As the sun goes down, the temperature quickly falls in Deboche, a tiny village at 3,860 metres in the Khumbu region of Nepal. A fresh layer of snow lies on the ground and from the Rivendell lodge is a truly heartstopping view: there, framed by the dining-room windows, is the tallest mountain on Earth, Everest. It’s vast and forbidding, a massive lump of striated rock and ice with a plume of snow streaking from the top, the 100mph-plus winds of the jet stream. It feels unreal looking at it, and then at my companions at the dinner table. Because if all goes to plan, 11 of them will be standing on top of it during the small window of good weather that opens up toward the middle of May.
The peak is some 5,000 metres higher than us – a good three vertical miles – and the temperature is already below zero. The air feels thin and I’m not the only one who’s already got a headache from the altitude. From this angle, I can’t even conceive how it’s possible to climb it. Or who would want to. The night before we set off from Kathmandu, though, David Hamilton, the leader of the group who have all booked with the Sheffield-based operator Jagged Globe, one of the pioneers of commercial trips to Everest, tells me that “the vast majority of people who climb Everest fall within the broad range of normal”. Normal? Hamilton, a 54-year-old Glaswegian who’s about 8ft tall and looks like he could pick you up and get you off the mountain under one arm should circumstances require, insists: “They’re not multimillionaires, they’re not nutters, they’re mostly people aged between 30 and 50 who are able to get two months off work, and have often saved for a long time to afford it.”
It’s a bold claim because nothing about Everest is normal. Life at 8,848 metres is decidedly not normal. A medical expedition in 2007 took a sample of arterial blood from climbers returning from the summit and found the oxygen level was the lowest ever recorded in living tissue. It’s pretty much the closest you can get to being dead while still alive.
In fact, Everest is the opposite of normal in almost every way you can imagine: from the news coverage it attracts, to the amount it costs to get to the top – from £12,000 with the most bargain-basement Nepalese operator to £43,000 with the most expensive western one, though this is the just the list price: a private guide and various extras can easily push that past the £70,000 mark.
Everest has a hold on the imagination that no other mountain on the planet can match. But there is a price. On 18 April last year, a massive block of ice broke free and crashed down into the Khumbu icefall just above base camp, killing 16 Sherpas. It was the most deadly accident on any major mountain for several years, and the fact that it hit Sherpa climbers, not westerners, was not a coincidence. While a paying climber might travel through the treacherous icefall – a constantly moving, creaking, crevasse-riddled outflow of the Khumbu glacier – as few as four times, Sherpa climbers might make 30 or 40 journeys, carrying loads of oxygen, tents, food, water and fuel to the higher camps, a system that has evolved in the commercial era to give people who might not be the strongest, or the most experienced, the best chance of making it to the top.
Commercial expeditions, or the practice of taking paying customers to the top of Everest, first started in the 1990s. Since then “a huge amount of accumulated knowledge has built up over the years,” says Hamilton, a seven-times summiter. “Basically the top operators have found a formula that works. I hate using the “e” word but Everest has gotten easier. The weather forecasting is better. The clothing and equipment is better. The oxygen system has improved. There is a well-proven formula and the chances of getting someone of average fitness to the top is far higher now than it used to be. But it does involve a lot of manpower.”
What last year’s accident has done is to expose the flaws in the formula, or at least the faultlines between the ambitions and aspirations of western climbers and the grinding realities of life in one of the most dysfunctional and corrupt nations in the world.
Nepal isn’t just poor, it’s dirt poor. The UN placed it at 145 out of 187 in the world in its last human development report. Its government barely functions. And the climbing Sherpas, the high-altitude porters who have been the backbone of almost every expedition on Everest since George Mallory’s in 1921, climb it for one reason only: money. Every westerner I speak to has their own reason for wanting to climb Everest. A challenge. An adventure. A midlife crisis. A lifelong dream. But for the Sherpas it’s work: hard, dangerous, difficult work and in a poor country with almost zero opportunities, it has traditionally been one of the best-paying jobs out there. A climbing Sherpa for one of the western operators can earn more than £5,000 in a two-month season, more than 10 times the average annual Nepalese wage.
But in the grief and shock that followed the avalanche last year, and a total mishandling of the situation by the government (which initially offered a mere $400 compensation to the dead men’s families), the Sherpas refused to climb – or at least enough of them did to prevent the others. The danger of what they were doing hit home and there were demands for better insurance and pay and, in the chaos that followed, the government declared the mountain officially closed. Three hundred climbers returned home, few having gone any further than base camp. As this year’s climbing season kicks off, with most of the teams arriving this weekend to start their acclimatisation, there’s more than a touch of trepidation in the air. No one knows what form the shifting politics and tensions that increasingly swirl around Everest might take this year – this volatile cocktail of money, testosterone, inequality, stress and danger.
The strike, many feel, was just a symptom of a changing balance of power. The climbing Sherpas are younger, better educated and increasingly they want more of a slice of an industry that has been developed and largely controlled by a handful of western operators. Ben Ayers, who works for a Nepalese NGO called dZi which funds community development, tells me that the strike garnered so many headlines “because there’s always been this idea that Sherpas are these cheerful Tenzings who bring you tea. It’s based upon those early expeditions and the idea of the noble servant. And there’s this surprise when they act like people.”
Traditionally, climbing Sherpas came from the villages around Everest. But this has changed, Dawa Steven Sherpa, the managing director of a Nepalese expedition organiser, Asian Trekking, tells me. “These days they’ve gone to school in Kathmandu. They’re more worldly and more ambitious. And they’re all on Facebook. When something happens, everyone from all over the world is chipping in and giving their opinion. Everything that happens on the mountain goes around the world in seconds and is then amplified and broadcast back.
“They are Facebook friends with climbers in Norway and America and feel they belong to the international climbing fraternity, and they do, but the economics are different in Nepal. Western guides are paid more but it’s really not because Sherpas are colonial underdogs. It’s because they don’t have the same language skills or cultural understanding or as much experience.”
But many leading operators fear that the self-regulation and cooperation between different outfits that has enabled large numbers of people to reach the summit safely is breaking down. The market has grown. Dozens of smaller companies are now competing for a slice of the pie. And the “system”, the formula that has enabled so many people to successfully summit and the safety procedures that underpinned it, has started to creak. The irony, according to Hamilton, is that the rescue operation after the 2014 avalanche showed how westerners and Nepalese could pull together to get everyone out. “All the leading teams worked together to get everybody to a place of treatment. Everyone was in it together. It was only quite late in the day that I realised that somebody on my own team had been killed.”
That someone was a 34-year-old Sherpa called Pasang Karma Sherpa. And it’s partly because of him that I’m in Nepal. Each spring Jagged Globe runs a trip to Nepal that anyone can join, accompanying climbers as they trek into base camp. This year they renamed it the Pasang Karma trek and pledged to donate the profits to his widow, Kandi Sherpa and her three children. On the day of the accident, Simon Lowe, Jagged Globe’s managing director, flew to Kathmandu, on to Lukla, and then made the full day’s trek to her home. “We told her that we’d pay for the children’s schooling. That’s the thing that people care about in Nepal.”
Education is everything in Nepal. Thomas Ball, a writer for the Economist who lives in Kathmandu and has just published a history of the city by the same name, tells me that only 13% of children who go to a government-run school come out with a school leaving certificate. “They’re absolutely hopeless. You’ve a one in 10 chance of being educated to any sort of standard. And then there’s the healthcare, which is wretched. You’re lucky if there’s a bottle of aspirin in the village health post.”
I have his words ringing in my ears as I set off to visit Kandi. The route goes along the old base-camp trail in from the roadhead in Jiri. It was the way that Edmund Hillary walked in, but it’s been all but abandoned by tourists since the airport in Lukla opened. It’s hard to overstate how absurdly beautiful it is: the rhododendron trees are in full bloom, huge creamy magnolia blossoms hang alongside the path and wisps of cloud cling to the peaks. I walk with Rakesh Tamang, a trekking guide, who tells me what a quiet, honest man Karma was and how awful it was the day the 16 body bags landed at Lukla airport and he stood on the tarmac when a government doctor came to unzip them all and certify them dead.
It’s almost dark when we reach Bupsa, a ridge-top village with bright green terraces of young wheat falling away in every direction, but when we visit Kandi early the next morning, it’s obvious that the idyll doesn’t last much beyond the front door. There’s a wooden platform bed in the corner of the one room in which the whole family lives and not a single toy, or anything much else for that matter. The only decoration is a framed portrait of Pasang Karma, and a few snaps of him up mountains.
The children, Pasang Geljen Sherpa, 15, Purnima Sherpa, 10 and Tenzing Sherpa, aged three and a half, sit quietly having their morning tea. I try asking Kandi about the accident but the whole thing is excruciatingly awkward. She wants to answer my questions, but at one point her eyes fill with tears and there’s a massive cultural gulf between us that I struggle to bridge. What was Pasang Karma like, I ask at one point. Was he a quiet man? Or did he like joking? Ramesh and a neighbour translate and she considers it and then replies: “He was very worried about the children’s education.”
It’s a heartbreaking answer. And it’s a very small ray of sunshine that they might now have that education, though for the moment they’re still at the village school. From what I can make out, Kandi is living on the money Jagged Globe has given her, and though there is insurance money from the government and possibly money from the fund that was raised to help the families of the Sherpas who died, she hasn’t yet made it to Kathmandu – which is a full day’s walk and then a 12-hour jeep ride away – to check her bank account. When we leave, Kandi places red silk scarves around our heads and I feel both touched and embarrassed. I’m not an honoured guest, I’m a journalist.
Days later, it strikes me that the whole encounter is a microcosm of the story I’m trying to unravel: a great chasm between two vastly different cultures underpinned by a gaping financial inequality. I give Kandi a small amount of money as a gift and walk 10 hours back up the mountain in torrential rain. I’m not sure either of us feel entirely comfortable about the exchange.
The day after I meet Kandi, I finally meet up with the nine-strong group of climbers and five trekkers with whom I will be walking to base camp. They’ve flown into Lukla, a precipitous airstrip on the edge of a mountain that is the gateway to the Everest region, with Hamilton and his assistant guide, Chris Groves, and the sirdar, or head Sherpa, the vastly experienced Pem Chirri, who has summited Everest 12 times. And it turns out that the climbers are pretty normal. The most remarkable thing about them is that they’ve all paid £39,500 for the privilege – and some of them paid £39,500 last year too and got no higher than base camp.
George Foulsham is a laidback 38-year old marine biologist who says he “just loves adventures”. Chris Weeks, 33, from Peterborough, works for construction machinery firm Caterpillar and got the mountain bug a decade ago. Richard Brooks is a 51-year-old lift engineer from Sydney. And Paul Greenan, 38, from Dublin, has his own plant hire company and says it hadn’t occurred to him until he went on the Everest base camp trek – the same walk we’re doing now – five years ago. “And when I got there, I just wanted to go up. I think I’m just one of those kinds of people.”
Selina Dicker, a 38-year-old from London who works in property finance, is a little bit different in that she’s the group’s only woman. “And if you’d asked me five years ago if I wanted to climb Everest, I’d have said, never in a million years, it’s far too dangerous, and I’ve no interest.” And then? “And then… well, some people I know did it, and I’m just as good a climber as them, and, somehow, the idea just sort of took hold.” She suffers from epilepsy so she says she’s going to be taking it “from camp to camp depending on how I feel”.
And then there’s Nick Talbot, a 39-year-old who works for the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and is hoping to be the first person suffering from cystic fibrosis to make it to the summit. He’s doing Everest, he says, because he wants to raise money and awareness for cystic fibrosis research and “the charity field is very competitive. It’s very difficult to stand out. But Everest still has a certain cachet.”
It does. And it’s the basis of everything. Everest’s newsworthiness, its draw, its glamour. Though others see it differently. Ben Ayers of dZi says: “It’s the great temple to the human ego. People impose their own ideas and their own dreams on to it. And in that, it’s a perfect reflection of the individualistic, capitalist society we live in. And it attracts that kind of people. Because it’s the biggest. It’s the Google of the mountain world.”
He’s more on the mark than he realises because the final three members of the group – Dan Fredinburg, Michele Battelli and Flo Nagl – all work for Google in various capacities ranging from interesting to enthralling (Dan is head of privacy for Google X, the company’s top secret, cutting-edge ideas lab). They’re all good company, more rambunctious Silicon Valley can-do than the Brits, but it’s a slightly tricky situation. They’re not licensed to talk on Google’s behalf to journalists and Google’s press office declines to confirm any details. But last month, Google announced that it had joined up with a local non-profit organisation to launch a Street View of the trek into base camp and it’s an open secret that another Street View camera is being carried to the summit. Click on a Google map in a few months’ time and you’ll be able to trace a path up over the South Col and the Hillary Step and see a 360-degree view of what the Earth looks like from the roof of the world.
And then there are the other rumours: that there are “several” other Google teams on the mountain doing undisclosed activities that may or may not become clear come summit day. What I realise is that none of this should come as a surprise. The Googlisation of Everest is only the next logical step. For a long time, the mountain was the greatest challenge the pre-technological 20th century had to offer and “conquering” it was a matter of national pride. The news of Sir Edmund Hillary’s and Tenzing Norgay’s successful ascent, which reached Britain on the morning of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, was perhaps the last great crowning moment of the age of empire. That Google, a company with assets greater than the GDP of many nation states, should seek to quantify and measure and possess the mountain and all its attendant commercial benefits is obvious. In the early 21st century, the great race is not among nation states for territory or some abstract notion of glory or honour, it’s among multinational corporations for profit, for every scrap of our data. Of course Google wants to map Everest. Of course it wants to attach the name of one of the biggest companies on Earth to the biggest mountain on Earth. It’s like Godzilla meets King Kong. And while purists may rail, they’re railing at the wrong thing. This isn’t about Everest, it’s about us.
Because in many ways Everest simply reflects us back at ourselves. We see in it what we want to see. And our ideas about it fit the ideas we have about the world we live in. Lefties see exploitative labour practices, mountaineers see a corruption of the sport they love, Sherpas see economic opportunity and each year around 300 people see a fixed point against which they can test themselves.
It’s a fascinating, odd experience trekking up to base camp with a climbing team who have committed two months of their lives to undertake the long acclimatisation process that may or may not end in reaching the top, but could possibly end in death. Every other day we do an acclimatisation climb of 800m or so – climbing high and sleeping low is the standard way to push the body into producing more red blood cells – but there’s a lot of just hanging around in lodges that are only sometimes heated (and then it’s by burning yak dung).
I can’t help but catch a waft of the group’s nervous energy and excitement. I have read too much about frostbitten limbs and amputated noses to think climbing Everest anything other than terrifying. On the flight to Kathmandu I re-read Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s gripping account of the 1996 disaster in which eight people died, and shivered.
But I climb to 5,530 metres with them, a few hundred metres higher than base camp, a breathless, head-pounding plod (at least for me). We’re still two vertical miles beneath the summit. The view is astonishing: 8,000-metre peaks in all directions; the world has never looked so fresh and new. Everest scares me but I’m starting to understand the thrill of it.
It might be less deadly than it was, and the miles of fixed ropes appal climbing purists, who say it’s not real mountaineering, but it’s still a dangerous, acutely uncomfortable environment that could end up killing you. Between 1921 and 1996, one person died for every four people who successfully reached the top. And from 1996 to last year, it was one person for every 60 ascents. “You can’t read too much into that,” Hamilton cautions me. “The top five operators, of which we are one, have probably got a thousand people to the top in the last decade and before last year’s avalanche, very, very few of our people had died.”
But still. Trekking up through the Khumbu valley, I encounter at least 60 climbers heading to the summit: bearded Norwegians, an American multimillionaire with his own high-altitude camera crew, a group of Gurkhas marking their 200th anniversary with an attempt on the summit, a documentary team, and on the long walk back from Kandi Sherpa’s home, a dozen or more climbing Sherpas.
They look like college kids, young, fresh-faced and decked out in the latest gear. They have Mammut down jackets and North Face rucksacks and brand new-looking ice axes hanging from their packs. They’re taking a group of Indian clients up, they tell me. But not one of them I talk to has ever been on Everest before. “Is the money good?” I ask them. They shake their heads. “But we do it for the experience.”
The top Everest operators simply won’t take you if you don’t have enough experience, but there are companies that will. “And one of the most difficult parts of my job is making sure I keep out of the way of them,” says David Hamilton. Clients who shouldn’t be there and inexperienced Sherpas are a red flag for every experienced guide on the mountain. Back in Sheffield, Simon Lowe ran me through the minimum two-year preparation they expect their clients to have undertaken, and pretty much everyone in my group has already been up at least Aconcagua, a 6,962-metre peak in Argentina that’s a popular pre-Everest warm-up and various other major world mountains. And, critically, they’ve experienced not getting to the summit. They know that reaching the top isn’t a given; that they’re paying to be guided safely, not to reach the summit come what may.
What if I just decided to give it a pop, I ask Hamilton. What do you reckon on my chances? He regards me through narrowed eyes. “Maybe 65%?” Sixty five per cent! I would have said somewhere between 0 and 1%. I’ve seen enough to know it’s anything but a cake walk, but I’m also beginning to understand why they call it the yak trail.
Everest has made the Khumbu the most prosperous place in Nepal: a string of mountain villages miles from any road that have a higher per capita GDP than Kathmandu. It is all relative, though. As we walk up to Dingboche, we pass a girl of no more than 10 hauling a load that must weigh at least 30kg. Migrants from all over Nepal now come for the jobs that Everest generates.
Local firm Asian Trekking competes with the foreign companies for Everest climbers but Dawa Steven Sherpa still says the idea that western operators are exploitative is “totally bogus”. “There are very few jobs in Nepal that pay as well. Construction in Qatar does, which is why 3 million Nepalese have gone there. And this is still better pay.” And if you think climbing Everest is unethical, you’d best not watch the 2022 World Cup. A Nepalese worker dies every other day in Qatar.
“Over time, companies in Nepal have become more and more professional, but while western companies are very good at marketing and differentiating themselves that way, the way the Nepalese companies differentiate themselves is with price. There is more and more pressure on price and corners are cut. Safety is sacrificed. And Sherpas are being paid a fraction of what they are by western companies. In the protests last year it was really the Sherpas from the cheaper companies who were the most vocal. This is Nepalese exploiting other Nepalese.”
The problem, he says, and this is echoed by almost everyone I speak to, is the government. Some changes have been made this year. The route through the icefall has been changed and the amount of insurance for Sherpas has been increased from $11,000 to $15,000. “But the Sherpas are presented as Nepal’s pride and very little is done for them. The permits to climb Everest cost $11,000 but they never see any of that. The anger last year was not directed toward the climbers. It was toward the government.”
There are dangerous jobs in every country that people do because they pay well. But the ethics of offsetting risk from one set of people on to another, in exchange for cash, are different – arguably – in a country where the other options are so few. Russell Brice, a veteran New Zealand mountaineer who first came to Nepal in 1974 to help Sir Edmund Hillary build a hospital, is the founder of Himalayan Experience, or Himex, and is renowned for running one of the safest operations on the mountain but also one of the ritziest. His dining tent is legendary for its gourmet delights and its open bar. But he was also probably the only expedition leader on his radio monitoring his Sherpas the whole time they were going through the icefall. And as another expedition leader tells me, “He’s worked with some of those guys for decades. They’re like family to him. And they bitch about it, but he’s the only operator fining his Sherpas when they don’t wear a helmet or forget to clip on to the rope.”
“Of course it’s dangerous,” Brice says. “But it’s dangerous for us too, for the guides. But the more people I can get to come and climb Everest the more chance I have of employing local people. That’s my sole goal in life. But because we have been successful at what we do, there are more people wanting to come and local operators are picking up the slack. So they offer these cheaper trips, but are they doing it safely? Are they looking after their staff? No, I’m sorry, they’re not. If you want to do your expedition properly, you need to look after everyone: the porters carrying the loads up to base camp and the cooks and the bottle-washers and all these people. You want to look after them properly and that all costs money.”
He tells me how he moved his operation from Chamonix to London recently “because it’s where the clients are”. They aren’t mountaineers, usually. “They want to go to the edge of space, or they want to do the deepest deep-sea dive, or they want to run [across] the desert, or they want to go to Everest. These are very successful people; they want to find new ways to challenge themselves. We talk all the time about taxing the rich. Well these rich people pay a lot of money and it keeps my staff in work and I see that as a good thing.”
But climbing Everest seems set to change. The Sherpas are becoming more professional and more qualified and no longer want to be seen simply as porters. David Hamilton tells me: “The days of westerners leading expeditions to Nepal will pass. It’s really one of the last battles of decolonisation. Countries that have taken control of their political and economic resources are now taking over their own tourism businesses and squeezing out the foreigners who started it. You could talk to an old white Rhodesian who could tell you the safaris were run much better in his time and he may or may not be right, but he’s from a bygone era. I just hope the Nepalese learn sufficient skills to continue to do so with a high degree of safety. Technically, they’re excellent climbers. It’s cultural issues that I fear may create problems.”
Such as? “Such as being able to turn around a Chinese client who offers you $10,000 to carry on when it’s not safe. It’s not unknown for people from these newer countries who don’t come from a mountaineering culture to overrule Sherpas and get them to do things they don’t want to do and that aren’t safe.”
But there is no black and white. Or at least, I can’t find it. The vast majority of my group are ordinary people who simply want to do something extraordinary. And, for the moment at least, the Sherpas want to climb. Pem Chirri, Jagged Globe’s sirdar, tells me about the two major accidents he’s had in the mountains. “My children don’t want me to climb,” he says. “They saw me after the accidents.” But they are at good, private schools in Kathmandu. They are learning English. They will have opportunities he didn’t. “They will be able to do other kinds of jobs. They won’t have to climb.”
For information on next year’s Pasang Karma trek, visit jagged-globe.co.uk. To make a donation to help the families of the Sherpas and other community initiatives, visit himalayantrust.co.uk
• This article was amended on 17 April 2015. An earlier version said that George Mallory walked to Everest base-camp along the trail from Jiri, as well as Edmund Hillary’s later expedition. Mallory’s 1920s expeditions came to Everest from Tibet, as Nepal was closed to western foreigners at the time.
