Everest, Inc.
The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Featuring original interviews with mountain guides and climbers—including Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker—this vivid and authoritative adventure history chronicles one of the least likely industries on Earth: guided climbing on Mount Everest.
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 the mountain pretty well figured out. It’s an extreme landscape where bad weather and incredible altitude can occasionally kill, but more so an overcrowded, trashed-out recreation destination where rich clients pad their egos—and social media feeds—while exploiting local Sherpas.
There’s some truth to these clichés, but they’re a sliver of the story. Unlike any book to date, Everest, Inc. gets to the heart of the mountain through the definitive story of its greatest invention: the Himalayan guiding industry. It all began in the 1980s with a few boot-strapping entrepreneurs who paired raw courage and naked ambition with a new style of expedition planning. Many of them are still living and climbing today, and as a result of their astonishing success, ninety percent of the people now on Everest are clients or employees of guided expeditions.
Studded with quotes from original interviews with more than a hundred western and Sherpa climbers, clients, writers, filmmakers, and even a Hollywood actor, Everest, Inc. foregrounds the voices of the people who have made the mountain what it is today. And while there is plenty of high-altitude drama in unpacking the last forty years of Everest tragedy and triumph, it ultimately transcends stereotypes and tells the uplifting counternarrative of the army of journeymen and women who have made people’s dreams come true, and of the Nepalis who are pushing the industry into the future.
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.