When Will Cockrell told me he was writing a book about Mount Everest, he couldn’t see the roll of my eyes. But he’s perceptive enough to have picked up on my lukewarm commitment to being interviewed, and so I felt a need to explain that there are already quite a few Everest books out there. My coffee table is in danger of imminent collapse under their weight; my shelves sag with Everest encyclopedias and memoirs. It’s been done, I told him.

　　Listen carefully, he said: This will be different. It will be the story of the entire guiding industry that was created on and around the world’s highest mountain. He planned to call it Everest, Inc.

　　That got my interest, because I put about a quarter century of blood, sweat, and tears into this “industry.” I first went to the Big E in the early 1990s, which turned out to be the dawn of the commercial era on the Goddess Mother of the Earth. Following years of adventure in the Himalayas, I quit guiding 8,000-meter peaks after the twin disaster years of 2014—when an avalanche on Everest killed 16 Nepali workers in the Khumbu Icefall—and 2015, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed 19 people at Everest Base Camp and a total of 9,000 people in Nepal.

　　I had to admit to Cockrell that a history of Everest as a business hadn’t been done, but I’m pretty cynical, and I wasn’t sure that he was the right person to do it. I’ve long enjoyed his magazine articles in venues like Men’s Journal, Outside, and GQ, and I know he put in some good years climbing rock and crags. I even guided him on Denali a while back. But he isn’t an Everest climber, much less an Everest guide. How was he going to understand the business? And, failing that, was he just going to take the usual potshots about how we exploited Sherpas and destroyed the environment and clogged up a sacred mountain with privileged neophytes who hadn’t “earned” the right to be there?

　　But Cockrell seemed to value my input, and as someone whos been captivated by Everest for so long, I wanted to avoid the foolish mistake of thinking that everyone already knows this story as well as I do. They don’t, and one of the virtues of  Everest, Inc. is that it sneaks up on you and becomes a history of the whole damn thing. In the 1920s, there was George Mallory; then came Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who achieved the first summit in 1953; and then there were the heroic hardasses of the 1970s and 1980s, climbers like Reinhold Messner and Jerzy Kukuczka, who got to the top using new routes, or by climbing without oxygen, or in winter, or during the summer monsoon. In 1985, Dick Bass came along and popularized the idea of climbing the Seven Summits, the highest mountain on each continent. In the 1990s, guides like Todd Burleson, Eric Simonson, and Russell Brice turned Everest into a gold mine and made climbing it start to look easy. But the Into Thin Air deaths of 1996 put an end to that.

　　There were also obvious tensions, exemplified in 2013 by a confrontation that involved climbers Simone Moro, Ueli Steck, and a number of Sherpas. It was spurred by a specific encounter on the Lhotse Face, but it also came to symbolize long standing friction between Western climbers and guides and home-grown mountaineers from Nepal. The year 2019 saw another potent symbol of how crowded the mountain had become: the famous and startling Conga Line photo, which showed a long queue of climbers en route to the Hillary Step and the summit.

　　As for Cockrell, his overall focus is on how two great transformations came about. The first—in the late 1980s and early 1990s—happened when expeditions backed by nations gave way to client-funded trips, and how those, in turn, developed into guided climbs. Something that was once unimaginable became routine. This shift was marked and shaped by particular tragedies, by the thirst for money and publicity and power, but also by heroism and the absolute thrill of climbing—and working—in extreme environments.

　　The second great transformation—which is ongoing—is the power transfer away from the foreign men and women who invented the Everest industry to the Nepalis and Sherpas who are determined to shape its future.

　　Cockrell has done a masterful job of putting the now-sprawling industry into an understandable and vastly entertaining context: his book isn’t just another catalog of expeditions and statistics. Improbably, Everest, Inc. is a story with narrative drive, as Cockrell makes it clear how one thing led to another. It succeeds precisely because he’s a real journalist and storyteller, rather than just another antagonist with scores to settle. This project required a professional, someone with the energy and interest to track down and interrogate a thousand quirky and often egotistical characters. Cockrell talked to the movers and shakers who built the industry, and to those who carried its weight on their backs. He sifted through mountains of published material and documentaries to understand changes in the game.

　　As I said, I thought I knew it all about the main players, but reading Everest, Inc. reminded me that I only knew them superficially. Just because we shared a climbing route, a poker table, and endless hours waiting for weather and coughs to go away didn’t necessarily give us full insight into each other. Cockrell asked the right questions, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning who my mentors and cohorts actually were and what motivated them.

　　We’re losing some of them, of course. In the week I spent reading the book, David Breashears and Lou Whittaker died. Both are key figures in the evolution that Cockrell maps out in Everest, Inc., and their loss makes me thankful that their reflections were preserved. And yes, a number of us talked smack about each other to Cockrell, but his reporting of these remarks doesn’t devolve into gossip. Even in the cases where important people—like Jon Krakauer and Nirmal “Nims” Purja—wouldn’t speak to him, he goes to considerable effort to give balanced assessments of their contributions to Everest history.

　　As for my worry that Everest, Inc. would take the standard and easy shots, I’ll admit I was relieved. Cockrell doesn’t shy away from controversies, but he doesn’t sensationalize them, either. The ethnic and economic tensions that have driven change in commercial climbing become a central theme. The persistent worry that modern climbers routinely and blithely walk past the dead and dying is addressed. (My belief is that rescues should be attempted when they’re feasible, but that it’s always possible for climbers to get themselves so deeply into trouble that no one can save them.) He shines a light on the tangled relationship between guided climbing and the media covering it.

　　This is tricky stuff, and I think Cockrell makes it clear that newspapers, magazines, books, and films are big parts of the enterprise, too. Their tendency to hype the deaths and disasters have served as fuel on the commercial fire. Time after time, business increased in the wake of well-publicized accidents and mishaps.

　　Between the lines of Cockrell’s book, one can easily discern that more than a few Everest climbers attempted the mountain so they could set themselves apart from mere mortals. Nothing aided them more than the perception that taking Everest on was death-defying and extreme. Those of us guiding and leading expeditions hated the coverage and railed against the media—unless of course we were the ones being interviewed in a given year, since there aren’t a lot of shy folks in this industry, and we all liked the spotlight. (Some of us still do, and as I read, I got mildly irritated that a few relentless self-promoters get even more coverage in Everest, Inc., at the expense of some of the hardest-working Sherpas and guides on the mountain.) Invariably, the story strays from the actual craft of climbing and guiding that drew me to this world to begin with, but that’s Cockrell’s point. This isn’t a book about the mythical and virtuous climber toiling toward some noble and deeply personal goal. It’s about the Inc.

　　Everest, Inc. puts the big events and obvious disasters in clear focus. But Cockrell also does a credible job of explaining that it doesn’t necessarily take an act of god to kill people on the mountain. The transformations that he’s highlighting mean, in essence, that the mountain is becoming more accessible—which many would view as an inherently good thing. But more people on the mountain will mean more people dying. Plain and simple. And shifting the business to those eager to take on more clients for less money—and in the process hiring less-experienced mountain workers—will have that same act-of-god effect from time to time. There will be deaths—and headlines all over the world—even when a major storm or avalanche isn’t the cause. Face it, the daily squall is bad enough at 28,000 feet. The sun simply going down at the end of the day is a disaster when you’re cold and strung out. Calamities will hit the new operators a little harder, but Everest, Inc. points out that the old-guard operators put their share of clients and guides way out there beyond their abilities.

　　The book explains where the industry is headed and who’s taking it there. Cockrell gives an important and articulate voice to the Sherpas and Nepalis driving the current phase of commercial climbing, not just on Everest, but on each of the world’s highest mountains. There is a fitting balance to the story. Yes, there was a fascinating period when the great western Everest guides roamed the planet, brought the clients, hired the help, called the shots, and made the movies. But Everest, Inc. makes it clear that this era has passed, which isn’t really a bad thing. This future is fascinating, too, and the characters—this time from more diverse backgrounds—are still larger than life.

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