A total of 394 people summited Everest in the four decades after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay did the incredible feat in the summer of 1953. But in the 30 years since the early 1990s, when it became a business to guide paying clients up to the top of the mountain, over 11,500 have summited.
The most remarkable recent public memory of Everest is the unforgettable 2019 photo of a long queue of over 300 climbers jostling for space, in freezing cold, while waiting to summit. Like a line of many colourful dots in the white snow, it is a stark image of how crowded the mountain has become.
Two hundred of them did make it to the top that day;two people died. The intense snowfall near the summit for much of the year had reduced the climbing window to a few days, and a dangerous scramble had followed.
At last count, there were over a 100 books on Everest, most of them being recounts of personal climbing success and failures, some about the tragedies, the avalanches and the many deaths; some by the people who climbed without oxygen or in winter or with artificial legs or who conquered the peak after multiple attempts.
But there is not one single book about what has made climbing the tallest mountain in the world, the Everest, so accessible and easy.
Who would have thought it would be ever possible to just get on top of the World’s biggest mountain by paying a guide to take you there.Unlike a historical monument or a wildlife sanctuary, it’s a high risk climb in inclement weather, possibly fatal, even for the guide.
In his new book, Everest Inc., Will Cockrell, a journalist, who has covered Everest for the Outside magazine and who has trekked up to the base camp in Nepal before becoming an outdoor guide tries to explain how climbing Everest has now become a highly competitive, commercial enterprise.
In a well-researched, fast moving tale filled with anecdotes, Cockrell illustrates how a colourful cast of moguls, intrepid adventurers, entrepreneurial guides and brave Sherpas began providing safe access to the summit, making a lot of money in the process.
Cockrell begins with the incredible tale of Richard Bass. The rich businessman’s son’s casual, self-sponsored attempt to summit all the seven tallest mountains on seven continents over four years culminating with Everest in 1985 became folklore and made climbing Everest look easier to mountaineers.
He and Wells, a Warner bros studios senior executive, signed up to be probably the first guided climbers on Everest by paying a 180,000 dollars to Rainier Mountaineering Inc, a firm founded by Lou Whittaker, whose twin brother was the first American to summit Everest in 1963.
No mountain guide had ever brought someone to Everest before, bearing full responsibility for that person’s safety and security.
Throughout the book, Cockrell uses first hand interviews, published books and documentaries to lay out more or less chronologically how the scramble to get people to the top of the Everest became a business ever since Bass summited.
He packs in a good amount of emotion during his detailing of the power plays between New Zealanders, British, American and local Nepali guiding companies jostling for clients and space on the mountain.
Like a modern day thriller, Cockerell then takes us through the first confrontations at 25,000 feet between western climbers Simone Moro & UeliSteck who were guiding paying clients and the Sherpas, who were the local guides and home-grown mountaineers from Nepal.
He follows this story with the tale of the tragic deaths of some of the clients and guides accompanying journalist Jon Krakauer in the 1996 spring season climb. Cockrell says that this tragedy was filmed by an IMAX crew which also summitted during the trip.
This triggered a debate about safety while climbing and brought forth the need to organise the business.
This in turn led to a former drug addict, Henry Todd, identifying the cause of these deaths as an opportunity and starting a lucrative business of setting up ropes, ladders, harnesses and ice-storm protection at high altitudes.
In a wonderful chapter, he interviews many guides to understand why one would want to be a guide on such a treacherous mountain. With Everest guides making just $15,000-$20,000 for a two-month season, barely enough to survive,
Cockrell says it’s the vicarious satisfaction these guides get from the power to change people’s lives that keeps them going back in spite of the dangers.
A few interesting chapters outline the shift of control of Everest from the western guiding companies who invented guided climbing to the Nepalis and Sherpas who moved up from being the helpers and porters to now running most of the companies.
Cockrell has done a masterful job of mixing documentary and story-telling to become the definitive account of how a few entrepreneurs using raw courage and naked ambition built the business of guiding people up the world’s greatest mountain.
An interesting anecdote Cockrell talks about is how technology has also made it easier to excite people about Everest. In 1953, it took four days for the world to learn that Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay had made the first ascent of Everest.
On the fiftieth anniversary of that climb, Edmund’s son, Peter, called his father from the summit using a satellite phone and the world celebrated instantly!
If at all, one could fault Cockrell’s book, it would be for glamorising the thrill of climbing Everest. Even as he describes the tragedies that befell the many seekers over the years, including the avalanches and earthquakes, in some ways he justifies the number of deaths, reducing them to percentages.
He finds that from 12 per cent deaths in the 1980s to less than 1 per cent deaths in the fully guided climbs of the 2010s is not a large number to worry about.
He also doesn’t talk about the environmental damage caused to the Mountain and the consequences of it becoming accessible to anyone with a few hundred thousand dollars.
If you need a thrilling account of the triumph and tragedy of summiting Everest, John Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air of his 1996 climb is an outstanding classic and its movie adaptation Everest (available on Netflix) tells that tale with a star-studded cast and some stunning cinematography.
When George Mallory, the famous mountaineer was asked why he wanted to climb Everest for the third time after two failed attempts, he replied, ‘Because it’s there!’. While he could never summit in the 1920s, now there are a few dozen companies that could have safely got him there.
(Naveen Chandra runs 91 Film Studios, a company the produces feature films in Indian regional languages.)
Find the book here.