Will Cockrell, Simon & Schuster, $39.99 (more…)
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April 18, 2014, began like any normal day during climbing season on Mount Everest. Some 200 workers set out from Base Camp for the Khumbu Icefall, a perilous glacial passageway where soft snow gives way to bottomless crevasses and icy plinths topple from above without warning. At 6.45am, a building-sized chunk broke off the mountain, triggering an avalanche of ice. Sixteen workers died; all were Nepali. They lost their lives carrying not just essential equipment but creature comforts up the mountain for Western-owned guiding companies. For the first time ever, Sherpas went on strike. It was the end of an era on Everest—an era pioneered by New Zealanders.
The most obvious connection between our tiny country at the bottom of the world and the precipice at the very top of it is Sir Edmund Hillary, who, with Tenzing Norgay, was first to reach the summit in 1953. Decades later, Kiwis won another race on the mountain that proved far more transformative: to be the first guides to take paying clients to the top.
Back then, the idea of amateurs blundering around in the “death zone”—the point above 8,000 metres where the body starts shutting down from lack of oxygen—sounded preposterous. But in 1992, star New Zealand climbers Rob Hall and Gary Ball pulled it off, bringing six clients to the summit and down again with their company Adventure Consultants. (Fellow Kiwi Guy Cotter was a guide on that first trip, and later took over the company.) At that time, only a few hundred mountaineers had repeated Hillary and Norgay’s achievement. Since then, there have been more than 11,000 successful ascents, the overwhelming majority by guided climbers who have paid between US$50,000 and $300,000 to stand on the roof of the world.
Everest, Inc. is the history of this industry, and as Will Cockrell observes, it was always marked by a certain hubris. Hall and Ball started planning an Everest offering before they had summited the mountain or acted as guides on any Himalayan peaks. Once they’d cracked the code, they and their competitors doubled their clientele each year—even though only a few dozen elite guides worldwide were capable of staffing these operations.
Hillary did not approve, grumbling: “It is becoming so that you can go to the beach for your holiday or climb Everest.”
A reckoning came in 1996, when eight people died in a storm on the mountain. Four belonged to the Adventure Consultants team, including Hall himself. One survivor, writer Jon Krakauer, published a searing account, concluding that a traffic jam at the Hillary Step kept climbers in the death zone dangerously late, and that Hall failed to turn around several who were struggling. But rather than killing the Everest market, Krakauer’s book sent demand summit-high. One operator told Cockrell, “1996 was the best marketing Everest ever had”.
Cockrell thinks Everest gets reduced to an unfair caricature: luxury tents at Base Camp, conga lines on the southeast ridge, a mountain covered in litter and the frozen bodies of the poorly prepared. All true, but so are other stories—such as the career of Russell Brice (another Kiwi), who for decades ran one of the biggest guiding companies, Himex, without losing a single client.
Still, Cockrell doesn’t sugarcoat Everest’s starkest inequities. The fiction that novices could “conquer” the mountain was made possible by armies of Sherpas employed to carry supplies, oxygen tanks and sometimes clients and to fix ropes and ladders in the riskiest spots. For years, they received limited training, modest wages and minimal compensation for their families if injured or killed. After the strike of 2014, that began to change. Today, Everest guiding is dominated by Sherpa-run companies—which are so successful that they have started marketing guided trips up far deadlier and more technical peaks, such as K2. Even in a new era, the hubris remains a constant.
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