German climber survives earthquake on Mount Everest

STORY: :: German alpinist recalls the ‘spicy moment’

when an earthquake struck on Mount Everest

:: Mount Everest, Nepal

:: January 7, 2025

:: Jost Kobusch, Alpinist

“So this morning I was on Everest in my camp at 5700 meters and, well, my tent was shaking pretty intensely. So I woke up, I looked out and I saw many avalanches coming down, seracs collapsing, big chunks of glacier like exploding and a pressure wave hitting my tent, doing some damage there. And well, it was just a spicy moment.”

“So when I descended, there were some certain sections where I had to walk through that debris, and those were the sections where I was definitely speeding up to reduce the amount of risk exposure that I had due to the time that I spent there.”

“I’ve been in earthquakes before on Everest in 2015 I experienced a very severe one here. And I know there are aftershocks and it’s just logical that there will be more stuff coming down with aftershocks. So it just felt right to go down. It just didn’t make sense to go higher up. There was no fear. It was just a logical aha moment where I was just like, this makes sense. Let’s go back to the base and let’s observe and see what happens.”

“I will definitely get some good rest right now. It’s late early in Nepal, and it’s going to be nice to finally sleep in a building again, not in a tent and feel safe. And I will take some time to observe the situation and make an informed decision on whether to go up or not.”

The magnitude 6.8 quake’s epicenter was about 80 km (50 miles) north of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. Tremors also shook buildings in neighboring Nepal, Bhutan and India.

The impact was felt across the Shigatse region of Tibet, home to 800,000 people.

At least 126 people were known to have been killed and 188 injured on the Tibetan side, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported. There were no reports of deaths elsewhere.