Lhotse is the fourth-highest mountain in the world at 8,516 metres, on the Nepal–Tibet border, and it is joined to Everest by the South Col — a saddle at about 7,900 metres. Its name is Tibetan for south peak, which describes exactly what it is: the southern summit of the Everest massif rather than an independent mountain.
Thousands climb its face without climbing the mountain
The standard route up Everest from Nepal does not go up Everest for most of its length. From Camp 2 in the Western Cwm, climbers ascend the Lhotse Face — a wall of blue ice rising some 1,100 metres at an angle around 40 to 50 degrees — to reach the South Col, and only then turn left onto Everest's south-east ridge.
Everyone using that route therefore spends a substantial part of the climb on Lhotse. The fixed ropes on the face are among the most heavily used in the Himalaya, and the traffic jams and rockfall incidents reported on Everest frequently happen on Lhotse's ice.
Because the two mountains share an approach, base camp and acclimatisation ladder, a number of climbers attempt both in a single season — summiting Everest and then, a day or two later, continuing from the South Col up Lhotse's couloir. The pairing is common enough to have become a recognised objective.
How high, exactly
Lhotse's accepted height of 8,516 metres comes from Survey of India measurements refined over decades, and like every Himalayan figure it carries small uncertainties — different national surveys have published slightly different numbers, and the question of whether to measure to rock or to the snow cap adds a metre or two of ambiguity.
The mountain is also, like the rest of the range, still rising. GPS measurement indicates the Himalaya are being uplifted at several millimetres a year as the Indian plate continues to drive north, partly offset by erosion and by the occasional sudden adjustment of a large earthquake. The 2015 Gorkha earthquake is thought to have dropped parts of the range slightly while raising others.
The wall nobody has properly solved
Lhotse's south face is the opposite proposition: roughly 3,200 metres of steep rock and ice, one of the largest and most dangerous faces in the world, and for decades the most sought-after unclimbed problem in Himalayan mountaineering.
Attempts through the 1970s and 80s read as a list of the era's strongest climbers failing on it. Reinhold Messner called it the face of the twenty-first century after his own attempt. Jerzy Kukuczka, one of the greatest high-altitude climbers of the period, died on it in 1989 when a rope broke high on the wall.
A Soviet expedition climbed the face in 1990 by a route to the summit, in a large siege-style effort — an ascent whose details have been debated but which is generally credited. What has not been done is a direct line up the centre of the face in modern alpine style, and the wall retains its reputation because it combines extreme altitude, sustained steepness, objective danger from falling ice, and a length that makes retreat from high on it very difficult.
Nuptse, the third wall
The horseshoe enclosing the Western Cwm is completed by Nuptse, at about 7,861 metres — west peak of the same name meaning, in Tibetan, west peak. Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse are therefore a matched set of directional names describing positions within one massif rather than three independent mountains.
Nuptse's south face, seen from the trek to Everest Base Camp, is the wall that dominates the view from Dingboche and Lobuche, and it hides Everest almost entirely from the valley below. It was first climbed in 1961 by a British expedition, and its ridges have since produced some of the harder routes in the Khumbu.
First ascent, and the expedition that got two mountains
Lhotse was first climbed on 18 May 1956 by Fritz Luchsinger and Ernst Reiss, members of a Swiss expedition led by Albert Eggler.
That expedition is notable for what else it achieved. Having put two men on Lhotse, it went on to make the second and third ascents of Everest a few days later — the first since Hillary and Tenzing three years earlier. A single Swiss party therefore claimed a first ascent of the world's fourth-highest mountain and the repeat of its highest within a fortnight, which stands as one of the more efficient Himalayan seasons on record.
Lhotse's subsidiary summits proved harder. Lhotse Middle, at about 8,410 metres, remained the highest unclimbed named point on Earth until a Russian team reached it in 2001.
Is it a mountain at all?
Lhotse raises the question mountaineering uses topographic prominence to answer: how far must a summit rise above the highest saddle connecting it to a higher peak before it counts as independent?
Lhotse's prominence is about 610 metres — the height it rises above the South Col, which connects it to Everest. That clears the 500-metre threshold commonly used for an independent peak, so it qualifies, but only just. By contrast Makalu, 19 km away, has a prominence exceeding 2,300 metres and is unambiguously its own mountain.
The distinction matters for the list of 8,000-metre peaks. There are fourteen by the usual reckoning, and that count depends on prominence rules: several points above 8,000 metres — Lhotse Middle, Lhotse Shar, Everest's south summit, several Kangchenjunga subpeaks — exceed the height but not the independence test, and are excluded as subsidiary summits rather than counted.
What the Khumbu looks like from below
From the Nepali side, Lhotse forms the head of the Imja valley and is the dominant wall seen from Chukhung and from Dingboche, with its south face rising almost sheer above the valley floor. Everest is largely hidden behind the Nuptse–Lhotse ridge from lower down the trek, so many walkers on the Everest Base Camp route spend days looking at Lhotse without realising which mountain is which.
The Khumbu is Sherpa country, and the mountain's Tibetan name reflects the Tibetan-derived language and Buddhist culture of the region — as does Everest's local name, Chomolungma, and Nepali Sagarmatha. Tengboche monastery, on the trekking route below, is the religious centre of the valley.
Sagarmatha National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, covers the area above about 2,845 metres. Its problems are the familiar ones of a heavily visited high-altitude park: waste management above the last road, firewood and fuel logistics, and the glacial lakes forming behind moraine dams as the ice retreats — Imja Tsho below Lhotse being among the most closely monitored in Nepal for outburst flood risk.
The Western Cwm, and the valley of silence
The approach to the Lhotse Face runs up the Western Cwm, a broad glacial basin enclosed by Everest on one side, Nuptse on the other and Lhotse at its head. George Mallory named it in 1921, borrowing the Welsh word for a steep-sided valley, without ever entering it.
It is sometimes called the Valley of Silence, because the enclosing walls cut the wind almost completely. That stillness has an unexpected consequence: with no air movement and intense high-altitude sunlight reflecting off snow on three sides, daytime temperatures in the Cwm can become oppressively hot, and climbers moving through it in the middle of the day risk overheating and dehydration at 6,000 metres. Parties therefore travel it early and rest through the middle of the day.
Reaching it requires passing the Khumbu Icefall, the most notorious hazard on the Nepali side of Everest — a chaotic, constantly moving jumble of seracs and crevasses through which a route must be reworked each season by the team known as the Icefall Doctors. Everyone climbing Lhotse by the standard route passes through it, several times, during acclimatisation rotations.
Winter, and the sub-peaks
Lhotse was first climbed in winter on 31 December 1988 by Krzysztof Wielicki, solo, in a single push — one of the defining feats of the Polish era of Himalayan winter climbing, a period in which Polish climbers took the first winter ascents of most of the 8,000-metre peaks.
The massif's subsidiary summits took much longer. Lhotse Shar, at about 8,383 metres, was climbed in 1970 by an Austrian party. Lhotse Middle, at roughly 8,410 metres, held out until 23 May 2001, when a Russian expedition reached it — at which point it had been, for years, the highest unclimbed named point on Earth.
Neither counts as a separate 8,000er, because neither rises far enough above the connecting ridge to qualify as independent under the prominence rules the list uses. They are, in the accounting that matters to record-keepers, parts of Lhotse rather than mountains in their own right — which is a slightly odd status for summits higher than eleven of the fourteen recognised peaks.
Set beside Everest, a mountain in a shadow
Lhotse is a curious case in mountaineering's attention economy. It is higher than every mountain on Earth except three, it carries one of the great unclimbed problems on its south face, and thousands of people ascend a large part of it every year — most of them thinking about somewhere else.
Compared with Everest it receives a small fraction of the summit attempts, and its name is far less widely known than those of mountains hundreds of metres lower. Being attached to the most famous mountain in the world turns out to be an effective way of disappearing.
