Everest, Inc

Auteur

Will Cockrell has spent more than twenty years as a senior editor, writer, and consultant for national magazines including Men’s Journal, Outside, Men’s Fitness, and GQ. His work has been awarded by the American Society of Magazine Editors and Professional Publishers Association UK. A former outdoor guide, Cockrell has covered Everest throughout his career, and has visited Everest base camp in Nepal. He lives with his family in Los Angeles, California. Find more at his website, WillCockrell.com.

Texte du rabat

The vivid and authoritative story of the Western and Sherpa adventurers who invented and refined one of the least likely industries on earth: guided climbing on Mount Everest.

Échantillon de lecture
Prologue PROLOGUE
The summit of Mount Everest is split right down the middle by the border between Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, but the vast majority of climbers make their attempt from the Nepal side. If they’re clients of a guiding company, as almost all Everest climbers are today, they do so via the South Col Route–the same one that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa used during their first ascent. On their way to the 29,035 foot summit, clients pass through five well-stocked camps, from the relatively flat and balmy base camp, at 17,600 feet, to the head-spinning and frigid Camp Four, at 26,250 feet. Camp Four sits on the South Col—a saddle-shaped pass between Everest and the adjacent peak Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world.

Trekkers and climbers reach base camp by first taking one of a dozen daily flights from Nepal’s capital city, Kathmandu, to Tenzing-Hillary Airport in the small village of Lukla, at 9,400 feet. From there, they spend ten days ascending and descending narrow switchbacks and rough staircases hand-built out of local granite, crossing swaying cable bridges over churning glacier-fed rivers, and admiring pink rhododendrons in full spring bloom during the most popular climbing season. They bed down each evening in cozy stone teahouses heated by yak-dung furnaces in increasingly small villages with centuries-old Buddhist temples. As base camp nears, the landscape of variegated earth tones becomes monochromatic, all black rock, white snow, and blue ice. While the Khumbu Glacier on which base camp sits looks like a vast rock garden, it is really the surface of a constantly shifting frozen river that has chewed its way through the surrounding metamorphic rock and deposited the crushed-up debris on the surface. When trekkers crest the final moraine before base camp, at last they see the hundreds of brightly colored, dome-shaped tents stretching across nearly a mile of the glacier.

Many of those who will be attempting the summit as part of a guided expedition will arrive in base camp to incongruous comforts for such a remote outpost, including carpeted lounges with beanbag chairs, high-speed internet access, masseuses, full bars, baristas, and movie screens. The diversions are meant to help fill the ample downtime, as climbers and their guides spend up to eight weeks on their expedition. It’s often said that Everest expeditions are two weeks of climbing crammed into two months. Climbers spend approximately a week, cumulatively, ascending to Camps Two and Three, and up nearby peaks to acclimatize to the crippling altitude. Then, when it’s time to go for the summit—which usually isn’t until about day thirty-five of the expedition, if all is going smoothly—it takes less than a week to climb from base camp to the peak. Coming back down takes only about three days.

Getting from base camp to Camp One requires navigating the mountain’s most treacherous section, where the Khumbu Glacier makes a sudden 2,000-foot climb in the span of about a mile and a half. This landscape of slick ice, enormous blocks of teetering snow, and gaping crevasses is known as the Khumbu Icefall. Camp One is more of a supply depot for oxygen bottles and other gear than an overnight pitstop, so climbers typically push on to Camp Two. Perched at 21,000 feet, in a seemingly benign valley called the Western Cwm (pronounced “koom”), Camp Two has fifty or so tents tucked into sheltered nooks of rock and ice. Surrounding the tents is a towering horseshoe-shaped amphitheater of jagged peaks and ridges consisting of Everest, Lhotse, and a rarely climbed, slightly lower, but more technical subpeak called Nuptse. Frayed, faded Buddhist prayer flags flap in the near-constant breeze as climbers hide out from the elements and sip lemon ginger tea in cramped mess tents that double as command centers—or ERs when disasters strike.

The terrain of Camp Two must be treated with great respect. Routine storms blow in, and avalanches, even distant ones, can push blasts of air and an apocalyptic cloud of white powder into the camp with such force that it rips tents apart or blows them away. Complacent newbies have been swallowed by cracks in the ice while fetching water for an afternoon tea. Even elite mountaineers have been lost. A beloved and skilled Nepalese climber named Babu Chiri Sherpa died in 2001 after falling into a crevasse while taking photos near Camp Two.

Bottom line: in the thin air of Camp Two, it is hard enough to walk a few feet away from your tent to relieve yourself, let alone run for your life. 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.

Steck and Moro represented an increasingly small slice of Everest society: elite mountaineers who neither paid others to guide them nor took money to guide others. They were sponsored climbers, who received a salary from huge outdoor companies including the North Face and Mountain Hardwear to beguile and inspire amateurs with their daring first ascents and pioneering records.

Steck, thirty-seven at the time, was one of the most famous climbers on earth—a national hero of Switzerland, where they treat professional mountaineers like Americans treat NBA players. His nickname: “the Swiss Machine.” Moro, forty-six, was an Italian who had been coming to Everest since he was twenty-one years old and had summited four times already. He also worked as a pilot for an elite high-altitude helicopter rescue operation in the Himalayas. At thirty-three, Jonathan Griffith, an Englishman, was less experienced, there primarily to film Steck and Moro’s groundbreaking climb for as long as he could keep up with them.

By 2013, there were only a couple of routes left on the mountain that had either never or only rarely been climbed before, and the Europeans were set to attempt one of them. Not only did Steck and Moro intend to summit Everest via this extremely dangerous route, they wanted to continue on in a single twenty-hour push to then summit Lhotse, also via a new route. They planned to do all of this without supplemental oxygen.

The pro climbers, however, were operating on the fringes of a juggernaut that can justly be described as the Everest-industrial complex. On any given day in April and May (Everest’s spring climbing season) there are approximately 1,500 people at base camp. Only a small fraction are independent climbers like Steck and Moro. The rest are clients or employees of the booming commercial guiding businesses, in which amateur climbers—or even complete novices—pay as much as $300,000 for a heavily assisted shot at the summit. The South Col Route is like a two-lane freeway, with a 75-miles-per-hour speed limit, and no shoulder to pull off on. Though they hoped to ultimately attempt a new route, the elite cli…