If ‘anyone’ can climb Everest, where does that leave Everest?

In the 1980s, a business executive named Dick Bass became the first person in the world to climb all seven summits. 

Bass was the owner of Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah and an early investor in Vail Resorts, so he was heavily involved in the industry of the outdoors. But he was not a likely candidate for success: He did not consider himself to be a climber, and he even bragged about how little training he did. 

But he had willpower, money, and time, all of which outweighed his inexperience. He also had charisma, essential for endearing himself to professional climbers who could lead him to the top at a time when no-one was even thinking about running guided trips there.

According to Will Cockrell, author of Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World, everything changed when Bass reached the summit. And the whole Everest guiding industry has him to thank for sparking the idea almost 40 years ago.

Cockrell’s book is a fascinating history of how the Everest guiding industry has grown up. We caught up with him about how the planet’s tallest peak has captivated us for generations and become a pariah among ‘serious’ climbers.

Adventure.com: How has Everest changed our perception of adventure?

Will Cockrell: I’m not sure that Everest has changed it. It’s possible that Everest has changed as a result of our changing definition of adventure. As a journalist in the adventure space for so long, I’ve heard all the debates, and in fact, they were content for me for years. I wrote features and athlete profiles and things about that very topic. I always found it interesting how you’d have one person come out and say, “Adventure is dead.”

There is no spot on this earth that hasn’t been GPS-ed or Instagrammed or whatever, and that makes it impossible to have an adventure of the quality of previous generations. But then you’d have someone go surfing near, say, Papua New Guinea, and find a remote beach where they didn’t see anyone, and all of a sudden they’ll say the opposite. They’ll say it just goes to show the world is big, and we can go and find these things.  

As with Everest, a lot of what shapes that definition of adventure, what compels people to plant their flag on what they feel is ‘adventure,’ is what was done before—often by them. People get very righteous about the way they did something. It’s a little bit like when you say, “Glastonbury used to be good, and now the festival is no good anymore.” It’s just whatever you did, or whatever you find most romantic—that’s what defines adventure for you.

In your book, you refer to Bass as an ‘amateur,’ because he wasn’t a guide, and his inexperience is played up—including by him. Yet he obviously spent a lot of time in the mountains. What makes someone a ‘real’ climber?

I feel pretty strongly that there’s really no-one in a position to judge that except for yourself—unless you’re going to put someone in danger. I guess you could lie about your experience with a climbing partner. But as for who’s a ‘real’ climber and who’s not, I consider myself to be a lifelong climber and I understand that it’s all about self-sufficiency. It’s your responsibility to learn enough to be self-sufficient. Obviously you’re going to have times when you’re learning, and that’s OK, but the idea is that you continue to learn so you can not only get yourself out of trouble, but get other people out of trouble, too.

But the thing is, I don’t expect a non-climber to do that. I don’t expect Dick Bass to devote 10 years to becoming self-sufficient in the mountains when he has no interest in doing that. He just wanted to climb seven mountains and become as able to climb those seven as he needed to be.

You also mention Sandy Hill (Pittman), a socialite who summitted Everest the same day as Jon Krakauer. She was criticized in his book Into Thin Air [about the 1996 guided Everest expedition that went wrong] for being there for the wrong reasons. What are the ‘right’ reasons to climb Everest?

I can’t answer that, because I actually make the point that judging Sandy and whether she was the right person to be there or not was the flaw in the argument from the get-go. I wasn’t able to have a conversation with Jon Krakauer, but this is something I would love to discuss with him. I respect him immensely as a writer, as a journalist, as a reporter, and as a mountaineer. He’s an incredible climber. So, he sort-of lives in this unique space to be able to judge certain things, which is fine. If you read Into Thin Air, he never asks the question explicitly: “I’m here to see who belongs here and who doesn’t.” 

He would probably disagree with me on this, but as he creates his cast of characters, he is without a doubt trying to tell the reader, “I’m going to go ahead and show you each person here at basecamp and the people I’ve climbed with, and I’m gonna paint them in a way that lets you know whether I think they belong here or not,”—Sandy being one that does not belong there. But on the other hand, Doug Hansen did belong there. He was a mailman who saved his money, and I think Jon related to him because he had grit. Sandy is an eccentric, interesting woman, and she has lived a pretty interesting life that is very much the opposite of the climbing world. I think that makes it hard for someone like Jon to see her as legitimate.

But I realized that it’s impossible to look at someone and decide whether they belong there or not. The one and only argument that I buy is that you shouldn’t be there if you’re endangering other people—and it happens, there’s people that lie about their experience—but they’re the exception, not the rule.

Today Everest is pretty safe—almost everyone comes down alive, with the exception of 2023. What has reduced the mortality rate so much?

It’s the infrastructure and the contingency plans. This is probably one of the most misunderstood things about the guiding industry on Everest, and yet for someone like me, maybe one of the most obvious things is that this is being run by mountain guides. Mountain guides’ jobs are to make things as safe as possible for the lowest common denominator in the group. They have redundancies and redundancies and redundancies. It’s not about taking chances—it’s about having zero deaths.

They also bring more oxygen now, and there’s a whole new generation of local Sherpa guides that are International Mountain Guide (IMG)-certified. The Sherpas going up are full-on mountain guides and they’re also insanely strong at altitude. So you have a better-trained Sherpa population who are not there necessarily to feed their families but because they love mountaineering. Oxygen is big, but I’m not sure if it’s technology so much as it is experience. It’s a trade route now, and these guides and Sherpas know it so well.

We have those iconic images of hikers lined up like ants heading to the summit. Would you say the guiding industry on Everest has been a net benefit for the country?

Without a doubt. I don’t know how much the Everest industry trickles out beyond the Khumbu Valley, but it does trickle out, and it’s a big part of the trekking industry. You’re talking 60,000 people trekking in the Khumbu Valley every year, and only a couple thousand are climbing the mountain. I was amazed at the prosperity within the Khumbu. It was this beautiful, happy, well-maintained slice of Nepal where generations of Nepalis have now settled into this idea of what their legacy is with this mountain. There’s so much pride around it.

There were some messy times, but we’re in this new time where they love the fact that people come into their valley to trek, see the mountains, etc.

Why do you think our perception of Everest is so negative?

I think primarily because the loudest voices in the room are the purist climbers. The reason their—and Krakauer’s, and [Patagonia founder Yvon] Chouinard’s—voices are the loudest in the room is because their notions of climbing are the most romantic notions. For the average person who doesn’t know a lot about climbing, they’re just gonna gravitate toward the most romantic notion of it: Man or woman against the elements, and that element of risk that you don’t know what you’re going into. All those things are what define adventure to the average person, because it’s what defines adventure to these badass climbers. It’s like there’s no way to undo that definition, and if you compare Everest to that definition, well, there’s really nowhere to go from there.

It costs tens of thousands of dollars to climb Everest—it’s not at all accessible to the average person, and yet the industry is growing. How have people’s reasons for climbing Everest changed over time?

It’s changing as we speak. There was a time when you would sign up to climb Everest and you would do it because you’re a high achiever who knows how to do the training, and you just have that tenacity and you pull it off. A lot of times, you could be an executive or a Navy SEAL, and to say you had climbed Everest had some real bragging rights to it. It was almost the reason a lot of people did it.

I can see the criticism there. Like with anything in life, why do it just to say you’ve done it? Is that really the only reason? It dominated social feeds for a while—‘look at me, I’ve climbed Everest.’ It was just such a big shout from the rooftops. But as more and more people do it, and even regular people do it—people you don’t expect—it’s become less of a thing that you brag about and more of a thing you do for personal reasons. I think that people are actually getting a little bit more in touch with why they’re going.

Is there a ‘new’ Everest now?

No. Everest is the tallest mountain in the world, and that’s never gonna change. It will always live in that special place, for anybody, not just climbers. I even argue that it’s moved on from being a ‘climbing’ thing at all. It’s just the tallest piece of land on Earth, and it takes some serious digging, digging deep, to even accomplish it, no matter who you think you are. I don’t know what would top that, challenge-wise and difficulty-wise. Sure, people can go do an Ironman triathlon. But I still don’t think it’s like standing on the top of the highest piece of Earth.

***

Adventure.com strives to be a low-emissions publication, and we are working to reduce our carbon emissions where possible. Emissions generated by the movements of our staff and contributors are carbon offset through our parent company, Intrepid. You can visit our sustainability page and read our Contributor Impact Guidelines for more information. While we take our commitment to people and planet seriously, we acknowledge that we still have plenty of work to do, and we welcome all feedback and suggestions from our readers. You can contact us anytime at hello@adventure.com. Please allow up to one week for a response.