Lhotseल्होत्से

Lhotse is the fourth-highest mountain on Earth, rising to 8,516 m (27,940 ft), after Mount Everest, K2 and Kangchenjunga. Its main summit lies on the international frontier between the Khumbu region of Nepal's Solukhumbu District (Koshi Province) and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. The peak belongs to the Mahalangur Himal, the high Himalayan subrange that also contains Everest, Makalu and Cho Oyu, placing four of the world's six highest mountains within a single cluster.

The name Lhotse derives from Tibetan, combining "Lho" (south) and "tse" (peak), literally "South Peak" — a reference to its position immediately south of Everest. The two giants are joined by the South Col, a roughly 7,906 m saddle, so that Lhotse is sometimes described as part of the Everest massif rather than a wholly independent mountain. Reflecting this close connection, Lhotse has a relatively modest topographic prominence of about 610 m (2,000 ft) despite its enormous absolute height, because its connecting ridge to Everest does not drop far below the summit.

Lhotse is not a single point but a series of summits along a high crest. In addition to the Lhotse Main summit (8,516 m), the massif includes Lhotse Middle (Lhotse Central, 8,414 m / 27,605 ft) and Lhotse Shar ("East Peak," 8,383 m / 27,503 ft), along with the intermediate Lhotse Central II. Several of these subsidiary tops themselves exceed 8,000 m, making the Lhotse complex one of the most concentrated groupings of eight-thousanders in the Himalaya. To the north the mountain overlooks the Western Cwm and the upper Khumbu Glacier; to the south it presents the immense, steep Lhotse South Face, which plunges roughly 3,000 m toward the Barun region.

The first ascent of Lhotse's main summit was made on 18 May 1956 by the Swiss climbers Fritz Luchsinger and Ernst Reiss. They were members of a Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research expedition led by Albert Eggler, supported by a large team of Sherpas. The same expedition went on to make the second and third ascents of Everest just days later, with Jürg Marmet and Ernst Schmied reaching the Everest summit on 23 May 1956 — making this one of the most productive single seasons in early Himalayan mountaineering.

Luchsinger and Reiss approached via the Western Cwm and the Lhotse Face, the same upper basin used to reach the South Col of Everest. From their high camp they climbed the steep snow-and-ice couloir that leads toward the summit, encountering hard snow and a band of reddish rock near the top before reaching the summit in the afternoon. This summit gully, by which the peak was first climbed, remains the heart of the standard route today.

Lhotse's secondary summits were climbed considerably later. Lhotse Shar (8,383 m) received its first ascent on 12 May 1970 by the Austrians Sepp Mayerl and Rolf Walter. Lhotse Middle (8,414 m), long considered the highest unclimbed named summit on Earth, was first reached on 23 May 2001 by a Russian team that included Eugeny Vinogradsky, Sergei Timofeev, Alexei Bolotov and Petr Kuznetsov. The first winter ascent of the main peak was achieved on 31 December 1988 by the Polish climber Krzysztof Wielicki, one of the pioneers of Himalayan winter mountaineering.

The standard route on Lhotse shares almost its entire length with the South Col route on Everest. Climbers pass through the Khumbu Icefall, ascend the Western Cwm to Camp 2, and then climb the steep Lhotse Face on fixed ropes. Above Camp 3 and the Yellow Band, the routes diverge: Everest-bound parties traverse left over the Geneva Spur to the South Col, while Lhotse climbers continue right and up into the narrow summit couloir, sometimes called the Reiss couloir, that funnels to the main summit. Because so much of the line overlaps with the world's busiest 8,000 m route, Lhotse is frequently attempted in the same season as Everest.

The principal objective hazards mirror those of Everest's south side. The Khumbu Icefall is notoriously unstable, with shifting seracs and crevasses; the Lhotse Face is a long, exposed slope of hard ice prone to avalanches and rockfall, where a fall without secure protection can be fatal. The final summit couloir is steep, sometimes icy and tightly constricted, demanding careful movement at extreme altitude. As with all eight-thousanders, the area above roughly 8,000 m is the "death zone," where reduced oxygen sharply increases the risk of high-altitude pulmonary and cerebral edema, frostbite and exhaustion.

By far the most formidable and storied challenge on the mountain is the Lhotse South Face — a vast, steep wall regarded for decades as one of the great problems of Himalayan climbing. Yugoslav and Polish expeditions in the 1980s reached high points on the face without topping out, and Reinhold Messner led an unsuccessful European attempt in 1989. In April 1990 the Slovenian Tomo Cesen claimed a solo first ascent of the face, but the climb — made without witnesses or summit photographs — became one of mountaineering's most debated controversies and is widely doubted. The first ascent of the South Face generally accepted as verified was made on 16 October 1990 by Sergey Bershov and Gennadiy Karataev of a large Soviet expedition.

As the fourth-highest mountain on Earth, Lhotse is one of the fourteen peaks above 8,000 m and a coveted objective for climbers pursuing that collection. Although it stands directly beside Everest and shares most of its ascent route, it sees far fewer summits, in part because many climbers focused on Everest pass close by without continuing to Lhotse's top. The mountain's combination of extreme height, technical summit couloir and proximity to the world's highest peak gives it a distinctive place in high-altitude mountaineering.

The Lhotse massif is unusual in concentrating several 8,000 m summits along one crest. The long-standing status of Lhotse Middle as the highest unclimbed named summit until 2001 underscored both the technical difficulty of its connecting ridges and the historical priority climbers placed on main summits over subsidiary tops. The towering Lhotse South Face, meanwhile, has functioned as a proving ground for elite alpinism, attracting some of the most accomplished Himalayan climbers and producing one of the sport's enduring ethical controversies over unverified solo claims.

Lhotse's intertwined history with Everest extends back to the earliest exploration of the region. The Western Cwm and Lhotse Face were first studied and climbed during the reconnaissance and ascents that opened the southern approach to Everest in the early 1950s, and the 1956 Swiss expedition's double success on Lhotse and Everest cemented the two mountains' shared legacy. Today Lhotse remains a major commercial and alpine objective within Nepal's Sagarmatha (Everest) region, valued both for its height ranking and for the formidable, still seldom-climbed challenge of its south wall.