Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World

by Will Cockrell

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 it, only 394 climbers reached the top. Between 1992 and 2024, more than 11,500 others accomplished this same feat.

The majority of the stickiest Everest myths, however, were seeded by Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s brilliant first-person account of an unusually heart-wrenching day. It remains the book about guiding on high peaks, and the lens through which just about all Everest stories continue to be viewed. But Krakauer’s scorching indictment of overcrowding, dangerously smug guides, and bumbling client climbers was written in 1996, only four years after guides first cracked the code on Everest.

The time has come for a recalibration of our understanding of who the clients and guides are on the iconic mountain, and why they’re drawn to it.

Before the first successful guided expedition, only about 10 percent of climbers reached the summit. Today, the number is roughly 70 percent. Less than 0.5 percent die while trying.

I hiked to Everest base camp in Nepal in the spring of 2022. I felt like I’d been run over by a bus at that altitude but my inadequacy as a high-altitude climber gave me an enormous appreciation for how impressive it is to merely attempt to climb Everest, let alone summit—and how downright superhuman it is that guides get so many inexperienced people to the summit, safely, year after year.

This is why on a now-infamous day in late April 2013, professional climbers Ueli Steck and Simone Moro, and their companion and cameraman Jonathan Griffith, were sick with dread as they fled down the mountain from Camp Two without time to consider the safest route. They had no choice. They were being chased.

Bass began thinking about one of his childhood heroes, Richard Halliburton. The early twentieth-century adventurer and writer had often mentioned wanting to sail the seven seas. What about climbing the highest mountain on each of the seven continents? Bass wondered. In addition to Denali, those would be Aconcagua in Argentina, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Elbrus in the Soviet Union, Vinson in Antarctica, Kosciuszko in Australia, and, of course, Everest in Nepal. As he later recounted in a book about his adventures, he thought, Christ, I’ve only got six to go.

The second Kiwi in history to climb Everest, Nick Banks, who summited in 1979, knew Hillary well. “The fascinating thing about Hillary is that he’s often portrayed as the bumbling happy-go-lucky beekeeper, which is complete rubbish,” says Banks today. “He was the most striving, ambitious man you’d ever meet.”

Ridgeway, who grew close to Bass and Wells, was later recruited to write the book chronicling their climbing adventures, Seven Summits. In it, he openly admitted his initial reservations.

“What made them think they had a chance? Naivete.” Looking back on his early experiences with the pair today, he says, “I had my bullshit detector up and tuned in to why these guys were doing it. I also had to try to judge how much of it was just some sort of ego thing so they could go back to the cocktail parties and brag about what they’ve done.”

“The Men That Don’t Fit In”: There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t stay still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain’s crest; Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don’t know how to rest.

Within a year of Dick Bass becoming the first person in history to climb to the highest point on each of the seven continents, the book that he and Wells commissioned Rick Ridgeway to help them write was published. Seven Summits, “by Dick Bass and Frank Wells, with Rick Ridgeway,” recounted the duo’s improbable four-year adventure.

“I think you can certainly provide inspiration and supervision above eight thousand meters, but you can’t guide in the traditional sense. You can go to the Himalaya safely twenty times and die on the twenty-first time, or you can go once and die from altitude on your first climb.”

A fit person who has been properly acclimatized to the altitude of the death zone—but with little or no supplemental oxygen—could last up to a day on the summit in a best-case scenario. But according to Hackett, a person just plucked from a sofa at sea level and dropped onto the summit would have about one minute of normal brain function. This is due to sudden hypoxia, or lack of oxygen. Their body would be furiously trying to increase oxygen intake through rapid breathing and a racing heartbeat. A lethal sense of well-being, even a morphine-like euphoria, would wash over the person. Approximately ten minutes after that, their brain would no longer be sending signals out to the rest of their body, and their heart and lungs would go into a sort of standby mode. Then the person would die.

By 1990, most experienced Himalayan climbers would agree that the list of veteran mountain guides with the experience, nerves, and logistical prowess to pull off a guided Everest climb could probably fit in a fortune cookie.

Guides need to have the leadership skills of a military general; the stamina, strength, and agility of an Olympic triathlete; the patience of a preschool teacher; and the cool head of a bomb squad technician.

More often than not, guiding is a thankless pursuit.

When clients don’t make the summit, their top three excuses tend to be “shitty guide, shitt...

“My big revelation was discovering that I got more pleasure, or more satisfaction, from seeing another person achieve something than I did achieving it myself,” explains Steve Bell. “You have this sort of incredible vicarious glow—you’ve given something to someone. Or, rather, it is a gift that you’ve enabled them to receive. There is something very special about sharing a mountain with a client, with somebody who would otherwise never be able to go there.”

“When you facilitate someone doing something they never thought was possible—or a lifelong dream like climbing Everest—it has a huge impact on their life,” reflects Jimmy Chin. “It could change somebody’s life and I think there is a real draw to that.”

Phil Ershler, the cofounder of IMG, feels not enough people understand the difference between a good climber and a good guide. “I know some climbers who are incredible—amazing athletes—but I wouldn’t trust them to walk my mother across the street,” he says. “Nobody’s going to remember Phil Ershler as a great climber—that won’t be on the epitaph—but I think they will talk about the fact that I was a pretty fucking good guide.”

“There’s a satisfaction in helping people to achieve something they wouldn’t normally be able to,”

The name-calling he references was done in a Patagonia-produced documentary called 180 Degrees South, in which Chouinard also made a pithy statement about people who used guides to reduce the risks of mountaineering. “If you compromise the process that much,” he said, “you’re an asshole when you start out, and you’re still an asshole when you come back.”

Climbing, Tejada-Flores wrote, is fundamentally meaningless, so humans apply ethical rules to the endeavor to disguise that. The rules are “designed to conserve the climber’s feeling of personal (moral) accomplishment against the meaninglessness of a success that represents merely a technical victory.” Satisfaction in climbing is all about preserving the sense of having overcome a true challenge. The “game” of climbing is to choose which set of rules to use for the particular type of climb you wanted to do.

The less risky the climb, the more rules climbers need to apply in order to feel they’ve accomplished something.

In 1971, well before he summited Everest, Messner wrote a famous and similarly prophetic essay of his own called “The Murder of the Impossible.”

Mountain guides contended that to hold climbing against some philosophical standard of purity was, at best, missing the point, and, at worst, elitist.

As a climber and writer, Krakauer always had notoriously inflexible ideas of right and wrong. His writing shows a particular disdain for narcissism. He declined to be interviewed for this book, and he declines almost every interview that has to do with Everest or Into Thin Air, telling friends he’s “just tired of talking about it.” He also says that all his thoughts on the subject are on the page, which is mostly true.

As he got set up at base camp in the spring of 1996, Krakauer encountered the familiar face of David Breashears, whom he had gotten to know in the Colorado climbing scene when both men were living in Boulder. The two had become friends, and Krakauer would later write the foreword for Breashears’s Everest book, High Exposure.

Yet the fact is, you’d be hard-pressed to find an Everest guide who is a fan of Into Thin Air, and it has little to do with self-preservation. To them, his view of climbing is far too narrow, and he doesn’t get what guiding is about.

The Nova documentary “Mountain of Ice” is a fascinating window into Hahn’s dynamic with Krakauer.

Simonson understood a crucial, uncomfortable fact: the specter of death is not a deterrent—it’s what makes many people want to climb Everest in the first place.

“It wasn’t Dick Bass or Jon Krakauer that ruined Everest,” says Russell Brice. “It was Al Gore, if you believe his claim that he invented the internet.”

As they approached base camp, IMG’s head cook, Pemba Sherpa, greeted the weary climbers with tea. Macdonald and Pemba sat together on a rock. “Heather, why is it Westerners come to Everest looking for something they did not lose here?” he asked.

Surviving Everest after what happened in 1996 actually magnifies that heroism. People believe that climbing Everest could possibly undo any vulnerability they feel about themselves.

an American cultural anthropologist named Ernest Becker, who, in 1973, wrote a book called The Denial of Death, which itself was a continuation of the work of Freud and others.

Becker goes so far as to say depression is the result of feeling that one’s “immortality project is failing.”

“I think everyone who wants to climb Everest should be required to go through a year of therapy first,” says Macdonald, only half joking.

“There are basically three different types of Everest client,” Macdonald says. “The first are those looking to awaken something they feel might be dead or dying inside them. The second are clients looking to discharge something, some built-up negative energy or tension from something that happened to them or from something they are going through. Finally, there are the people who just need a new experience to help them reorganize their life a little.

“I think one of the main subtleties of guiding on Everest is that you often have clients who are overqualified but underconfident, and then others in the same group who are underqualified and overconfident.”

The first wave of people who signed up for guided ascents of Everest included a remarkably high number of dentists and doctors, followed closely by lawyers and investment bankers—almost all of them men.

“They say doctors make poor pilots because we take risks,” he explains.

Guides broadly agreed that being a good or bad client had very little to do with climbing experience. What it came down to in the end was self-awareness. A lack of it could make a client come across as an asshole in base camp, which was one thing, but not having self-awareness in the death zone was potentially fatal.

“As a climber, I know that not being successful is a big part of forming character,”

Michael Kodas, a Connecticut-based journalist and climber, was climbing from the north side in the spring of 2006, on assignment for his city paper, the Hartford Courant. Instead of writing only an article, Kodas came away with enough material to write a book, which he called High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed.

Pasang Yangjee explains. “Imagine being an angry person in the mountains and having to survive all by yourself. That’s just not going to work. Practically speaking—whether you are a Sherpa or not—to survive up in the mountains, you better behave and you better know how to take care of each other and maintain harmony in the group. How do you do that? Sometimes you just have to smile.”

cowrote a popular autobiography for a major American publisher called Tiger of the Snows with one of the most well-known adventure writers of the 1950s, James Ramsey Ullman.

In her seminal 1999 book, Life and Death on Mount Everest, Sherry Ortner writes, “Himalayan mountaineering was originally, and still is, for the most part, defined by the international mountaineers. It is their sport, their game, the enactment of their desires.”

It may sound nitpicky, but guides have a mantra: small mistakes can have grave consequences in the mountains.

Alan Arnette is someone who heartily disagrees with all of this nay-saying about client climbers. At sixty-five, the Colorado native and former Hewlett-Packard executive is an authority on the matter of guides.