Heights of ambition

Everest, Inc: The Renegades and Rogues who built an industry on top of the world

Author: Will Cockrell

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: Rs 699   

Pages: 331

With each climbing season in the Himalayas, Mount Everest becomes the focal point of all sorts of new records. By 2024, the elderly, the middle-aged, teenagers, the differently abled and so on had submitted the world’s highest mountain with clockwork success. Will Cockrell puts these achievements in perspective: “Between 1953, when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa became the first people to summit Mount Everest, and 1992, when the first paying clients were successfully guided up on it, only 394 climbers reached the top. Between 1992 and 2024, more than 11,500 others accomplished this feat. …More than 90 per cent were the clients and employees of a small number of mountain-guiding companies,” he writes in the introduction to Everest, Inc.  

Cockrell describes his book, with little false modesty, as “perhaps one of the most thrilling untold tales in mountaineering history, if not the history of entrepreneurialism writ large”. Certainly, Everest, Inc is an exuberant account of how a vibrant industry flourished around making the world’s highest mountains accessible to anyone who can pony up between $60,000 and $100,000 a pop, enjoys a minimum level of fitness and doesn’t mind being short-roped up the slopes by Sherpas.

This is adventure sport deluxe and mostly de-risked, with commerce, technology and humankind’s ambitions to “conquer” nature with minimum bodily harm combining to create a fast-growing adventure tourism business. Though not as encyclopaedic as Walt Unsworth’s 1981 meticulous recording of the first ascents of Everest’s various faces by professional mountaineers (Everest: The Mountaineering History), this racily written book takes the story forward.

As Cockrell tells it, the unwitting pioneer of the commercial exploitation of Everest was Richard Bass, maverick scion of an oil and natural gas billionaire. He invested in a ski resort and approached a woman ski patroller to guide him up Mount Denali, America’s tallest peak at 20,310 feet in Alaska.

Though he struggled mightily during the ascent, reciting poems to overcome the fatigue, he also learned that the higher he climbed, the stronger he became. That success gave Bass the idea of summiting the highest mountain on each continent. These expeditions were not strictly “guided”; Bass and a friend put up the capital for expeditions in which they climbed alongside experienced mountaineers.

By 1983, Bass had climbed the six peaks on the US, South America (Aconcagua, 22,837 feet), Europe (Elbrus, 18,510 feet), Africa (Kilimanjaro, 19,340 feet), Antarctica (Vinson, 16,050 feet) and Australia (Kosciuszko, 7,310 feet). He summited Everest (29,030 feet) on his third attempt in a 1985 expedition with the legendary Everesters, David Breashears and Ang Rita Sherpa. Bass was the 174th person to stand on Everest and at age 55, the oldest to have done so.

‘Big Mouth’ Bass’ ascent and perilous descent – his oxygen ran out and he was saved only with Breashears’ help – and the fact that he lived to tell the tale on prime time TV suddenly opened up to mountain guiding companies the possibilities of taking non-climbers to the summit of Everest, among the least technical of the 8,000-metre peaks, with what one mountaineer memorably called “enablers and manservants”. By 1990, the first guided expedition up Everest was offered in the open market, and one of the first to sign on was an IBM executive.

Cockrell or his publishers have added a subtitle about “renegades and rogues” building Everest Inc. The book suggests that most of the pioneers were professional guiding companies in the US and Europe. With buccaneering names such as Mountain Madness, Himalayan Experience, Adventure Consultants, these outfits rapidly expanded their repertoire so that by the nineties, guided tours up Everest offered disco nights at base camp to pasta and foie gras, internet connectivity and satellite telephony. Nepal in particular cashed in, making permits more expensive but imposing fewer limits on the number of expeditions.

The booming business did inevitably attract charlatans undercutting the bigger companies and compromising on safety by supplying shoddy equipment at cut-rate prices or charging unauthorised fees for expeditions to use the fixed rope they laid along ascent routes. But the real issue is the acute competition; the more clients companies put on the summit, the greater their “market share”. In 1996 came the first reality check, when a freak storm left clients and guides stranded, resulting in the death of eight climbers including the famous guide Rob Hall, who died in the death zone at 26,000 feet. The 1996 disaster was eloquently recounted by Jon Krakauer in his bestselling Into Thin Air. The book was intended to be a stinging indictment of the Everest Inc business but, Cockrell writes, it paradoxically proved a catalyst for it.  

Eventually, the Sherpas (and sherpanis) who were the backbone of the business from the start literally learnt the ropes and emerged as keen competitors. Sherpa-owned companies are every bit as savvy, tailoring their offerings to affordability levels to draw even more people to Everest and increasingly asserting their rights against western competitors.  

But last year brought another reality check to this flourishing business, recording 17 deaths, “officially the deadliest season in the mountain’s history”. The cause of these deaths varied – heart failure, altitude sickness, sometimes unknown. But the deaths of three sherpas in the Khumbu Icefall, ferrying loads from Base Camp that included Persian carpets for the comfort of clients, surely point to the confusing morality of Everest Inc.

Written with brio, the book nevertheless is an uncomfortable read because Cockrell ignores the distressing negative externalities of Everest Inc. The mountain is now the world’s highest garbage heap with the discarded detritus of the crowds piling up along with dead bodies. Clean-up expeditions have yielded modest results. With variations, this is the story of the booming “adventure tourism” business – in Antarctica, the ocean floors, the rain forests and now outer space – that's the outcome of humankind’s desire to subjugate nature. Hillary famously spoke of how they’d “knocked the b*****d off" after he and Tenzing summited in 1953. Maybe, as the Dalai Lama wrote in a perceptive foreword to a coffee table book on Everest, people could profit just as much from conquering the “Everests of the mind”.