Arrival at base camp

The BBC is retracing the footsteps of the 1953 British Everest expedition as they made their way up to base camp in preparation for the first successful assault on the mountain's summit. BBC correspondent Jane Hughes is keeping a diary of her journey.

Day 11: Gorak Shep to Everest Base Camp

Every day our trek has taken us into wilder and more extraordinary terrain. Our final day of walking was no exception.

From Gorak Shep we passed into a landscape that looked like an ice desert. The path skirted the great Khumbu Glacier - a frozen river beneath the mountains, great crevices zigzagging across it and blue-green ice lakes dotting its surface.

Alongside the lakes were ice caverns the size of cathedrals, vast frozen stalactites hanging from their ceilings.

This was the route taken by the 35 or so hardy men and women who embarked on what must be one of the most daunting running challenges ever completed.

The Everest Marathon passed us early in the morning - the runners heading 26 miles (41 kilometres) down the valley to Namche Bazar - a journey that took us 3 days in the opposite direction.

We saw them at the three-mile point, already looking tired though amazingly cheerful.

They were battling not only rough and difficult paths, and a route that took them endlessly up and down, but the difficulty of altitude.

Marathon runners battled difficult paths

Up here there is only half the oxygen there is a sea level.

For one runner it all proved too much. He collapsed on his way to Gorak Shep and had to be carried down the mountain on the back of a porter for urgent treatment for acute altitude sickness.

We continued on our way in the opposite direction towards base camp, struck by the eerie silence which was broken only by the occasional rumble of avalanches as great pieces of snow detached them from the mountainsides.

Overhead was the intimidating bulk of Mount Everest, its summit shrouded in clouds.

Inhospitable

As we neared base camp, we passed onto the glacier itself. Columns of ice, eroded into strange ice sculptures, stood on either side of our route and rocks perched crazily on pedestals of ice.

And then into the camp, a small city of some 700 tents scattered across the brutally inhospitable landscape.

This is an area not designed for human habitation. It is a great expanse of rock piled into awkward heaps, the tents perched on top or in the hollows.

Everest has claimed many lives

Sleep on a lumpy bed of rock does not promise to be comfortable.

It was snowing steadily when we arrived and the clouds were low so we could not admire the view.

Members of the 1953 expedition, who set up their base camp a short distance away, were similarly daunted by the terrain.

John Hunt, the expedition leader, called it "lifeless without the compensation of the stark grandeur to impress the mind, breathlessly hot on a still windless morning, it became chill and drear as the clouds billowed up the valley and the snow began to fall".

From here the 1953 team began their assault on the mountain, beginning forays up the perilous Khumbu Icefall and sending supplies up to establish higher camps.

We intend to stay here and picture their journey as they gradually made it closer and closer to the top until they finally conquered the mountain on 29 May 1953.