Uphill Athlete Book Club: The Business of Everest with Will Cockrell

00:01.39
Steve
Hello, and welcome to the Uphill Athlete podcast. I’m your host, Steve House. And today we have a very special guest joining us. Will Cockrell is a prolific author and influential figure in the world of outdoor media. And he has written a really interesting new book called Everest, Inc. Anyone who’s ever read, and I think this is most of us, Krakeurs into thin air, or has seen the photo of climbers standing in line to get to the top of Everest, probably think that they have a sense of what it’s like to climb the world’s highest mountain. That picture is of an extreme landscape or bad weather, an incredible altitude can kill. It’s overcrowded, it’s trashed out, and it’s a place where the rich exploit the local sherpa, all while patting their ego and their social media feeds. And of course, there is some truth

00:57.01
Steve
to these classes cliches, but there’s also a sliver of the story that has not been told. And unlike any book today, Will’s book, Everest, Inc., is a definitive account of the history of guiding and commercial climbing on Mount Everest. It was not that long ago that guiding a peak like Everest was considered impossible. I literally remember it in my own climbing life, and I’m getting middle-aged, but I’m not old yet. and you know, just within a few decades, Everest guiding has become a pretty big industry. And today, 90% of the people on the mountain are clients or employees of guided expeditions, which is just an incredible shift from what climbing on Everest was, you know, 30 years ago. So as my friend and

01:54.56
Steve
professional climber and author Freddie Wilkinson said of the book, whether you’re thinking about trick taking a crack at the world’s highest peak or simply an armchair mountaineer trying to make sense of the complex dynamics driving the modern Everest industry, Everest Inc. should be required reading. And I’ve just finished the book and I couldn’t agree more with Freddie’s suggestion. Thanks, Will, for being here. Really great to have you.

02:19.32
will
Thanks for having me. It’s great to talk to you again.

02:22.63
Steve
Yeah, we first got in contact, well, maybe not first, but maybe laughed when our books, but the Training for the New Alpinism started to come out and you were covering, you know, mountain sports and not as a book author, but as a freelance author, right?

02:40.96
will
Well, actually, I think at the time, I was probably a staff editor possibly at Men’s Journal magazine. And I was in many of my jobs, I was kind of ah I was kind of you know given the role of health and fitness editor or something. So it wasn’t even necessarily mountaineering fitness.

02:59.87
Steve
Yeah.

03:00.72
will
It was mainstream health and fitness. And as I’m sure you know, and probably one of the reasons you wrote the book, it gets tiring, repeating themes and news in the health and fitness world. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s the men’s health six pack abs joke, right?

03:14.64
Steve
Yeah.

03:17.18
Steve
Great.

03:18.48
will
So when something like an uphill athlete came along, it was that once in a blue moon moment that someone had come up with something interesting and new to say in the fitness world. right And this wasn’t just about climbing or mountaineering. You were basically talking to endurance athletes.

03:34.58
Steve
Yeah.

03:35.16
will
And all of a sudden, it’s like that that exploded, I think, for you guys.

03:39.83
will
and I was fascinated by it. So I loved it. Talked to you and Scott a few times.

03:46.35
Steve
Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. It has been a wild ride. Um, one of the things that I like so much about having this little mini books division of the uphill athlete podcast is I just think that there are so many fascinating stories from our mountain community and authors like you and others that I’ve interviewed here. Your book does such a great job of telling that richness, that tapestry of characters, many of whom I know very well personally, whether it’s Lucas Fortenbach or, I don’t know, or Die Kotter or, you know, so many of these characters. I’ve spent so much, Verne Tejas, I’ve just spent so much time around all these guys.

04:31.95
Steve
And your book is subtitled, The Renegades and Rogues who built an industry on top of the world. Maybe I got that a little bit off, but I really appreciate that you call them out as Renegades and Rogues because I honestly see them that way and I see their stories in that way. Like they really did. Let’s talk about the gestation and birth of the guide on Everest. What was that like? Who are those characters? What were some of their storylines?

05:03.87
will
Yeah, so it happened so quickly. I think that not many people are aware that the guiding industry is only 40 years old, right? That the first time a client ever successfully stood on the summit, a client who had a guide that was responsible for them in exchange for money, you know the whole the whole deal in the strict sense, was 1992. Like people, people think guiding is just how climbing has been on Everest. And I want to go pre-90s, 80s even. We came from this time that Everest was impossible to climb, then it being possible, but kind of suicidal. It sort of bounced very quickly up to, and then anyone can climb it.

05:48.66
will
And you had this band of really talented climbers who started going to the Himalayas in the 70s and 80s and you know more for their own thrill and started climbing all these different peaks, including Everest. You had guys like Eric Simonson. ah Rob Hall, ah Gary Ball, you know who owned the company, Adventure Consultants Before um ah guy, ah Russell Bryce.

06:16.53
Steve
Russell Price.

06:17.66
will
Yeah, so you had these people going there, Steve Bell, Himalayan Kingdoms. You had these people going there just climbing. Now, the interesting thing was many of those people just happened to be mountain guides. Eric Simonson was like, you know, embedded in Rainier Mountaineering at the time, and when Rainier, who knows how many times. So he was from that pedigree. Russell Bryce comes from that incredible guiding, what would you call it, like a legacy in New Zealand, right? They were another country that took it as seriously as, say, France, and same thing. They see these big mountains, and naturally, instead of looking for the most cutting-edge way up,

06:58.72
will
they actually thought, what if I could get you know not basically inexperienced people up this mountain the way I do Rainier at home or the way I do Mount Cook?

07:08.41
Steve
Yeah.

07:10.12
will
And it’s an audacious idea. It’s kind of insane. And I think that one of the storylines that I really enjoyed finding in this book was just how sort of difficult it was to make the decision of whether that’s even ethical.

07:19.84
Steve
Hmm.

07:28.15
will
Because you had a lot of people in the climbing community saying, that’s ridiculous. Why turn this mountain that’s so unpredictable, ah you know, into a guiding destination? It just didn’t make any sense. And so it’s kind of against all odds that they built this industry.

07:43.66
Steve
Yeah. And I think I want to pull on that thread where, you know, I took an avalanche course from Eric Simonson when I was, I don’t know, probably 19 years old or 20 years old or something at Crystal Mountain. I mean, he was a big role model and an actual instructor of mine as a young climber. And, you know, that was probably around that time. It was probably 89 or 90. And just how much of an audacious idea it was, and just maybe tell me a little bit. I mean, I know some of this is in the book, but they didn’t just immediately decide to like, Hey, let’s make this a big ah guiding destination. There were actually quite a few steps in between. So those early expeditions where they were guiding

08:32.60
Steve
Dick Bass on Everest and, you know, they had, you know, Simonson was there and Marty, you know, you talk about Marty Hoey and, ah you know, all these other, you know, famous Rainier guys of the time, Phil Urschler, so many others. What did that look like? Did it look the way it looks now or was it completely different?

08:55.89
will
Well, you had that transition. My understanding, and you probably know this much better than I, of that era was that it was pretty hard to get on an Everest expedition.

09:05.87
Steve
Yeah.

09:06.01
will
That it was sort of like if you heard there was a spot open or someone offered you a spot, you kind of didn’t say no, even if you kind of hadn’t thought about climbing Everest or whatever. I don’t. So my understanding was that that in itself was difficult. And then you slowly had this thing where

09:23.94
will
The transition was these guys who wanted to bring clients to the Himalayas. They started setting up expeditions and essentially just offering the slots to former clients as climbing partners as expedition members. So these would be people that would be pretty up for the task theoretically, right?

09:38.70
Steve
Yep.

09:41.94
will
Ah maybe climbed with a guide on Denali or something like that and they would help fund these guide’s endeavors and

09:50.20
Steve
What does that mean? Like when like Dick Bass went on those early trips? What was the arrangement? What was it?

09:58.55
will
Yeah.

09:58.87
Steve
How clear-cut was it?

10:00.65
will
Yeah. So, everyone refers to Dick Bass for those who don’t know this, you know, kind of gregarious American oilman who, you know, had a ton of money who owned Snowbird ski resort and was the guy who basically decided to climb the seven summits first, not that he came up

10:16.31
Steve
Right. Thanks for that.

10:18.71
will
Yeah, not that he invented the idea, but he was the one who sort of announced he wanted to do it and kind of ticked through them all, um was incredibly talented at Altitude, was not a climber, and was quite proud of the fact that he was not a climber. And a lot of people consider him the very first Everest client. I think that’s not true at all, but I get it his story is so good that we can see that step in the evolution.

10:48.73
will
And it was basically, he got to be very good friends with David Breshears, who we just lost this year, really unexpectedly. um

10:58.11
Steve
Yeah, it was a great guy.

10:59.84
will
Yeah, and David was like sort of one of the earliest, I don’t know what to call it. He was very fond of Everest. He loved Everest. Sort of like loved it in all of its ways, the hard routes, the easy routes, you know, the sort of characters, he really loved Everest. um And he was much younger than Dick and they had kind of this father-son relationship. And ah David tried to help Dick in 1983 this friendship kind of continued, so they tried again in 84, and then 85, you know, once again, they linked up on an expedition, ah Norwegian expedition, and there was no money exchanged.

11:41.13
will
There was, there was, you know, I think David David always kind of says, oh, I got a season pass to Snowbird, right?

11:41.58
Steve
Okay.

11:49.41
will
Things like that. And also it’s really important to note, David Breshears was not a mountain guide and he has never been a mountain guide in his whole climbing career. And so that’s another big, in my opinion, delineator that this was not a guide client relationship. However, Dick Bass made very, very clear that there’s no way he could have summited without David by his side because David was essentially making sure everything went okay.

12:17.28
Steve
Yeah.

12:20.96
Steve
And this is sort of one of those intermediate steps, right? Where it was, it was pretty clear that Dick was funding, I don’t know if all of the budget, but certainly a large part of it. David was bringing something else and they were balancing out and creating a team. And then that was, like you said, a stepping stone towards eventually somebody saying, Hey, we’re going to go to Everest. We have a permit. where it’s X dollars to go and running an ad in whatever the magazine was at the time.

12:54.12
Steve
And that was sort of like the early 90s when that started.

12:54.41
will
Right.

12:57.60
Steve
And who were the characters there? The characters in your book? And they’re just, they’re just great. Like you do such a great job just explaining because they’re also, I mean, I love all of them and many of them I do know, as I said, and they’re all just such wonderful people and we’re all so quirky and in a good, lovable way.

13:10.73
will
Yeah. Yeah.

13:20.06
Steve
Yeah. So who are the characters there in the early, early nineties? I mean, it was kind of a little more centered around the UK at that time, as I understand it.

13:29.03
will
Um, well, actually the credit goes, the credit, the credit probably goes to an American.

13:33.94
will
Here’s the interesting piece of this because, you talk about all these, people who had a lot of Himalayan experience, Simonson, Steve Bell, uh, Bryce, for example.

13:36.60
Steve
Cool.

13:46.85
will
And then all of a sudden it’s a guy named Todd Burleson. Who actually scouts Everest and the same year puts an ad in an outside magazine for a guided climb. First one to ever do that. Also someone no one had ever heard of. You know, it was really wild that he kind of came out of nowhere. And this is with a company that we know as Alpine Descent International, AAI, which is huge. I mean, without a doubt, one of the most trailblazing companies on that mountain.

14:19.90
will
And I think with the characters, like you say, there’s a lot of really interesting, rich characters. Steve Bell’s story back in the UK with Himalayan kingdoms that turned into Jagged Globe. They had a rival in a country that was fascinating, this rivalry with another ah company trying to guide Everest. But the thing is, is ambition. Ambition does characterize a couple of these people. And ambition can come across to everyone a little differently. um you know Some people rub the wrong way, some people understand it.

14:51.19
will
And that’s what I wanted to do in the book is just show that like the thing that separated Todd Burleson and the other people I’ll mention is again is Rob Hall and Gary Ball was there was kind of this odd ambition that they had to get there first.

15:12.25
will
to set themselves up in a way that the world heard about what they were doing, whether it was ads in a magazine or you know with adventure consultants, they were very good at publicity. And sure enough, it was AAI and adventure consultants who put the first clients on the Summit of Everest together at the same time in 1992. And the reason why that’s interesting is because a lot of those climbers that we’re talking about, the other ones have way more experience than them. I mean, especially in a guiding capacity, but also even in a climbing capacity. And that’s interesting. It’s because, it’s because entering the guiding industry or I should say forming it was a different beast, right? That took a different secret sauce.

16:00.53
Steve
Yeah, and I always felt, and I never guided a single day anywhere in the Himalayan chain. So I have a very outside viewpoint. I was always there as a climber, but I think my experience from other expeditionary guides, like for example, with Denali, and I think one of the connections here is that there, it is such a massive logistical undertaking. Like people from the outside, I think underestimate how much logistics go into doing one of these trips. And to call them expeditions now and say, and use that in the same breath as say an expedition of the 1920s, obviously not the same, like those are those are very different undertakings. But having done a lot, dozens, I don’t know how many of my own, very small, very light, very simple expeditions throughout the Himalayan range.

16:56.91
Steve
It is a massive amount of work just to make sure you bring the right number of kilos of rice to base camp, the right number of liters of fuel for the cook stove, the right number of sleeping pads, and the right number of tents. Tents are like backup flies for the tent in case there’s a storm that destroys your rain fly. I mean, there’s like a, there’s a million things that you have to think about and have continuous to see contingency plans for. and a mountain like Everest, not so unlike Denali. And I think that that’s one of the reasons where a lot of the Denali guides found success on Everest, in my opinion, is, you you know, you have to be very self-sufficient through your own logistics, you know, channels of getting getting bottles of oxygen or fuel or tents or food, whatever it is, in the right place at the right time for the right people.

17:37.17
will
Yeah.

17:49.52
will
Yeah, you know, I’ve read referred to more than once that living at base camp for the six to eight weeks it takes to climb Everest is an art form. You know what I mean?

18:00.75
Steve
Yeah.

18:00.97
will
It really is. I mean, it’s 17,500 feet. I know how I felt. I’m not great at altitude to begin with, but I know how I felt when I spent time there. It’s an art form to live and be comfortable and settle in. But I want to touch on what you brought up about this shift. This shift that is very interesting is that one thing that you’re describing, that self-sufficiency and that you need to have backup plans and everything, um that is very much the climber’s mentality. That is very much the climber’s version of doing these big mountains.

18:38.86
will
And interestingly, as the shift was happening, where inexperienced people were being brought to Everest more and more, the companies were taking those responsibilities away from the climbers.

18:51.07
Steve
Mm.

18:51.14
will
All of a sudden, the companies were measuring the food and bringing the backup oxygen and having everything set up for them. You know, the biggest criticism that gets leveled at Everest at the Everest guiding industry and Everest clients is that they’re not really climbing and they’re not really climbers. And I think, I’m not sure if this comes across, but in my book, I sort of make the point that that’s not necessarily, I mean, that’s possibly true, but it shouldn’t be a criticism.

19:25.23
will
And so at the time that all those responsibilities that climbers understand shifted, it was around the same time that climbing Everest was no longer a mountaineering challenge, but an endurance challenge.

19:27.06
Steve
yeah

19:40.86
Steve
Mhm.

19:41.73
will
So all of a sudden it went from being, like I say, ah you know a man against mountain type thing to being an Ironman triathlon.

19:50.26
Steve
Yeah.

19:51.42
will
And again, people can criticize that and they do all the time. But I just find that fascinating that it just, you know, all of a sudden a new type of person decided they wanted to climb it.

20:02.50
Steve
Yeah, yeah, and I want to come back to this idea of the let’s say archetype of the Everest climber and how that itself has evolved. And so let’s put a pin in this sort of like early nineties Everest climber that at that point, probably it’s like 80, 20 with 20% being guided or something like that.

20:16.77
will
Yeah.

20:23.75
Steve
I don’t, I don’t really know. Right. And then it’s shifting to this sort of 90, 10 that we have over time.

20:25.58
will
Yeah.

20:29.13
Steve
So like what you take us through and it’s, it it’s, a bit worn, well-worn story with the with the tra with sort of the series of tragedies. I’m going to put it like sort of in the thin air tragedy, the um ever the avalanche or the earthquake and avalanche later on, you know, not all happening at the same time, but happening over quite a time. It feels like we’re sort of past a good chunk of that.

21:04.75
Steve
And how did those challenges, I’ll just say, how did those events shape both the characters on the stage and how the characters performed on the stage?

21:19.56
will
Yeah, well, I’ll separate 1996 only because it was so early. I think again, another another myth or another misconception of Everest is that John Krakauer was over there kind of you know, ah getting his take on this industry that’s been around forever and something bad is bound to happen and it’s just, you know, it’s an accident waiting to happen.

21:23.87
Steve
OK.

21:42.70
will
That was the gist of how people perceived thin air. The industry was only four years old.

21:48.94
Steve
Right.

21:49.20
will
So you know what I mean? Like they had submitted in 92 and this was 96. This was Adventure Consultants third expedition or something.

21:54.06
Steve
Yeah.

21:56.65
Steve
Right.

21:57.57
will
And the only reason I say that is because I just think people should understand that. You know, I wouldn’t say it’s all good or all bad, but it’s both. That into thin air is what framed our understanding of the guiding industry on Everest.

22:13.98
Steve
Mm hmm.

22:14.74
will
From the very get-go. From the very get-go. So we really saw it through John Krakauer’s eyes.

22:18.74
Steve
Yeah.

22:21.86
will
a very righteous climber who has a very purist mentality and isn’t afraid to kind of tell people what he thinks is right and wrong. And that was the lens that you know his book was so incredible, incredibly written, great journalism, you know the whole deal. And it was his experience. And so I often do say like that’s his right to paint however he wanted, because he was right in the middle of that when that happened. But it definitely changed how people saw the guiding industry right off the bat.

22:53.10
will
right it it It brought up, perhaps for the first time, the central question, who belongs on Everest and who does not belong on Everest.

22:53.16
Steve
Yeah.

23:01.83
will
I think John Krakauer, without explicitly saying so, his entire book is an asking and answering of that question.

23:10.10
Steve
Oh Yeah.

23:10.39
will
That’s what he does. Who belongs, who doesn’t. With Sandy Pittman being someone who does not belong.

23:16.68
Steve
Right.

23:16.92
will
For some reason, even though she had done it on Everest twice before. You know what I mean? Like that’s a big deal by the 90s. Those other events that you mentioned, yeah, go ahead.

23:28.27
Steve
Well, can we pause there before we jump forward? Because I want to go I want to pause there and talk. Maybe I could recant my earlier hypothesis. And let’s talk about what the guiding industry was like in the late 90s, sort of in those years leading up to the you know these other things like the earthquake and avalanche.

23:49.17
will
Mm.

23:52.82
Steve
who were the big, as you put it in the book, you kind of delineate these big five companies that sort of grew up during this period. And these are all, and that’s really key to sort of some of the transition that happens later and is still unfolding today in the guiding industry over there. So who were those five characters?

24:14.21
will
Right. So the names we talked about earlier, Russell Bryce’s Himalayan experience, which people know as him X, perhaps the most famous guiding company on Everest.

24:18.66
Steve
Okay. Right.

24:23.17
will
I think the most successful expeditions. AAI, Out by Descent International, Todd Burleson’s country, which was based out of the Pacific Northwest, Seattle kind of thing. You could argue maybe they are both successful. It’s really hard to say with the numbers, but um both very successful companies with zero client deaths and all this kind of stuff. And then you have IMG, International Mountain Guides, which was Eric Simonson’s company. And that was born out of Rainier Mountaineering, the Simonson-Urschler

24:52.98
Steve
Yeah.

24:56.06
will
And George Dunn was given sort of permission to do international expeditions from the Whitakers. And then you had Steve Bell, who was a British climber who started Himalayan kingdoms, which later turned into Jagged Globe. That’s probably the biggest European outfit, I guess you could say. And then finally, adventure consultants, you know, the one made famous in, into thin air, Rob Hall, Gary Ball, more Kiwis. Kiwis are very talented on Everest.

25:27.97
will
Fantastic, but you know, marketing people, those two, Gary Ball died, unfortunately, sort of mid nineties, I think. And, early nineties, actually 93 something like anyway. And adventure consultants have gone on to be one of those big five. So that’s the five.

25:47.31
Steve
Yeah, yeah, so that’s who we’re kind of running the mountain and it’s sort of matured and it’s sort of feeling like

25:56.49
Steve
This is a routine thing now by the end of the nineties, right? Like there’s regular successes. There’s proof that there’s quite a remarkably good safety record. Actually as you pointed out, most of these companies have zero fatalities on their record, even, even today, several of them. And so then we kind of go into this period of the earthquake and what year was the earthquake? Now it has been a year since I was there. It was 2000.

26:26.12
will
fifteen.

26:27.24
Steve
15. Okay.

26:28.25
will
But fourteen was the avalanche. Fourteen was the, or the ice the ice fell.

26:30.40
Steve
14 was Avalon. Yep.

26:33.62
will
Yeah.

26:34.47
Steve
And so sort of in, as I read your book, at least I understood that there was, you sort of use this, these events as sort of a, sort of a marker in my mind as to sort of how Everest guiding was prior to those events and what it has become more immediately since then. What is that? Who are the characters and how did that evolve over those years?

27:00.23
will
I refer to that period before that happened as ever the ever-sliding industry’s adolescence. It was like an awkward phase. And what I mean by that is that there’s that one criticism that is very hard to shake, and that’s colonialism.

27:15.42
will
That’s the idea that the most dangerous jobs were being done by locals, by sherpas. um The fact that you know they were doing a lot of the same things, going all the way to the summit with clients and making a fraction of the money you know for the season. and all these things. And the guiding industry was trying to solve a problem and they and they were having a little trouble. And that was how to turn these talented locals into guides. It was really important to note that being a mountain guide is a very specific discipline.

27:54.60
will
It’s like having a medical degree you know in a lot of ways.

27:56.24
Steve
Yeah.

27:59.02
will
And so when I spoke to the Sherpas who were really prolific in the 2000s, that was one of the things I was fascinated to hear them all say. Like, I had no idea how to deal with a femur fracture or you know someone falling in a crevasse or whatever. They were like, I felt great at 26,000 feet, but I didn’t know how to do any of these rescue things or save a life high up.

28:19.62
Steve
Hmm.

28:25.69
will
And you know, a lot of people say, the guides are there for when things go wrong, not when things go right. And that is why the Sherpa climbers got stuck in this place because they weren’t mountain guides and the Westerners sat in the mountain guide class where they were making more money and that’s what happened. What people didn’t realize is that the mountain guide companies

28:50.62
Steve
Hmm.

28:50.82
will
The ones who were very loyal to their Sherpas, people like Locke Barita, adventure consultants had Engdorgy. These people became crucial pillars in their business model and in their business. And all of a sudden the race was on to get these guys certified, right? Throughout the 2000s, get them the skills. You know Todd Burleson was flying Locke Barita over to Seattle constantly to work on Rainier and Mount Baker or whatever. and the reason why that’s important is because that criticism is another myth, I guess.

29:28.27
will
It’s another sort of, yes, the dynamic was not good and a little unhealthy at that time. That’s true. But that’s exactly when the guiding companies recognized that and began to put in motion this other way of doing things. And by the events you’re talking about,

29:43.19
Steve
you know

29:46.71
will
you had a class, a generation of sherpas that were very different from their fathers or very different from their uncles. And that’s why that was a pivot or a turning point coming right in, say, 2013, 2014.

29:54.81
Steve
Yeah.

29:58.42
Steve
Yeah. Yeah. And, this has come up twice now and we’ve been talking here for these few minutes and I want to just elevate this point that whether it’s, you know, people seeing things through the crack hour lens of 1996 or seeing things through the colonialism lens of the early 2000s, you know, in, you know, like, like John’s, you know, we’re, we’re putting words in his mouth a little bit, but his thesis of like, who belongs on Everest and who doesn’t belong, you know, this, this colonialism take. And in every one of these cases, the reality was,

30:43.26
Steve
much more nuanced. And actually, the truth on the ground was that that was already in process that the people involved were self-reflective, they were smart, they were hardworking, they were talking to each other, they’re working together, they were really like, there was, there’s just a so much incredible good human to human work that was being done. And that this whole kind of One of the things I took away from, I took this off away from your book and it made me realize that I myself had fallen prey probably at times to this sort of black and white judgmental thinking of who doesn’t belong or, you know, those kinds of things. And it was a false narrative, you know, and that the all along people were just people and they’re doing the best they can and they’re evolving and they’re changing and there’s all a certain rate they can do that. You can’t train a sherpa.

31:43.08
Steve
that’s got high altitude experience to become a mountain guide in like three months.

31:47.23
Steve
Like if I’m an IFMGA guide from my first course to my last exam it was eight years. and I was in the guiding industry as a young man, like in the north Pacific Northwest, right in the heart of all of this. So it’s a huge undertaking and it takes time. And this was all kind of going on. And then we get to the other side of things like the earthquake and the avalanche And there’s this new class of Nepali mountain guides who in many cases are younger. They’ve got a different energy. They see, they look at what these Western guide services have done. And instead of saying, I can’t do that, they are saying, well, why can’t I do that? And so they just, they just do it.

32:36.97
Steve
And they have some inherent advantages right off the bat, most importantly, that they don’t have to pay a permit fee on Everest, like the foreigners do.

32:37.48
will
Yeah.

32:45.57
Steve
So they immediately have a cost advantage there, which I think is a super smart and interesting thing for them to take advantage of. And the modern era is sort of born in may, that’s in my read of this.

33:00.11
will
I mean, you, you had these climbers who, you know, Nepal got its IFMGA program in 2012, I believe. Obviously it’s taken a while and there aren’t many of them. I think there’s maybe 25 or 30 certified IFMGA, but the point is it’s on their radar and many of them do seek out that training. And then you have another high profile, uh, institution in the Kumboo is Conrad’s, you know, Conrad Anker, uh, Kumboo climbing center. And this is another place that’s designed to take in any Sherpa who wants to get into the climbing industry and teach them.

33:34.82
will
You have Dawa Yangzom, who is a local climber and guide in the Himalaya, who is also a sponsored North Face athlete.

33:44.31
Steve
But

33:44.37
will
It’s incredible. She’s in her 20s, and she’s a teammate of Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anchor. and it’s kind of I mean, the the change is incredible, in my opinion, like the sort of this idea that I was having conversations with guys like Ming Ma Ji, who owns Imagine Nepal, about climbs that have nothing to do with guiding was very wild for me. That’s never happened as a journalist, even, to be talking to Sherpas, where he’s the one who really conceived of the idea of climbing K2 in the winter.

34:18.64
will
So it was Mingma Ji who decided, look, that’s the last objective left that no one has done

34:18.76
Steve
Right.

34:26.62
will
And I don’t want another Westerner to get it. like That was his thinking. I think this should be a Nepali thing. He teamed up with Mindzai to do that. But it was really Mingmajie’s idea. And just that he even wanted to do it you know is a shift in thinking.

34:41.30
Steve
Yeah.

34:44.11
will
And he’s done first to sense as well.

34:44.14
Steve
Major shift, major shift, major shift.

34:48.34
will
Yeah.

34:48.51
Steve
You know, just to give you, this is a small anecdote that, you know, one of my experts, I went to Makalu three times to try to climb a new route on the west face, which shares a base camp with the normal route on Makalu. And you can see the west face from there, but the normal route goes up a 40 degree snow slope and ridge. kind of to the left edge of the proper West face, which is, you know, ah out of 10,000 vertical foot face that is, you know, vertical, mostly vertical to overhanging the whole way. Very, very technical. And I was, I had a conversation with a Sherpa team in the base camp and they were like, you know, where are you guys climbing? Because they never saw us climbing. And we’re sorry. And we said, well, we’re trying a new route on the West face and they just looked so confused. And the one guy just looked at us like,

35:38.66
Steve
But if you climb a new route, we won’t follow you. Like he literally thought that we were trying to establish our own fixed route, fixed ropes, and that we would then, like everybody would follow us up.

35:42.16
will
Yeah.

35:49.70
Steve
But like this was the, you know, and when, when he said that, I didn’t at the time know what to say, but I thought about it often because it really illustrated this divide in their thinking. Like they, they didn’t even know what a new route meant. They didn’t know what that term meant.

36:05.32
will
Right.

36:06.25
Steve
There was only one way to climb Makalu.

36:06.82
will
Right.

36:08.09
Steve
There was only one route. They didn’t even know there was another potential route. So like, and that was probably like 2011 or something. So, I mean, to take it from there, which again, it’s just such a small amount of time to take it. So now where they’re ideating, Hey, let’s go do the last great problem in Himalayan climbing, which is the winner san of Santa P two, which is, you know,

36:29.42
will
Yeah.

36:30.19
Steve
probably not going to be done again for another hundred years.

36:32.94
will
Right.

36:32.95
Steve
So, you know, an incredible story and a very, just everything about that is a story.

36:34.33
will
Right.

36:40.18
Steve
And so they have a wonderful story. And so they’ve got this, they’ve got this, they’re picking up this sort of climbing tour, the guiding tours. They’re running, you know, can we say that probably the majority of, probably by any measure, they’re running the majority of commercial guided trips on Mount Everest now, whether you talk about the number of climbers, the amount of revenue generated. I don’t care what you know. Is that what’s happening? Where is Everest now, and the business of Everest?

37:13.31
will
That is exactly what’s happening, for better or worse. It’s going through another sort of period of shift and trying to figure itself out. In many ways, the Nepalese, now that they have taken over the industry, are going through that awkward phase that the Westerners did in the 90s and 2000s in some ways. And what I mean by that is that they are kind of busting in, perhaps getting over their skis a little bit. There’s really no sense of limit to how many people they’ll sign up. The mountain is so safe, why not take 100 clients in several different expeditions, right different guides.

38:00.22
will
You know, the market has shifted wildly. There are far fewer Westerners signing up to climb Everest than there were, and there are far more Easterners. So there are or, you know, middle, I should say, like, say Malaysian, Chinese, Indian, Central Asia, places where there’s an emerging middle class, basically.

38:23.10
Steve
Mm hmm.

38:24.24
will
And these Nepali companies cater to them perfectly on price point, culture, just in general. And so, yes, the Nepali companies are taking hundreds of clients in a season, and companies like Adventure Consultants and AAI are taking half a dozen. But of course, you and I probably relate to that experience a little more. You want to know exactly who you’re climbing with. You want to know them well. That small team thing is a great thing.

38:55.04
will
I mean, if I’m going to spend $65,000 to climb it, which is what those two companies still charge, I think a small team is pretty good.

39:04.51
Steve
Yeah.

39:05.28
will
And then the other companies are charging, say, half that.

39:08.47
Steve
Yeah. Yeah.

39:08.69
will
But they have four times, five times as many clients.

39:12.99
Steve
Interesting.

39:14.00
will
Yeah.

39:14.94
Steve
Yeah. So when we, when we look at, you know, the, I don’t know, the, the next, I think even 10 years in the future is a long time in the world of Mount Everest. What do you see in your crystal ball? Having studied this industry, having written this very great book, and it’s very entertaining, it’s also very educational. What do you see? What do you think? Where do you put your bets?

39:48.48
will
Cautiously optimistic. I think that let’s start with what matters most here, and that’s the Nepalese.

39:57.33
Steve
Hmm.

39:58.44
will
In this whole journey from the first time it was ever climbed to now, it’s really their mountain, or I should say it’s in their borders, and it was revered by their people for hundreds of years. And the Sherpa community, especially, is just such a vibrant and amazing, warm, shrewd, intelligent sort of culture that for things to have shifted to where the guiding industry is in their hands. And I don’t just mean in the mountains. I mean the guest houses and the gear shops and all these other things in the Khumbu Valley that help it thrive.

40:35.24
will
I love that. I find that to be poetic and I’m really glad that that’s where we’re at. As Conrad Anker told me and I put in the book, you know, Everest is Nepal’s greatness in a lot of ways, right? They have statues of the first woman who summited and, you know, there are kids who want to become mountaineers.

40:52.72
Steve
Hmm.

40:58.26
will
It’s a little bit like they don’t have a soccer team, for example, that competes on any sort of stage. So that piece of it, I love seeing this moment right now as it being really, they’re they’re making it up, they’re making up the rules. And as well, you’ve had some ah missteps in the guiding of the last, say, five, six years. You’ve had a few more unnecessary fatalities on the mountain, which have to do with supervision up high and sort of the number of people supervising, how many clients, et cetera.

41:30.38
Steve
Yeah.

41:34.11
will
And that is largely an Neplai problem, not a Western company problem. What’s different is that you have a lot of scrutiny on those events and you have a lot of the owners and the guide saying, we need to do better.

41:44.63
Steve
Yeah.

41:49.58
will
So I just think that this conscious idea of losing four clients, you know, even if it’s only four clients for the entire season, it shouldn’t even be one client in many of these cases. These are preventable deaths is what everybody sees them as.

42:07.02
Steve
Mm hmm.

42:07.57
will
And that’s what anyone cares about, right preventable. And as long as everyone’s still maintaining that conversation and calling that out, like, hey, it’s gotta get better, it’s gotta get better. And I think the government is doing that as well because they are afraid that the industry will just kind of fall apart if no one trusts, you know if the death rate was going up and you couldn’t trust the companies. So I’m cautiously optimistic that that’s headed in the right direction as well. I just don’t know when. you know, that might solidify. um And so yeah, so I don’t think it’s. I think it’s exciting.

42:43.16
Steve
Yeah, I agree. I think it’s, I think it’s great. I think it’s wonderful to see them taking ownership of their mountain and everything they’re doing with it. And let’s, let’s, let’s give them some grace. Like they’re human. None of us are perfect. You know, if we, if we want to. You know, comparing apples to apples, we can go back to the, you know, beginnings of the guiding industry in Europe and, you know, look at how things were done then if we want to, you know. So I think I would like ask people to, you know, be a little less judgmental of others as they as they watch events unfold and have for a variety of reasons, but not the least of which that people are are human and not everything is perfect and not all accidents and oversight is preventable.

43:31.98
Steve
I want to go back to something that we talked about. We kind of tried to put a pin in about like who that person is being guided on Everest, you know, over these last sort of 30, 40 years or yeah, I guess 30 years. You know, we had sort of the the oil man, flamboyant, oil man, businessman, the bath. which is really a caricature of that whole like he’s just like so right out of right out of central casting.

43:59.89
will
yeah

44:02.25
Steve
Right.

44:02.64
will
yeah

44:03.30
Steve
And then you had, you know, these sort of people like, um you know, Sandy Hill Pittman, who, you know, was also somewhere on that spectrum. Her husband at the time had founded MTV and made a lot of money. But she also like climbed with people like Alex Lowe and Barry Blanchard and

44:24.04
will
Yeah.

44:25.35
Steve
you know, like top guys in the world at the time, probably Conrad was part of that too.

44:27.38
will
Yeah.

44:33.58
will
David Breshear, he climbed with a couple of fences.

44:33.58
Steve
But David Breshears. Yeah.

44:36.26
will
yeah

44:37.09
Steve
And who’s climbing Everest now? How do you characterize like, I think you put it well, it went from being sort of this impossible thing to being this barely possible thing to being this like, you know, crazy doable but crazy thing to being like, yeah, we can guide people, but to yeah, we can guide people and expect a 0% fatality rate. You know, what is it? Where is it now?

45:06.10
will
Um, you know, that’s the crux of my book, really. I mean, obviously I wrote this for a Western audience, right?

45:09.39
Steve
Okay.

45:12.08
will
So I’m mostly speaking to Westerners and really the client is probably the most hated figure on Everest, the Western client was anyway.

45:20.57
Steve
Hmm.

45:22.92
will
And as soon as I recognize that shift to it becoming an endurance ah challenge. And as soon as I recognized the shift of noticing that the people who go climb Everest were a lot of the same people who sign up for their first marathon or sign up for their first ultra or whatever. And this is by the way, I relate to this a hundred percent, but it’s people who like, you know, maybe have something going on in their life, you know, a recent difficulty, like a divorce or something, and they’re, they want to work through it, or maybe they want to discharge some old trauma in their life. Um, or, or they just need to give their life a kick up the ass. Like there’s a bunch of personal, very personal reasons why people need to put a challenge in front of them. And

46:14.96
will
Again, the challenge ranges from you know ah Kathy and accounting signing up for a 5K to someone who’s done a bunch of marathons saying, I’m going to do an ultra. These are insane, audacious ideas to that person.

46:31.41
Steve
Yeah.

46:32.13
will
And climbing Mount Everest is now on that list, it is the way I look at it.

46:37.01
Steve
Yeah.

46:38.38
will
It has been taken from the climbing community, although I wanted one caveat there. I think it’s really important to note. The South call has been taken from the climbing community. The other 13 routes are fair game.

46:48.57
Steve
Right.

46:51.41
will
Anyone who wants to try them, right? And I would say that’s fair to say it has been taken from the climbing community, and it’s not a climbing challenge anymore. But boy, when it comes to challenges that are meant to shake your life up, that are just meant to transform you in some way. And I’m guessing, I don’t know what percentage of clients you guys get, but I bet you a very high percentage of them would admit that these endurance challenges are mini forms of therapy and transformative experiences for them.

47:27.07
will
It’s the whole point in doing them, right?

47:28.96
Steve
Absolutely.

47:30.39
will
Transformation.

47:31.32
Steve
Yeah.

47:31.51
will
And so I would never begrudge any human being who is looking to go get some transformation. And so that’s who climbs Everest these days. It really is.

47:41.76
Steve
yeah

47:42.65
will
Everyone at base camp is there because they want some sort of transformation. And don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean there’s a bunch of depressed people moping around base camp, and then they all come down and they’re happy. These are highly ambitious people to begin with. These are people that are optimistic, who view life as just this wild adventure. And then all of a sudden, someone says, well, why don’t you go climb Everest? It’s this very special, interesting kind of person who says, huh, you know what? I think I will. I think it’s interesting. I think it’s fascinating.

48:16.56
Steve
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more than anything, everything you said. And, you know, I always, we always talk about it internally among the coaches that at a pro athlete that, you know, the physical training is just sort of a mechanism for the actual work we’re doing with people, which is the transformation of themselves into something they want to become something they envision for themselves, someone they envision themselves becoming.

48:37.33
will
Thanks.

48:42.72
Steve
And it takes work. It doesn’t happen like all of this. It doesn’t happen overnight. You can’t just say like, I want to be, I don’t know, successful in this. It’s like, you know, if you decide you want to be successful in something, you almost surely can have you, you know, the right motivations and the right willpower and the right, all these things. And, and you just start putting your head down and working at it and it’ll, it’ll happen. And climbing Everest is absolutely no different. And I also think, and, and maybe this is a shout out to my, my climbing

49:08.05
will
Yeah.

49:13.71
Steve
more climbing oriented community here that listens to this podcast. Yeah. The South call has gone from Everest, but as you, from the climbers, as you say, and, and, and I do think that’s true, but it’s the, the analogy is Denali, you know, we would never have been able to climb the Slovak direct on the South face of Denali in 60 hours. If there was not a well beaten path that I personally had been up and down, like I don’t know, so something between 20 and 25 times at that point in my life, because I had been guiding, because when we got to the top, we could we could actually relax and just run down the, run down the follow the wands and get down really quickly.

49:46.59
will
Yeah.

49:57.47
Steve
Like we went from the summit down to 14 and like three hours or something insane.

49:57.68
will
Yeah.

50:02.04
Steve
And of course we were fit and strong, but also there was a path and we weren’t breaking trail and we weren’t looking for the route and we were just turning our brains off And going down in place, we’ve been down dozens of times collectively. And, you know, I would say that Everest is that now, like, you know, there’s plenty of climbing challenges on Everest and people do still attempt them, but they’re not on the South call, but the South call is the escape route, essentially. Like if you time it right and you get down, you know, get there or you get lucky and you get there at the top and you can bail down.

50:28.05
will
Yeah.

50:34.03
Steve
back into the Western Coom in just a matter of hours if you’re a skilled climber and you don’t have the Hillary step to negotiate anymore, there’s fewer bottlenecks, um all of that.

50:42.83
will
Yeah.

50:44.15
Steve
I think it’s great. Like, you know, the Everest haters, I think, I kind of, you know, I think that they’re just people are always gonna, people will hate, there will always be haters and they just need to kind of get over it and let people live their lives.

51:00.63
will
I feel like you know that the hater slice is getting smaller and smaller, I will say. And here’s what I mean.

51:05.96
Steve
Is it?

51:06.89
will
Personally, I think they’re just loud. That’s the thing. They’re just really loud, you know the hater class of Everest. But here’s what you have. You have a bunch of climbers. You know and I hate to use the word real, but climbers who never had any interest in climbing Everest to begin with. if they hit you They could care less if it was the highest. That doesn’t interest them. And then you have the people who are not climbers who are up there because someone told them they could do it without being a climber. Well, the slice I think that’s hating is the climber who would love to put the highest mountain in the world on their resume but doesn’t have the experience to go on any of the harder routes. So someone who is like not comfortable

51:57.23
will
That is thinking, I want to go up the South Col route, but damn it, I’m going to have to climb with all these you know amateurs. That’s the slice, I think. Because there are a bunch of climbers out there, I think, who probably would like to stand on top of Everest just because it’s Everest.

52:07.22
Steve
Yeah.

52:09.91
Steve
But Yeah, that’s great.

52:13.20
will
Yeah.

52:13.36
Steve
That’s great. Yeah, I like that. So I love the book, Will. I can’t recommend it enough. How do people connect with you and find you? You may have some book events coming up. I know it was launched in April of 2024, a few months back. So, you know, you’ve got Simon and Schuster behind this, which is awesome because I love that our mountain community is telling stories to the whole spectrum of, you know, Western American culture.

52:44.97
Steve
I love that you’re stepping into that for us, representing us there. It’s fantastic. And, you know, I can only hope we have more of that kind of representation in our community. So thank you. And how do we, how do our readers find you? Where do they get their book? How do they get sick, the signed copy, anything like that?

53:04.85
will
It’s all the easy and obvious routes, right? Your Amazon, a lot of independent bookstores are carrying it. Um, you know, and it’s Kindle, it’s audio, it’s the, it’s the whole thing and the paperback will be available next year. Although I’d love it if people buy the hardcover. Um, but, uh, the signed copies are tricky. Um, uh, yeah, but I actually don’t know. I mean, you know, you could get in touch with, yeah.

53:30.44
Steve
Oh, maybe we can sort that out. If anybody needs a signed copy, they’ll have to have to get in touch with either me directly and I’ll connect you to Will or connect on Will via his socials or whatever. So.

53:43.99
will
Well, here’s the thing, the events that I have done, I’ve always done a bunch of signed copies for those bookstores. So I know where they are, if anyone wants to get in touch. If they happen to be in Southern California, for instance, I can tell them where there are signed copies of the book.

53:52.14
Steve
Got it.

53:57.28
will
They’re just not everywhere, that’s all.

53:59.67
Steve
Right. Right.

54:00.80
will
Yeah, I am not a prolific Instagram poster by any means, but I sort of, ah I do sort of feed some Everest ink stuff on there.

54:00.78
Steve
Makes sense.

54:17.19
will
That’s bonus material to the book, I guess you could say. And you know, sort of, as the season unfolded this year, right?

54:26.82
will
That was not written about in my book, and I sort of commentated on that a little bit, and I’ll do the same next year. And my Instagram is willcockrellincolor.

54:39.02
Steve
We’ll add it to the show notes as well. Thanks so much.

54:41.35
will
Yeah.

54:41.74
Steve
Well, it’s been great talking to you and thank you for tuning into the uphill athlete podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review and subscribe to stay updated on future episode until next time. Keep moving, stay safe. I’ve been your host, Steve house. Thanks for listening.