April 8, 2009
Climbing the world’s highest peak is the ultimate adventure, says Eric Ellis, but with trips costing up to $100,000 each and numerous fatalities each season, it can be an expensive one too
You exited the bank just in time. The boltholes in Gloucestershire and Tuscany look after themselves, as do the family. You’re bored with your expensive toys and you’re not even 50. You don’t paint, read or garden. So, what’s next for Mr Alpha? Everest. ‘Because,’ as Mallory remarked in 1923 before disappearing in its snows, ‘…it’s there’. No matter that you’ve never climbed anything icier than the corporate ladder, you find the expedition websites speak your language. Mountaineering, like business, is about ‘the challenge’, ‘overcoming adversity’ and ‘problem-solving’. Suddenly you’re in Kathmandu’s bohemian enclave, Thamel. It’s intoxicating. True, people can die, but surely that’s just ‘risk management’? And you’ve kept yourself trim – isn’t that important?
It is, chorused Kathmandu’s hornet’s nest of Everest entrepreneurs – as many as 500 offer expeditions – during my week in Thamel, as I effected to be a retired tycoon yearning for adventure. But if fitness mattered, no one cared I was ten kilograms overweight, arriving exhausted at their desk after mounting the summit of their back stairs. I’d dressed like Bear Grylls: Thamel’s uniform of stubble, hardwear jacket, cargo pants and an Arafat-esque keffiyeh. But if Himalayan peak time was a pre-requisite, my confession that I’d barely tramped up Primrose Hill, much less the Kanchenjungas, Lhotses and Cho Oyus, where real mountaineers serve their apprenticeships, went unheard.
What mattered was my wallet. Few warned that I might be on a death path to somewhere I had no business going. Nepali climber Appa Sherpa, who’s climbed Everest a record 18 times, recently declared that ‘in the Khumbu [one of three subregions of the Himalayas], people are not judged by how many times they climbed Mount Everest or by how much money they have in the bank, but rather by how much they help or give to their neighbours.’ Such altruism doesn’t inform the grasping anarchy of Thamel, where myriad snake-oil vendors – not all of them Nepali – tout treks, expeditions and Himalayan joyflights and, if that doesn’t appeal, hookers, hashish and pirated copies of Slumdog Millionaire.
After a bewildering week, I found I could almost be carried up all 29,029 feet of Everest, munching foie gras and sipping a latte, with my own barista lugging the espresso machine behind me, if I so desired. The Ferrari of expedition operators charge around $100,000. For that, I’d be guided by some Canadian who’d reached the summit a dozen times himself, and Appa Sherpa too. Climbing Everest is clearly a wallet-opening experience and these two agreed to get me up and down with ten fingers intact if it meant a fat tip, a promise that fellow tycoons would soon follow suit and perhaps even a Channel 4 documentary.
Some ‘boutique expedition’ companies won’t take climbers who don’t have any experience in serious mountaineering and set 6,000 metres as the maximum climbing height. They don’t want novices, whose inexperience can kill or endanger fellow climbers. However, tour operators at the Reliant Robin end of the market don’t seem to care. Their tours cost about $6,000 and involve being handed a map and the number of some official who’ll introduce you to his cousin, who may or may not have some gear. This is the dangerous side of climbing Everest, luring drop-ins to the challenge, and you don’t want your gap year teens going near it. Those who do business at this end – most of Thamel it seems – have few scruples. But don’t think high-end operators guarantee survival either. The disastrous 1996 expeditions, in which 11 people died in one day, were all ‘boutique’ and many show evidence of fatal cost-cutting, even by the most expensive operators.
‘Interestingly, deaths are not considered negative,’ says Australian climber Duncan Chessell. Nepal’s legal system is neither just, transparent nor sophisticated enough to accommodate negligence suits. Nor is the industry regulated much in this dirt-poor country desperate to rebuild tourism after years of civil war.
The Himalayas are a honey pot for governments. If climbers attempt the summit via Everest’s easier southern Nepali side, they pay an average $10,000 per person. Going north from Chinese Tibet costs just $1,200 per person. In the early 1990s, the Nepali fee was about $1,000 per group but the increase hasn’t deterred climbers. About 900 climbers are expected to attempt the summit this season – that’s six times more than the 150 who set out in the 30 years following Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s successful conquest in 1953.
Encouragingly, Chamonix-based climber Russell Brice says Everest’s ‘kill ratio’ has fallen from 31.5 per cent in the early 1980s to around 1.5 per cent today. The season starts in May, before the summer monsoon blows in snow and high winds. But with limited weather windows open, access time gets crunched to between ten and 14 days from around 10 May. Eighty to 100 people try per day – about 40 per cent fail – shuffling past corpses as they go. Asian Trekking’s Dawa Sherpa sent 31 clients via the Tibet side in 2006 – including the ill-fated Briton David Sharp – and boasted they ‘only lost six people’. Seasoned mountaineers say about half Everest’s operators should not be in business. ‘There is no regulation,’ confirms Chessell. ‘Caveat emptor is never more appropriate than for Everest trips.’
Extreme undertakings attract extreme people, like the Scot Henry Barclay Todd, known in Kathmandu as ‘The Toddfather’. Todd is described by mounteverest.net as ‘Everest’s Most Dangerous Man’. The website claims he’s ‘violent,’ has a ‘chequered past’ and, worst of all for Everest summiteers, provides bad oxygen – re-filling industry-standard Russian ‘Poisk’ tanks with sub-standard stuff from India.
But ‘chequered past’ seems an understatement. In 1977, Todd was busted for his role running the ‘best acid lab in the world’ from a Welsh farmhouse and his Hampton Wick semi. Police found six million doses between the two labs. ‘Operation Julie’ was then the world’s biggest drug bust and Todd served seven years in prison before he tuned in and dropped out to the mountains. Now, running Everest expeditions – he has never reached the summit – is Todd’s latest way of getting people high. He was once banned from offering expeditions for two years for assaulting a journalist at base camp and in 2006, a London court threw out a manslaughter case brought against him by the father of 22 year-old Michael Matthews, who died in 1999 on a Todd expedition. American author Michael Kodas wrote a book on Everest’s venality, High Crimes, and last year told ESPN that Todd was ‘a guy who runs a number of business endeavours on Everest that would be absolutely actionable elsewhere in the world. But he can go and do this on Everest, in this kind of mining town atmosphere.’ The Henry Todd I met at a Kathmandu cocktail party was charm itself, oozing the well-fed air of a Highlands squire. He says the publishers of mounteverest.net, Swedish adventurers Tom and Tina Sjogren, have a vendetta against him. The Sjogrens say they are simply ombudsmen of the anarchic Everest scene. British mountaineer Dennis Morrod, an ex-marine who runs Cornwall-based Mountain Clients, says ‘the debacle that Everest has become mirrors quite nicely the callous nature of many aspects of modern mountaineering’.
But where is Nepal in all this? To many adrenalin junkies, on whom Nepal relies to keep its near-collapsed economy ticking over, it’s little more than an exotic backdrop for hairy-chested adventurers, its travails only adding frisson to these self-styled heroic undertakings. Honour boards in Thamel’s bars are full of superlatives – from fastest, youngest, oldest to Peruvian, Filipino, Israeli, crippled, blindfolded or blind – you name it, they’ve climbed it. Elizabeth Hawley, the octogenarian American who has chronicled Everest from her Kathmandu base since 1964, laments the pot of gold it has become. ‘A lot of these raw amateurs haven’t a clue about the code of behaviour,’ she says.
Through the turmoil, Nepalis muddle through, lugging supplies, oxygen and sometimes the climbers themselves up Everest. With their perma-smiles and Namaste greetings, these men are the true heroes, the last ones named – and the worst paid – on the ‘mission accomplished’ emails summiteers like to send from Base Camp. These emails rarely mention the human cost, the frostbite, the helicopter rescue missions, the missing and broken limbs, the dead. That discussion would be bad for attracting business from the likes of Tom Cruise, long rumoured to be scouting expeditions. Cruise might cling to rock faces in his missions impossible, but the only mountain he’s climbed is in Hollywood. But with a new season upon Everest, if Alpha types wave big bucks, there are few in Kathmandu inclined to stop them possibly killing themselves in the process. A desperate Nepal needs their money as it stares into its own abyss.