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I hate to ask stupid questions all the time, but are those all glaciers?

[in best John Kerry voice] "Yes and no".

All those you see are the glaciers and their valleys.

I think this picture was shot in infrared so you are seeing the area beneath the snow.

Now the big thing that kind of looks like a blown out volcano just right of center is the Everest complex.

Mount Everest proper is the bigger peak on the left of the complex with the 3 lines coming together like a pyramid. The flat surface of it that is running on the left is the North Face (see the "brownish" photo I posted earlier) which is the Tibetan side. The long Glacier/Valley running off to the top left part of the picture is the Rongbuk glacier. Until 1953, this was the way everyone tried to scale Mt. Everest (Nepal then being "forbidden" to foreigners.... they all failed)

Now...look to the "Bowl" behind (to the right of the Everest pyramid in this picture)

That is the "Western Cwm". Cwm is the Welsh word for "valley" and was so named by George Mallory who was lost on the mountain in 1924 and the man who answered "Because it is there." when asked why scale Mt. Everest. BTW...his frozen body was found at around 26,000 ft. in 1999. His partner, "Sandy" Irvine has yet to be found. But I digress.

The two other mountains that make up the Everest Complex and surround the Western Cwm are Lhotse and Nuptse.

Nuptse sits across from Everest the opening of the horseshoe shaped bowl.

Lhotse is at the top of the bowl and connects to Everest at what is called the "South Col".

The South Col is a flat area at over 26,000 ft. (The Death Zone) and is the location of "Camp Four", the final resting place before the final assault to the top of the mountain.

This route through the "Bowl" of the Western Cwm is called the Southern Route and was pioneered in the British Expedition of 1953 in which Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first confirmed people to reach the summit and return. (Romantics like me wish to believe that Mallory made it to the top and died on his way down)

The route begins at the Khumba Icefall which, if it were running water, would be rapids. But instead is huge house sized boulders of ice that shift as the glacier runs "rapidly" downhill. Most deaths on Everest expeditions are at the Icefall.

Then you go up the valley, half-way up Lhotse to curve up to the left over the Geneva Spur to the South Col and then to the top.

Simple. ;o)