Dorje Morup was a keen mountaineer and had climbed many peaks, including Stok Kangri, the highest peak in the Ladakh mountain range
For 30 years, a dead body known as "Green Boots" has been lying in the snow, nestled under an overhanging rock, not far from Mount Everest's summit.
The lime mountaineering boots worn by an Indian climber who died in 1996 have been a grim trail marker for many climbers on their way up the world's highest peak ever since.
Now India is looking for a specialist high-altitude recovery team to undertake a complex and risky mission to retrieve what they say is Dorje Morup's body – arguably the most famous of the hundreds whose bodies have been left frozen on the mountain.
They hope they are on the cusp of returning his remains to friends and family who never gave up hope he'd come home.
"On some days, before I went to sleep, I would think that there'd be a knock on the door tonight and that when I opened, he would be there," Morup's wife told the BBC.
"When he comes home, I will ask him: 'Where were you all these years?'"
Warning: This story contains a picture of a dead body.
The body of Indian climber Dorje Morup who died 30 years ago wearing his green mountaineering boots has become a grim marker along the road to Everest's summit
The night before he left to be part of a historic Indian expedition on Everest, Morup sat with his wife at his home in Ladakh, an Indian-administered territory in another part of the Himalayas.
He made her a promise: that he would come back a hero and make his country proud.
"He asked me to take care of the kids and come to the airport to greet him on his return," Konchak Yangskit told the BBC at her home.
A lance naik, or lance corporal, in the Indo Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the force guarding much of India's border with China, 48-year-old Morup was no stranger to Himalayan trekking.
But Yangskit says she had a strange sense of foreboding that night: "I wondered if I was ever going to see him again."
Morup was one of six climbers on the ITBP expedition attempting to reach the top of Everest – which lies on the border between Nepal and the Chinese-governed territory of Tibet.