Mount Everest is the highest mountain on earth (video). It is located in the Himalayas on the border between Nepal and Tibet / China (map). Mount Everest is part of the Khumbu Himal range. The base camp can be reached via the Sino-Nepal Road road from Kathmandu in Nepal or from Lhasa in Tibet/China. The road to Mt.Everest is at the crossroad of the Zhangmu Sino-Nepal Road from New Tingri(Shagar) to Old Tingri County. Starting 30 kilometers (20 miles) south from New Tinggri, one will reach a checkpoint. 11 kilometers (7miles) west of the checkpoint, a new road and an old one turn off south to Mt.Everest Base Camp.
The mountain has three main faces: South Face, North Face and the Kangshung Face. Lhotse (8516m) and Nuptse (7861m) are in close vicinity to Everest (click here for a panorama from the summit of Everest). The Tibetan name is Chomolungma meaning "Mother of the Universe". The English name was given by Andrew Waugh, the British surveyor-general of India in 1865
Radhanath Sikhdar was the first who calculated the height of Mount Everest (then Peak XV) who discovered it to be the tallest mountain on earth. His calculations resulted in a height of 8839m. Today, the height of Mount Everest is usually quoted to be 8848m. On October 9, 2005, China's State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping officially announced the height of Everest as 8,844.43m ± 0.21m. Mount Everest grows about 3 to 30 mm per year due to plate tectonics.
Jon Krakauer writes in "Into Thin Air": "The actual particulars of the event are unclear, obscured by the accretion of myth. But the year was 1852, and the setting was the office of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India in the northern hill station of Dehra Dun. According to the most plausible version of what transpired, a clerk rushed into the chambers of Sir Andrew Waugh, India's surveyor general, and exclaimed that a Bengali computer named Radhanath Sikhdar, working out of the Survey's Calcutta bureau, had 'discovered the highest mountain in the world.' (In Waugh's day a computer was a job description rather than a machine.) Designated Peak XV by surveyors in the field who'd first measured the angle of its rise with a twenty-four inch theodolite three years earlier, the mountain in question jutted from the spine of the Himalaya in the forbidden kingdom of Nepal. ... In 1865, nine years after Sikhdar's computations had been confirmed, Waugh bestowed the name Mount Everest on Peak XV, in honor of Sir George Everest, his predecessor as survey general."