Wife of Everest’s Green Boots speaks out for first time ahead of emotional recovery mission

The wife of the climber known as Green Boots, who died on Mount Everest 30 years ago, has spoken out for the first time ever before his body is due to finally be retrieved after three decades and repatriated to India.

He passed away in a huge blizzard while trying to summit the mountain in May 1996 and became known as “Green Boots” as he was wearing bright green boots when he died. His body lay visible to other climbers for years, perfectly preserved due to the cold temperatures 8,000 metres up, until 2014, when he was moved off the main path.

For decades, nobody knew who the body belonged to, but he was identified as 47-year-old Indian climber Dorje Morup earlier this year following DNA testing by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. After revealing his identity, the police issued a government tender seeking a team to retrieve Green Boots’ body from the mountain before October.

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As they are still looking for a specialist team to carry out the extremely dangerous mission, Dorje Morup’s wife, Konchak Yangskit, has spoken out and recalled the day she saw her husband for the last time. She still lives in Ladakh, the Indian-owned region in the Himalayas where they lived together.

“On some days, before I went to sleep, I would think that there’d be a knock on the door tonight and that when I opened, he would be there,” the 75-year-old told the BBC. “When he comes home, I will ask him: ‘Where were you all these years?'”

Yangskit said there was no doubt in his mind that he wouldn’t return. “He asked me to take care of the kids and come to the airport to greet him on his return,” she recalled. However, she had a strange feeling before he left. “I wondered if I was ever going to see him again.”

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Reuniting with his body will finally allow her to come to terms with his death. “Even though we organised cremation prayers at home, my heart refused to believe he had died. I didn’t see his dead body, so it was difficult for me to believe it,” she said.

Most people climb Everest from the Nepal side, but Morup and his group of five other climbers wanted to be the first Indian expedition to climb it from the Tibet side, which is controlled by Chinese authorities and is a far more difficult and dangerous mission, with steep slopes and harsher weather.

Three of the group turned back in a big snowstorm, but Morup and two others, Tsewang Smanla and Tsewang Paljor, kept going and were sadly killed in the blizzard. For years, people wrongly believed Green Boots was Tsewang Paljor. Now, after 30 long years, Morup and Yangskit will finally be reunited.

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Featured image credit: imageBROKER/Shutterstock and Wikimedia Commons