How Everest became a holiday destination for dentists and bankers

The world’s highest mountain was once a peak only the most elite mountaineers and madmen would think to scale. Thanks to one-on-one Sherpa support and copious supplemental oxygen, things have changed.

Expedition tents are seen at Everest Base Camp. Picture: AFP

The Himalayas are having a publishing moment. The legendary mountain range is the backdrop to two recent releases, each catering to extremely different tastes and interests.

One is a painstaking, often maddening but always fair-minded exploration of the Everest industrial complex. The other is an entertaining but somewhat silly stab at giving a fictional high-altitude Indian Himalayan luxury spa the Agatha Christie treatment.

Everest, Inc by Will Cockerill

In Everest, Inc. veteran outdoors writer Will Cockrell takes a forensic look at how the world’s highest mountain went from a peak only the most elite mountaineers and madmen would think to scale to a holiday destination for dentists and bankers who don’t believe a complete lack of climbing skill or experience should stop them standing on top of the world.

Perhaps thanks to his hundreds of interviews with Western guides, Nepali climbing entrepreneurs, client climbers and Everest veterans, Cockrell takes an even-handed approach to the ethical issues with which any visitor to the region must wrestle.

For every climbing purist who disparages the “dentists from Dallas” who rely entirely on Sherpas and copious supplemental oxygen to reach the top is a guide who describes the joy of helping a client safely achieve a life goal.

“This idea that some people don’t belong has always been a massive oversimplification and assumption,” guide and Everest entrepreneur Wally Berg tells Cockrell. “The mountain takes care of people who don’t belong. Believe me … the people who are still there at the end – you know what? They belong.”

Cockrell’s book provides armchair adventurers with some much-needed clarity on the differences between a fully guided Everest climb versus the more barebones version, which includes food, fixed ropes and expertise but not one-on-one Sherpa support.

Cockrell is equally nuanced on the issue of whether the West’s obsession with Everest goes hand in hand with the exploitation of the local Sherpa population.

He outlines the infamous (in climbing circles) Sherpa versus Western climber spats that have exploded at various times, and devotes time to the devastating 2014 Khumbu icefall avalanche that killed 16 high-altitude workers – every one of them Nepali; not a single Western climber or guide died. But Cockrell also devotes several chapters to the mountain’s changing of the guard. Where once every Everest guiding company was foreign, the major players on the mountain are now Nepali-run and owned, often by Sherpas trained and formerly employed by those pioneering Western companies.

“They’re sort of retaking the mountain, in some ways,” says leading guide Ben Jones. “I guess that could potentially affect my job and career. But I’m still super happy for them.”

Where Cockrell’s even-handedness dissipates somewhat is when discussing the ways in which some client climbers have endangered themselves and their guides through hubris and lack of experience.

Climbers on Mount Everest. Picture:@nepalvisuals/Instagram

While he is careful in his telling of the tragic story of 22-year-old Michael Matthews, his thoughts seem clear when he writes of Matthews’ parents spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees in hopes of destroying the men they felt were responsible for their son’s death”.

Matthews, son of millionaire hotelier, older brother of Made in Chelsea star Spencer and younger brother of James, who would go on to marry Pippa Middleton, disappeared after summiting Everest in 1999. He had twice refused to follow guide advice to descend earlier.

While the guides were found not guilty of manslaughter in a criminal trial, with the judge finding one guide had put his own life at risk to try to save Matthews, the family nonetheless won a settlement in a civil trial, which bankrupted the guiding company.

“In the rare but always tragic situation in which a stubborn, ill-prepared client lacking self-awareness does die on Everest, it’s the guides who get the blame, regardless of culpability,” Cockrell notes at the end of the chapter.

Elsewhere, Cockrell provides a new perspective on the deadly 1996 season, the subject of best-selling book Into Thin Air, which saw eight people die on the mountain as a result of what virtually every expert agrees was poor guide decision-making coupled with an unexpected storm.

While Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer didn’t agree to be interviewed for this book, it’s fascinating to see how the major players reflect, and disagree, about what the book said about their industry and the dreadful events of that day.

Perhaps the only omission in Everest, Inc. – understandable with book publishing’s long lead times – is any mention of the recent accusations against Nirmal Purja, popularly known as Nimsdai.

Cockrell devotes several pages to the divisive climber and star of Netflix’s 14 Peaks, but nothing to accusations of unwanted sexual advances levelled against him by several female climbers in a recent New York Times investigation.

Regardless, in Everest, Inc. Will Cockrell has produced a careful reckoning of the moral crevasses that confront anyone who wishes to spend time on the legendary peak. His book is not a polemic – there’s few true heroes or villains, and no declarations of right and wrong – but it is a compulsively readable and welcome addition to the bibliography of Everest writing.

From the sublimely researched to the baroquely plotted …

Death in the Air by Ram Murali

Death in the Air is the debut novel from New York-born London-residing former lawyer Ram Murali.

In crisp prose Murali introduces a roster of wealthy socialites, poseurs, heiresses and a movie star, who all find themselves enjoying a gruelling program of massages, yoga and therapy at an ultra-exclusive spa hotel in the Indian Himalayas over Christmas, until one of them turns up dead.

There’s something extremely pleasant in reading about impeccably manicured and exquisitely spoiled rich people leading pointless lives, particularly when the setting is so exotic (to most Western readers anyway).

The brand names Murali litters his pages with, and the finely detailed descriptions of interiors and fashion, have a lulling effect, but he also uses Death in the Air as something of a Trojan horse.

The injustice of the Indian Partition and the complexities of the Indian diaspora sneak into the plot alongside the vintage watches and Van Cleef and Arpels jewellery.

And while the denouement is downright daft, Death in the Air is still an enjoyable enough romp in a rarefied world.

Claire Sutherland is a journalist, rock climber and the author of The Crag, a murder mystery set in the Wimmera and Mt Arapiles in Victoria, published July 30 through Affirm Press.