Lhotse

The fourth-highest mountain on Earth, 8,516 metres, sharing the South Col with Everest itself. Lhotse is the same massif as Everest from base camp through Camp 3. The two mountains are separated only by a high col at 7,906 metres. From below, Lhotse appears as a triangular wall of ice and rock attached to its taller neighbour. From above — from Everest's summit — Lhotse is the mountain immediately south, close enough to study in detail.

The first ascent was made in 1956 by the Swiss climbers Fritz Luchsinger and Ernst Reiss, three years after Everest. The climbing community had focused on Everest first, and Lhotse was treated for a time as a secondary objective on the same expedition logistics. The standard route, the West Face, follows the same approach as Everest as far as the Lhotse Face, then traverses east at the Yellow Band and ascends a steep couloir to the summit ridge.

The South Face of Lhotse is a different mountain. Three thousand vertical metres of rock and ice, the largest face in the Himalaya, climbed for the first time only in 1990 by a Soviet expedition led by Sergei Bershov. The route has been repeated rarely. The face holds avalanche danger that does not exist on the standard side. Reinhold Messner once described it as the great unsolved problem in Himalayan climbing.

Lhotse Middle, at 8,414 metres, was the last 8000-metre summit on Earth to remain unclimbed. It was first climbed in 2001 by a Russian team. The mountain's three summits — Main, Middle, and Shar — together form one of the most architecturally complex 8000-metre massifs in the Himalaya.