Debate storms over
the
under-qualified
tackling Everest
SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
In a catalog from Mountain Travel/Sobek, there's this eye-catching headline: "Everest Expedition."
"Are you ready to tackle the summit of the world's highest mountain?" asks the text. "At 29,028 feet, Everest is the ultimate climb of all."
The price: "From $65,000."
Once off-limits to all but the world's most accomplished climbers, Mount Everest is increasingly marketed as the ultimate trophy for the less experienced.
Adventurers with high aspirations, less-than-Everest experience and deep pockets can buy a chance to join one of the world's most exclusive clubs -- the more than 600 who've left their footprints on Everest's summit.
But when a recent blizzard killed eight people on the mountain, five of them were members of such commercially guided expeditions. That raised questions about whether high-paying novices are finding their way onto the sides of the world's highest mountain.
The disaster touched off a debate in the booming adventure travel industry, with some arguing that their customers deserve a shot at the top -- as long as they have the required skills and understand the extraordinary risks.
Many clients on such expeditions are experienced, competent high-altitude climbers. And the companies that guide the trips say they screen clients carefully. But reports from the mountain suggest some recent Everest aspirants were something closer to enthusiastic beginners.
"It's really appalling," said Jon Krakauer, a Seattle writer and expert climber sent by Outside Magazine to report on the scene. His comments were posted on the magazine's World Wide Web site.
"There's a lot of inexperienced people here . . . and that's sort of scary," Krakauer said from base camp before the tragedy. "There's a lot of people here who shouldn't be here."
As part of a detailed account he gave after the deaths, Krakauer said he didn't think a rank amateur could buy a spot on an Everest summit attempt.
"It's way more complicated than that," he said. "You have to be fit, and motivated, and then you can buy your way. But it's not like some guy who's been up Rainier once and wants to get to the top -- he couldn't buy his way up.
Climbing the world's highest mountains is almost certainly the world's deadliest sport. For every five people who have reached the summit of Everest, one has died.
In the recent storm, the death toll included two of the most respected guides on Everest, Scott Fischer of Seattle and Rob Hall of New Zealand. Also killed were Hall's assistant, Andrew Harris, and expedition clients Douglas Hansen of Renton and Yasuko Nanba of Japan -- both experienced climbers. Another client, Dallas pathologist Seaborn "Beck" Weathers, was able to stagger down the mountain and get plucked off by a helicopter at 20,000 feet.
So far, accounts of the tragedy have made it hard to know whether the experience level of clients among the many expeditions on the mountain played a role in the deaths.
In recent years the impoverished Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, which derives most of its income from tourism, has altered the Everest permit system so it now favors high-paying commercial expeditions. Nepal charges $10,000 a head to set foot on the peak.
"The permit is so expensive that the only ones who can afford it are the investment bankers who can pay $65,000 to be on commercial expeditions," said Al Read, president of Exum Mountain Guides in Wyoming's Grand Tetons and vice chairman of Geographic Expeditions, a San Francisco adventure travel company. "Private groups of competent mountaineers cannot afford to go."
No matter how thoroughly guides screen clients, Read said, the hefty amounts involved might color the decision.
"If you need one more person to fill out the trip and there's someone standing in front of you holding $65,000, well, you don't want to be irresponsible -- but even if he's not quite the person you'd hoped for you might end up taking him along anyway."
When the storm hit last week there were 25 expeditions on the mountain, including a British TV crew filming actor Brian Blessed's push for the top, an American group attempting to film an IMAX movie on the summit, and a 16-year-old from Rhode Island, Mark Pfezer, hoping to become the youngest ever to conquer Everest.
Lawrence Huntington, New York-based chairman of Fiduciary
Trust International, a global investment management firm, said climbing the world's highest peak had been a "lifetime dream."
He joined hybrid Everest expeditions -- partly commercial, partly sponsored - in 1991 and 1994, and was turned back short of the top both times. "It's one of the most extraordinary challenges on Earth," he said.
Huntington, an experienced alpinist who has climbed Alaska's Mount McKinley, Aconcagua in Argentina and other big mountains, said many climbers he encountered on Everest "simply shouldn't have been there."
"They had never been in the Himalayas before, they were under-equipped, they didn't know the basic techniques, they didn't know how to acclimatize properly and they kept getting lost," he said. "I'd say a lot of the people getting permits were not qualified."
Not all of the neophytes were on commercial expeditions, he added.
Since the late 1970s, according to Read, many noncommercial expeditions have been guided up the mountain by experienced Sherpas.
What's new is that Everest is now being marketed to people outside the community of experienced high-altitude mountaineers. In recent years, ads for commercial expeditions have appeared regularly in such magazines as Outside and Climbing, and in adventure travel catalogs.
The trip advertised in the catalog of Mountain Travel/Sobek, a California adventure-travel company, was for the ill-fated expedition led by Fischer. Doug Parker, vice president of Mountain Travel/Sobek, said his firm wasn't operating the Everest climb; it merely listed the trip in the catalog and forwarded inquiries to Fischer's Seattle company, Mountain Madness.
"We had it in there to round things out for clients who wanted to climb the Seven Summits," he said.
Parker said he had some concerns about such an expedition, particularly about the process of screening unqualified aspirants.
"Still, it's easy right now to take potshots at these commercial expeditions," Parker said. "It isn't safe, and it's never going to be safe (to climb Everest). But that doesn't make it illegitimate to try."
At Mountain Madness, a spokesman said the screening of potential clients is extensive. Everest candidates are required to submit a climbing resume detailing their experience. The guide then interviews the candidate at length.
"There's no guarantee they're going to be able to go out and do it, or that they know what they say they know," acknowledged Tom Nickels, a Mountain Madness guide specializing in African treks.
Jim Sano has led an Everest expedition and is president of Geographic Expeditions, which once offered an Everest climb that it canceled due to lack of clients. While he says even the best guide can't eliminate the danger from climbing Everest - or rafting a Class V river, for that matter - he believes clients should decide for themselves.
"A lot of individuals getting involved in these things are typically in professions involving risk every day, like the financial and investment community," Sano said. "They're attracted to high-risk activities. To them, (climbing Everest) is in some respects like pulling off a great deal."
But experienced mountaineers say the multitude of dangers encountered on the upper reaches of Everest are vastly greater than those faced on even the riskiest adventure travel trip at lower elevations.
In the "Death Zone," the region above 24,000 feet where the oxygen-poor air makes survival difficult and clear thinking next to impossible, the line between success and death is often razor-thin.
Robert Holmes, a San Francisco-area photographer and veteran of five Himalayan climbs, including Everest, said the money involved in commercial expeditions can distort decision-making.
"Up there even experienced climbers sometimes use bad judgment and do things they shouldn't do," he said. "If you've paid $65,000 for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get to the top of the world's highest peak, you're going to push very hard -- and that can't help but put pressure on the leaders."
Reports of the recent tragedy have prompted calls for regulation. But, said Huntington, "you can't regulate judgment."
No one in the adventure travel business believes the disaster will slow the business of guiding people to the top of the world.
"Everest is still the highest mountain in the world," said Geographic Expeditions' Sano. "It's ironic, but in some ways, what has happened could increase the romance of this. Part of the allure is the element of danger."
