

bambax2• 20 days ago

I don't understand why we should not show photos of dead people, esp. famous ones like is the case here? And his face isn't even visible? What's the harm?

ChrisRR• 20 days ago

Everyone should be averse to the daily mail

tomaytotomato• 20 days ago

If you are averse to the Daily Mail, you can try this article instead..

The irony of this though is that you just become bucketed in another consumer group.

Resist the packaging of yourself by media firms and marketing.

Try and consume news through the sources like AFP or Reuters (unfortunately not free anymore)

zeafoamrun• 20 days ago

... bucketed in another consumer group ... Resist the packaging of yourself by media firms and marketing.
Suggests some different buckets.

nephihaha2• 20 days ago

The problem is that AFP, AP and Reuters supply the news to these big outlets and have done for decades. Sometimes this comes out in different papers using the same phrasing.

It means that our news is filtered through a handful of outlets, and is dependent on their own policies.

snorkel• 20 days ago

I can’t imagine having a hobby that involves passing by, and in some cases climbing over, the exposed remains of others who died doing that same activity.

killingtime74• 20 days ago

Yeah and also knowing if something happens your team will definitely leave you

Smoosh• 20 days ago

The movie Touching the Void is highly recommended.

tim3332• 20 days ago

Not always but in some circumstances it's hard to do much.

TFNA4• 20 days ago

A good friend of mine is a professional alpinist who focuses only climbing eight-thousanders with no supplementary oxygen. Through him I’ve met others and learned about this whole community. A number of people are as weird and eccentric as us here in computer-nerd circles; one is tempted to armchair-diagnose some as autistic and climbing as their fixation, so something like Green Boots or the death of peers just won’t stop them. (I envy them that their fixation gives them the physique of a Greek god and stories that can impress any listener, so they often manage to be very socially successful in spite of their quirks.)

1over137• 20 days ago

Aren't there only a dozen or so mountains above 8000 m? Can you really do that without supplementary oxygen? Amazing.

somenameforme• 20 days ago

From another perspective, nobody lives forever. And so long as somebody isn't e.g. leaving behind young children or whatever, what would be better than going out while looking at beautiful scenery doing something that you love? And it's not like it's fatalism or whatever. Everest is now up to a > 99% survival rate, and even the really deadly climbs are becoming more manageable over time. Better weather forecasting, gear, knowledge, etc.

ninth_ant2• 20 days ago

A climber who was pivotally involved in the failed rescue efforts for the dead person in this article immediately left on a solo climb of a nearby mountain. He died just over a year later in another climbing incident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Boukreev

rob742• 20 days ago

From what I read, the 1996 Everest disaster involved two completely separate groups: Adventure Consultants/Mountain Madness, who ascended via the South Route (from Nepal), and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition, who came via the North Route (from Tibet), so if they ever met, it was only at the summit. "Green Boots" was part of the latter group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Mount_Everest_disaster#Li...

Dylan168073• 20 days ago

Is climbing over something that happens?

For passing by, that says some about the danger of the hobby and much more about the effort of getting the body back. There's lots of common activities where you might pass by a spot someone died while doing it. Notably, driving a car nearly guarantees it.

dhosek2• 20 days ago

Or taking a walk. There’s an intersection two blocks from me where a pedestrian was killed in a hit and run accident shortly after I moved to town. The roadside memorial remained in place for nearly two years (I remember thinking that the people who lived in the house at the corner where the memorial was would probably like to remove it, but didn’t want to appear callous).

The worst part is that even though the intersection has been a 4-way stop for over a decade (the additional stop signs added after the hit and run), I’ve twice nearly been struck by drivers blowing the stop sign after I’ve entered the intersection as a pedestrian.

notahacker• 20 days ago

There aren't any common activities where visible corpses serve to remind you that around 1% of participants don't make it back

saghm• 20 days ago

There's a pretty stark difference been "someone died in this spot" and them still being there for you to see. Most people don't react nearly as viscerally to hearing that someone died as they do to literally seeing a corpse.

rich_sasha2• 20 days ago

The stepping over the dead bothers me little, frankly. As a mountaineer, it's hard to imagine a nicer end than dying at the top of a beautiful mountain. Beats the care home for sure.

What horrifies me is the idea of stepping past people who are alive and dying, because... Meh? Because I paid to go the top, not rescue stragglers? People often say they can barely walk forwards, never mind rescue someone, and it's true. But surely if you have any energy left in you, it should go to saving a life. And if it is so touch and go for you, then don't go.

drakonka2• 20 days ago

Do you think if you're in that kind of situation, where you are dying on a beautiful mountain, you would have it in you to appreciate the beauty around you? I was imagining it to be more like a cold, painful death rather than a nice end where you appreciate the mountain air.

potamic• 20 days ago

In some cases leaving people behind to die as well.

https://apnews.com/article/pakistan-porter-death-k2-norwegia...

dhosek2• 20 days ago

Back in the 90s, I went to see an IMAX film about climbing Everest and at the beginning, I was thinking, “I could do this,” but as it continued my view turned into, “I will never do this. This is insane.”

What’s really scary now is that it’s turned into something where people have to literally stand in line to reach the summit.

trhway2• 20 days ago

With today tech - cameras, drones - the tragedy would unfold like a reality TV.

Several months ago a woman broke her leg and stuck as a result at 6800m on Pobeda Peak in Russia and died in several days while the whole country was watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbr02F36YdQ

bambax2• 20 days ago

I could absolutely not do this, but "Into Thin Air" (which mentions Green Boots many times) is a great book. Highly recommended.

marcyb5st• 20 days ago

If you like hiking and tough, but rewarding, trails, consider the one to the base camp of Everest, or the roundtrip around the Annapurna. I did both and they are truly amazing without the craziness that has become climbing those Mountains. When I reached the basecamp it really felt like being in a weird Venice or Florence, with "tourist groups" and their guides. Crazy stuff.

Especially the Annapurna one, you still climb up to 5+k meters in altitude, and seeing the actual mountain still towering over you is crazy once you realize.

dreamcompiler2• 20 days ago

As a firefighter/EMT I occasionally have to deal with death, and I will even put myself in somewhat dangerous situations (that I've been trained for, and for which I have appropriate PPE) if there's a chance I can save a life.

But putting myself in a situation where the likelihood of dying is quite high for no reason other than to say I did it? No thanks.

Nevertheless I'm glad the family of Mr. Morup is no longer wondering what happened to him.

vasco2• 20 days ago

I mean you do firefighting because you like something about it, maybe the feeling of doing something good. So it should be understandable doing something dangerous for some good internal feeling. Your driving feel good feeling is just different from theirs. The fact you dismissed it to just be "to say they did it" doesn't mean that's how they feel about it. There's ways to be dismissive about being a firefighter too, but they aren't fair.

everyone• 20 days ago

I mean Everest is so gauche also, only rich morons do it.

nephihaha2• 20 days ago

Other mountains are available. Most of the mountains in Antarctica are unclimbed.

zanderwohl• 20 days ago

Well, rest in peace. If they do remove him, I hope nobody else loses their lives in the process. I understand they often don't bring people down because of the difficulty and danger of carrying something has heavy as a person at that altitude.

"Rainbow Valley" is a region near the top with many bodies, so-called because of the variety of coats and other gear. Most photos on Google are AI-generated, though.

Alien1Being• 20 days ago

He was one of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police.

Let us pay tribute to the courage of our Tibetan friends.

"The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) is a central armed police force in India, under the Ministry of Home Affairs. It is responsible for guarding India's border with Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It was formed in the aftermath of the Sino-Indian War of 1962"

LennyWhiteJr• 20 days ago

honestly just leave him. it's a more metal burial place than any other he'll get anywhere else.

iJohnDoe• 20 days ago

Serious question. When climbers are walking by bodies, do they check if they are still alive or need help? Is there nothing that could be done anyways? Face down means don’t bother checking?

Any human not moving in Rainbow Valley is presumed dead?

I imagine you’re trying to keep yourself alive and keep your eyes forward, and realize you can’t do anything to help them anyways.

jmalicki• 20 days ago

There was a case of a climber (David Sharp) that was having issues and found shelter in the vicinity of green boots, and the theory was that part of why he died is that the 40 climbers who passed by him without stopping just assumed he was green boots and didn't pay attention.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/david-sharp

It's why green boots was moved (and is no longer a landmark), and David Sharp was also moved.

ekjhgkejhgk• 19 days ago

What exactly is dangerous about this climb? What kills people specifically?

I hear people talk about the weather, visibility, injuries, etc etc. But all of those, if you stay put they're not problems, right? The only real problem I can think of is temperatures so low that your equipment can't contain heat loss for long enough and your body will shut down.

Ok temperature. So if this is the only danger (that can't be addressed by staying put) then could it be addressed by thicker clothes and/or electrically heated clothes?

Not trolling, real question.

chuckadams• 19 days ago

What exactly is dangerous about this climb? What kills people specifically?

Lack of oxygen, mostly. Bad in itself, but if the temperatures drop to dangerous lows, you're less likely to notice because you're out also of your head due to hypoxia/hypercapnia.

RetroTechie• 19 days ago

Article mentions helicopters can't (or safely) fly there due to thin air at altitude.

Sounds logical for existing helicopters designed to operate at lower altitude.

But wouldn't it be possible to design or adapt a helicopter specifically for this purpose?

It's not that aerodynamics / lift etc suddenly stop working, it's 'just' the numbers changing. Eg. a helicopter with longer rotor blades, or dual-rotor design might work? Bonus points if it could fly unmanned to not risk pilots' lives unnecessarily.

ChucklsTheBeard• 16 days ago

The wind is the major problem.

During the ~1 week of the year where it's safest to summit, they're typically looking at 15kph winds with up to 50kph gusts. Conditions are worse for the rest of the year. It's unsafe to try to hover near the ground in those conditions, and the thinner atmosphere just compounds that problem.

Also, you're talking about designing a new, specialized helicopter... that's not cheap, and someone would have to pay for it. What's the commercial incentive?

warumdarum• 19 days ago

Why is there no such thing as a thermal insulated, glued in place pressurizeable bubble tent?

Mystery identity of 'Green Boots' climber is finally solved after DNA test

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