Since 1996, a frozen body has marked the north route of Everest at 8,500 meters of altitude. Climbers call it Green Boots, and for almost thirty years they used it as a reference point, without stopping too much to think about who he had been in life.
It was taken for granted that it was Tsewang Paljor, a member of the Indian expedition who was trapped in a storm on May 10, 1996, along with Tsewang Smanla and Dorje Morup. But a DNA test carried out by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police changed the story: the body belongs to Morup, not Paljor.
Now India is preparing an expedition to recover him, in an area so extreme that it is known as the death zone. The body, frozen for almost three decades, is estimated to weigh up to 200 kilos, and bringing it down from that altitude will be one of the most difficult operations in the history of mountaineering.
