Everest from Tibet

The familiar face of Everest is the one seen from Nepal, where the world’s highest mountain rises above a complex assemblage of high ridges and fine peaks including the attendant summits of Lhotse and Nuptse. But across the border, in the once forbidden land of Tibet, Everest stands in complete and unrivalled supremacy, overlooking expansive valleys of outstanding and contrasting beauty. It was to these northern and eastern flanks of the mountain that I found myself inextricably drawn, lured by the inspirational accounts of tweed-jacketed pioneers in whose footsteps few westerners had followed for almost half a century.

The view of Everest from Tibet, to which I refer specifically, is that from Rongbuk, which is where this image was taken. As George Leigh Mallory once said, "Everest leaves no complication to the eye. The highest of the world's mountains, it seems, has to make but a single gesture of magnificence to be the lord of all, vast in unchallenged and isolated supremacy.