Everest, Inc.
The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Featuring original interviews with Everest mountain guides and climbers, this is “a fast-moving, nuanced account of the peak’s transformation from the ultimate mountaineering challenge into a booming business opportunity” (Joshua Hammer, New York Times bestselling author).
Anyone who has read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or has seen a recent photo of climbers standing in line to get to the top of Everest may think they have a sense of what the world’s highest mountain is like. It’s an extreme landscape where bad weather and incredible altitude can kill; an overcrowded, trashed-out recreation destination; and a place where the rich exploit local Sherpas while padding their egos—and social media feeds.
There’s some truth to these clichés, but they’re a sliver of the story. Unlike any book to date, Everest, Inc. is the definitive account of how a few daring entrepreneurs paired raw courage and naked ambition to get paying clients safely up and down Everest. Until the late eighties, such a thing was considered impossible. Within a few years, Everest guiding was a burgeoning industry. Today, ninety percent of the people on the mountain are clients or employees of guided expeditions.
Studded with quotes from original interviews with more than a hundred Western and Sherpa climbers, clients, writers, and filmmakers—including Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker—Everest, Inc. foregrounds the colorful voices of the people who have made the mountain what it is today. As professional climber and author Freddie Wilkinson says, “Whether you are thinking about taking a crack at the world’s highest peak or are simply an armchair mountaineer trying to make sense of the complex dynamics driving the modern Everest industry, Everest, Inc. should be required reading.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Cockrell chronicles the simultaneous democratization and commercialization of high adventure in his deeply researched debut account of the guided climbing industry on Mt. Everest. Setting himself in opposition to tales of "tragedy or triumph" on Everest, Cockrell aims for a more nuanced story of entrepreneurial gumption, local economic uplift, and expanded access. Once attempted only by the most elite climbers, in the 1980s a ragtag assemblage of mountaineers saw an opportunity to make Everest attainable for a hefty fee. Through a combination of imported scientific innovation (satellite phones and oxygen tanks), Sherpa know-how (including the quick building of stone shelters at high altitudes), and permanent infrastructure (a series of camps up the side of the mountain), a booming industry was born. Everest has now been climbed by nearly 12,000 people, the vast majority of them clients of guiding companies. Cockrell doesn't always fully convince in his effort to push back against common criticism of these developments—the fact that deaths are "less than 0.5%" of climbers isn't totally inspiring, and his highlighting of the local Sherpa people's prospering off the industry, while illuminating, is noticeably missing any figures on how much the guide companies actually make. Still, this is a sure-footed, and at times riveting, history of Everest. Fans of mountaineering adventures will want to add this to their shelf.
