Dorje Morup was a keen mountaineer and had climbed many peaks, including Stok Kangri, the highest peak in the Ladakh mountain range<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 arguably the most famous of the hundreds whose bodies have been left frozen on the mountain.<\/p>\n
They hope they are on the cusp of returning his remains to friends and family who never gave up hope he'd come home.<\/p>\n
"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.<\/p>\n
"When he comes home, I will ask him: 'Where were you all these years?'"<\/p>\n
Warning: This story contains a picture of a dead body.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He made her a promise: that he would come back a hero and make his country proud.<\/p>\n
"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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But Yangskit says she had a strange sense of foreboding that night: "I wondered if I was ever going to see him again."<\/p>\n
Morup was one of six climbers on the ITBP expedition attempting to reach the top of Everest \u2013 which lies on the border between Nepal and the Chinese-governed territory of Tibet.<\/p>\n