Sherpa guides, porters, and high-altitude workers deserve a book in which they are heroes and not victims. Western Everest guides, meanwhile, deserve a book in which they are shown as well-intentioned but human, and not as villains.
Will Cockrell, acknowledgements for Everest, Inc.
A review of Everest, Inc. by Will Cockrell
In 1989 Walt Unsworth wrote what I have previously described as the Everest history to end all Everest histories. Starting with the British invasion of Tibet in 1904 led by Francis Younghusband, which opened up the possibility of an expedition to Everest, and ending with a fatal Czech attempt to climb the South-West Face in alpine style in 1988, the book covered every major expedition on every major route.
By the time Walt Unsworth’s book was published, there had been just 274 ascents of Everest by 244 different people. By the end of the 2023, these numbers had shot up to 11,996 ascents by 6,664 different people. In the years since its first ascent in 1953 by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, Everest has been climbed by 20 different routes, but almost all ascents in the last few years have been by just one of two routes, the North Ridge and South-East Ridge, known as the standard routes on the north and south sides of the mountain.
Indeed, the last ascent of Everest by a completely new route was in 2009, when a Korean team ascended a new line on the South-West Face. If the mountaineering history of a peak is judged by its exploration and ascents by new routes then you could argue that the history of Everest has ended, but that’s far from being the case. In fact, in the last 35 years, Everest has entered a new era, one that is derided by climbing purists and has been neglected by mountain historians – until now.
Since 1992, the majority of Everest ascents have been made by clients and staff of commercial operators. Now, thanks to journalist Will Cockrell, this unique period has the history it deserves.
As Will says in the introduction to Everest, Inc. (which carries the mischievous subtitle The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry on Top of the World), ‘the modern history of Everest is, fundamentally, the history of the guiding industry on Everest’.
This is predominantly an aural history. In the course of his research, Will interviewed a staggering 120 industry insiders, including company owners, mountain guides, Sherpa mountaineers, commercial clients and elite climbers (and even some bozo called Horrell). He has managed to open a window into the climbing culture of the world’s highest peak in a way that no one has done before.
Over the last 30 years, the history of Everest guiding has been subject to many misconceptions. Will attributes this partly to the success of Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (who declined to be interviewed for Everest, Inc.) Probably the most widely read book about mountaineering ever written, Into Thin Air is an eye-opening memoir of two commercial Everest expeditions in 1996 that went horribly wrong. Its accounts of what Will describes as smug guides, bumbling clients and overcrowding still forms many people’s perception of what guiding on Everest involves.
Everest, Inc. provides a comprehensive antidote for all those people who judge the modern Everest by Into Thin Air, or by tendentious accounts in the popular press of overcrowding, human trash, excrement or selfish climbers stepping over dead bodies. It does this by taking readers on a guided tour of Everest in the modern era.
Will attributes the birth of guiding on Everest to the American businessman Dick Bass. In 1981, 51-year-old Bass was the owner of a ski resort in Utah with virtually no mountaineering experience when he enlisted the help of one of his staff, a mountain guide called Marty Hoey, to guide him up Denali, the highest mountain in North America.
After reaching the summit and discovering a talent for high altitude, he hit upon the idea of climbing the highest peak on every continent. The first four chapters of Everest, Inc. recount Bass’s journey to achieving his dream. He became the first person to climb all of the seven summits when he climbed Everest with David Breashears in 1985.
When Bass published his book Seven Summits the following year, climbing the seven summits as an adventure challenge became a thing. A new race was born. Several guiding companies started advertising seven summits packages, including Eric Simonsen, who had co-founded a company called International Mountain Guides (IMG) in 1981 to offer guided trips all over the world, including the Himalayas.
But guided trips up Everest remained elusive. Breashears didn’t consider his ascent of Everest with Dick Bass to be guiding, although it’s questionable whether Bass would have made it without him. As early as 1979, German climber Hannalore Schmatz invited a Denali guide called Ray Genet to accompany her on Everest, but she was rather more experienced than the commercial clients of today, and again it wasn’t considered guiding. Tragically, both Schmatz and Genet died on descent after Genet refused to abandon his struggling companion to save himself.
A little known American called Todd Burleson is believed to have published the very first advert for a guided ascent of Everest in the August 1989 edition of Outside magazine. He had registered his company Alpine Ascents International a few years earlier, but when he advertised a trip to climb the Super Couloir on Everest’s north side in spring 1990 (not the most obvious route for a guided attempt), people started to take notice.
New Zealanders Rob Hall and Gary Ball then climbed all seven summits in only seven months to promote their own seven summits guiding service Adventure Consultants. The race was well and truly on. The next three chapters of Everest, Inc. describe the emergence of what Will calls the big 5 Everest guiding companies (Adventure Consultants, Alpine Ascents, IMG, Himex and Jagged Globe). The first successful expeditions duly came in 1992 when two of Alpine Ascents’ clients reached the summit, and all six from Adventure Consultants (one of whom, Doug Mantle, I bumped into on another guided trip to Guatemala 20 years later). Significantly, they had done it safely.
There is, of course, a chapter on the 1996 Everest tragedy, as well as another one critiquing Into Thin Air and how, paradoxically, it became great marketing for Everest trips. This produced one of many classic quotes from veteran Everest guide Dave Hahn, who said (hopefully while keeping a straight face) that ‘Into Thin Air was the story of a train wreck. But people seemed to be pretty inspired by that train wreck… For a lot of people, Into Thin Air was a how-to book.’
There is a chapter exploring the growth of the internet and live reporting, and how it fed into marketing for both operators and sponsored clients. Another one explores the ethics of climbing, including an amusing debate about guide certifications. Does IFMGA (International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations – the Rolls Royce international mountaineering standard) or NMA (the Nepal Mountaineering Association) offer a better qualification for guiding Everest? For what it’s worth, I would far rather look for a guide with multiple Everest summits that include getting their clients up and down safely, who is strong at high altitude and understands the mountain, than one with an extreme guiding certification.
There is, of course, a lot of focus on the perspective of guides. Less obviously we also seem to learn more about clients from guides than we do from clients themselves. This is mostly positive. One guide, Heather Macdonald of IMG, was asked why she wanted to go up and down the same mountain again and again. She explained that every expedition is different when you’re doing it with different people each time. She went on to describe three types of Everest client: ‘those looking to awaken something they feel might be dead or dying inside of them… clients looking to discharge something, some built-up negative energy or tension from something that happened to them… [and] people who just need a new experience to help them reorganize their life a little.’ (I have no idea which of those three categories I was.)
Eric Simonsen likened finding the right clients to farming. You sow your crop and nurture it: Mt Rainier clients become Denali clients become Aconcagua clients, eventually becoming seven summits clients (I would have put Denali and Aconcagua the other way round in terms of the experience required, but I guess for American clients, that’s the progression). I did, however, find myself doffing my climbing helmet to Wally Berg of Alpine Ascents who, when asked whether commercial clients belonged on Everest, said ‘The mountain takes care of people who don’t belong. It is eight weeks, and people who don’t belong go home after two or three weeks. And the people who are still there at the end – you know what? They belong.’
As well as analysing the suitability and competence of clients, the book does the same for operators. This feeds neatly into the closing chapters, which focus quite rightly on the emergence of Sherpa-owned companies as the dominant force on Everest.
Will views the 2013 and 2014 seasons as a massive turning point for Sherpas on Everest. In 2013 an incident in the Western Cwm involving the elite mountaineers Ueli Steck and Simone Moro brought the conflict between Sherpas and westerners to global attention. This generally cast the westerners as victims, but in 2014 the situation was reversed. A massive avalanche (which I witnessed on my way into the Khumbu Icefall) killed 16 Nepalis, and a strike by mountain workers brought the season crashing to a halt.
There is an interesting chapter about two very different Everest movies that came out the following year, one a backward-looking blockbuster about the 1996 tragedy involving Hollywood actors, the other a forward-looking documentary about the 2014 tragedy involving real live Sherpas. The latter heralded the changing face of Everest mountaineering. Gradually, the old guard left Everest. The final straw for some was the earthquake in 2015. They were replaced by a new brand of media savvy companies, both Nepali and western, led by dynamic guides who had all learned their trade climbing Everest multiple times with the old school.
Will provides the story of Babu Chiri, arguably the first Sherpa mountaineer in the commercial era to acquire a media profile. It became much easier as the media took a greater interest in Sherpa stories after the 2014 season. This process reached its zenith with Nirmal Purja’s high profile ascent of all fourteen 8,000m peaks in 2019 (who, ironically, wasn’t a Sherpa but a Magar, a different Nepali ethnic group).
It seemed that all of a sudden, Nepali operators were able to attract their own clients. And while they had a different philosophy to safety (which is explored in detail), the Nepali companies offered something that foreign operators couldn’t: cheaper expeditions to all of the 8,000m peaks instead of the two or three peaks considered safe for commercial expeditions. They also acquired influence within government that the foreigners never had. To compete with them, the new breed of western operators had to offer something new, such as the so-called ‘flash’ expeditions of Furtenbach and Alpenglow – shorter trips where climbers pre-acclimatised at home in high-altitude tents.
I’m personally very grateful to Will for writing this book. Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will know that I spent about ten years of my life providing a client’s perspective on the world of commercial mountaineering against a tide of negative media coverage. While the guides get the lion’s share of the voices in Everest, Inc., with Sherpas an honorable second, there are some genuine client voices too.
This mix of perspectives gives the book a balance that nearly all accounts of the commercial era have failed to achieve. It also surfaces some cracking quotes. Traditionally, writers and journalists have been willing to leave the voices of alpinists unchallenged when they’ve dismissed guided climbing as worthless. By contrast, Will is always able to counter them by providing a quote or example from the alternative viewpoint.
‘If you compromise on the process that much,’ says Yvon Chouinard about climbers who are willing to take shortcuts by hiring guides, ‘you’re an asshole when you start out, and you’re an asshole when you come back.’
But Will points out that Chouinard, the founder of outdoor gear brand Patagonia, profited from many of the same ‘assholes’ buying his kit. He was also willing to benefit from the largesse of Dick Bass who hired Chouinard to help him up Aconcagua (as did the great Sir Chris Bonington, who joined Bass’s expedition to Mount Vinson in Antarctica).
Even the words of the legendary Edmund Hillary are questioned. ‘It is becoming so that you can go to the beach for your holiday or climb Everest,’ Hillary told The Times in 1992. But Will speculates whether Hillary, the first man to stand on the summit of Everest, felt that his own achievement was diluted every time someone else followed in his footsteps.
In a section on the plethora of obscure Everest records that emerge on an annual basis in the commercial era (frequently mocked and derided by elite climbers), Will provides another zinger of a quote from Dave Hahn: ‘If you missed the significance of the first ascent of an African black man, then maybe your view of climbing has too much to do with rocks and too little to do with humanity.’ (South African climber Sibusiso Vilane became the first black African to climb Everest in 2003.)
There are one or two things that the book doesn’t cover – I would like to have heard more about the absence of strong industry regulation or the role of corrupt government. The ethics of inexperienced clients climbing Everest or Sherpas being paid to climb into the death zone is explored fairly thoroughly, but there was nothing about the infamous 2021 Covid year, when tone-deaf operators scrambled to continue their expeditions amid an unprecedented health crisis both in base camp and the hospitals of Kathmandu.
But there is a remarkable amount of new material packed into Everest, Inc.’s 300 pages; it’s by far the most comprehensive account you will find about a period that has been much maligned and greatly misunderstood. At last, the commercial era has the history it deserves. Hundreds of books have been written about Everest; none quite like this one. I believe this is a very important book that should be read for years to come by everyone with an interest in the world’s highest mountain.
Looking to read more? My book Sherpa Hospitality as a Cure for Frostbite explores the evolution of Sherpa mountaineers, from the porters of early expeditions to the superstar climbers of the present day. Its central section explores the fallout from the 2014 season, which I witnessed, in detail.
