‘Green Boots’: India plans daring mission to bring home soldier's body from Everest's death zone after 30 years
For thirty years, a lifeless figure clad in bright lime-coloured boots has lain undisturbed beneath a rocky overhang near the summit of the world's tallest
For thirty years, a lifeless figure clad in bright lime-coloured boots has lain undisturbed beneath a rocky overhang near the summit of the world's tallest mountain. Climbers making their final push to the top of Everest have long passed this eerie waypoint, known simply as "Green Boots" — a grim but unavoidable marker on the route. Indian authorities now believe they know exactly whose body it is, and they are moving to bring him home, BBC reported. A Mission Three Decades In The Making India is reportedly scouting for an elite high-altitude recovery team willing to take on one of mountaineering's most hazardous assignments: retrieving the remains believed to belong to Dorje Morup, an Indian climber who perished during a 1996 expedition. His case is considered among the most well-known of the several hundred bodies still stranded on Everest's slopes. For his family, the mission represents a long-delayed chance at closure. Morup's wife has described nights spent half-expecting a knock at the door, imagining her husband finally returning after all these years. A Promise Made Before Departure The evening before he set off, Morup — then 48 and serving as a lance naik with the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, the force responsible for guarding much of India's frontier with China — sat with his wife at their home in Ladakh.
He vowed he would return victorious and asked her to look after their children until he came back. Morup was part of a si member ITBP team attempting an ambitious feat: becoming the first Indian expedition to summit Everest via its more punishing Chinese, or northern, route, rather than the more commonly used Nepalese side. Midway through the climb, a snowstorm forced three of the six team members to turn back. Morup pressed on with two teammates, Tsewang Smanla and Tsewang Paljor, and the trio eventually reached the 8,849-metre summit. Tragedy struck during their descent, when a blizzard overtook all three climbers. Two of the bodies have never been located. The third — identified for years by his distinctive lime-coloured footwear — has remained at roughly 8,500 metres ever since. Correcting A Case Of Mistaken Identity For a long time, "Green Boots" was widely believed to be teammate Tsewang Paljor rather than Morup. However, accounts from surviving expedition members, combined with the location of the climbers' final radio transmission, have since pointed authorities toward a different conclusion. An unnamed ITBP official told BBC News Hindi that clothing and climbing equipment recovered in recent years helped confirm the body's likely identity as Morup, adding that the force had never given up on bringing him home.
The BriefWire