The Hillary Step was a nearly vertical rock face with a height of around located very high on Mount Everest at approximately above sea level, near the summit. It was located on the southeast ridge, halfway between the "South Summit" and the true summit, and it gave climbers the last real challenge before reaching the top of the mountain via the southeast route. The Step was known as the most technically difficult part of the typical Nepal-side Everest climb. In some climbing seasons after heavy snowfall, the rock face could have been bypassed with snow/ice climbing. Climbing the Hillary Step has the danger of a drop on the right and an drop on the left. The Hillary Step was where the late Anatoli Boukreev found a body hanging from ropes at the base of the step in 1996, as stated in his book The Climb. One expedition noted that climbing the Hillary Step was "strenuous", but did offer some protection from the elements. An unaided Hillary Step climb was rated as a Class 4 rock climb, but at almost altitude. The Hillary Step was destroyed most likely during a massive earthquake that hit the region in 2015.
History
The Step was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first known person, along with Tenzing Norgay, to scale it on the way to the summit during the 1953 British Mount Everest Expedition. Hillary and Tenzing first climbed the Hillary Step on 29 May 1953 by climbing the crack between the snow and the rock. Hillary reported that the snow on the step was harder than at lower elevation. Hillary wrote in 1953 : The step had been seen by the first assault party of Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans when they reached the South Summit on 26 May 1953 at 1 pm. Seated on the snow dome, they could look closely at the last 300 vertical feet to the Summit. It was not the gentle snow ridge they’d hoped for... but a thin crest of snow and ice on rock, steep on the left, overhanging as a cornice on the right. It was interrupted by a formidable-looking 40 foot rock step two-thirds of the way up.
Modern climbing
In more recent years, the ascent and descent over the Step were generally made with the assistance of fixed ropes, usually placed there by the first ascending team of the season. With increasing numbers of people climbing the mountain, the Step frequently become a bottleneck, with climbers forced to wait significant amounts of time for their turn on the ropes, leading to problems in getting climbers efficiently up and down the mountain. Only one climber at a time could traverse it. In a good climbing situation, it was about a two-hour climb from the South Summit to the Hillary Step, one to two hours to climb the cliff, and then another 20 minutesfrom the top of the Hillary Step to the summit of Mount Everest. It was suspected in 2016 that the April 2015 Nepal earthquake had altered the Hillary Step, but there was so much snow it was not clear whether it had truly changed. Kenton Cool wrote that the Hillary Step "is only 12 to 15 feet high." It was reported in May 2017 by climbers including mountaineer Tim Mosedale that "the Hillary Step is no more", although the full extent and interpretation of the changes are still nascent. There are multiple pictures of before and after. Another climber who thought the Step changed by 2016 was six-time Everest summiter David Liaño Gonzalez, who summited in 2013 and 2016, when the relevant changes are reported to have occurred. However, some important Nepalese climbers, including Ang Tshering Sherpa, chairman of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, have reported that the Step is still intact but covered in more snow than before. Later in the year, after seeing a large exhibition of photos from 2006 to 2016 he did agree that at least the upper portion of the step had indeed changed. Peter Hillary, Edmund Hillary's son, was asked his opinion about the Step based on photos. He agreed it was there in part, but seemed to think it had undergone some sort of a change, noting especially what looked like a fresh broken rock. By early June 2017 more reports and photographic evidence came in, with Garrett Madison reporting that the step had conclusively changed. Dave Hahn, who has climbed Everest 15 times, was shown photos and agreed that it was changed. A special kind of mourning hit the community with realization of missing rocks and freshly hewn scars of new coloured rock at this landmark feature. Hahn noted how it was great tribute to Hillary and Tenzing and he thought of them whenever he scrambled over it. Later in 2017, mountaineering guide Lhakpa Rangdu did a photo exhibition at the Nepal Tourism Board showing how the Hillary Step area had changed in the relevant years. Rangdu has climbed Everest multiple times since 2005, including before and after the big Nepal earthquake, and he is a trained photographer. The combination of these skills—high-altitude photography and mountaineering—allowed him to provide a photographic history of the Hillary step feature, and he has stated that it is indeed gone, crumbled by the Ghorka earthquake that devastated Nepal and Chinese Tibet. Before 2015, the descending sequence along Everest's southeast ridge was:
