High Crimes | Michael Kodas | Talks at Google

We're very, very excited to have Michael Kotis here today to talk about his new book, High the Fate of Everest in an Age of Grief. His wife Carolyn joins us and I'll just read a brief introduction to Michael and his book and then pass the floor over for what promises to be a very exciting event. So Michael Kotis is a member of the Pulitzer Prize, excuse me, prize winning team of journalists at the Hartford Courant, where He's worked since 1987 as a reporter and photographer. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, L.A. times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and Newsweek. He's an avid climber and his latest book, High the Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed, has received significant praise. It's been called gripping, riveting and shocking, as one review put it. There are plenty of books about the allure and the danger of Everest, but this may be the first to explore the mountain's criminal element. Mr. Codis documents the fraudulent commercial guides, the looting of climbers camps, the stealing of vital supplies to be sold later at a profit, and the violence among climbers, as another review puts it. He exposes the witness in which money and ego have corrupted the traditional cultures of both mountaineers and their Sherpa guides. He also brings a painful focus to the delusions, misunderstandings and indifference that allow climbers to literally step over the bodies of dying people on the way to the top. We're excited to learn more about this and please join me in welcoming Michael Kotis.

Thanks a lot, Seth, and thanks for having me. This is certainly the most different audience that I've had in a very long time. So it was actually almost four years ago to the day that I took off for Mount Everest with a team of New England mountaineers. And I anticipated an expedition that was going to take me to the other side of the world and be probably the hardest thing that I'd ever done over probably three months. And now it's four years later and I've been to mountain ranges on three other continents and been back to Mount Everest. So I completely underestimated what I was in for. I've got some folks, photos and video to kind of guide you through all this.

Everest is more than a mountain. To the Sherpa, she is Chomalungma, Mother Goddess of the world. To much of the rest of the world, Everest is the ultimate measure of human accomplishment. For everyone who yearns to stand on her summit, she offers the opportunity to be reborn. A few of the mountaineers who arrive in one of Everest's base camps have been climbing all their lives to work their way up to the world's tallest mountain. Many others have climbed only a handful of peaks. Either way, those who reach the top descend with the title world class mountaineer. Some who were schoolteachers, car salesmen, or contractors when they started up descend transformed into motivational speakers, television personalities, sponsored athletes, mountain guides, life coaches, or authors. In other cases, the summit of Everest is simply a must have listing at the top of a life's resume. But there's another side of the mountain that rarely gets the kind of attention that the summit does. Author Michael Curtis learned that the hard way.

All right, so the photo that I took for the COVID of my book, I took somewhere close to my high point on Mount Everest at about 25,000ft. It was probably my low point in the Himalayas. However, the person in the photo is Ann Parmenter. She's a coach at Trinity College in Hartford. And she was who brought me into Himalayan mountaineering. Ann had a really unusual introduction to being a high altitude mountain guide. She was on a climb in the mid-90s on Aconcagua, which is the highest mountain in the Americas, and went with a team of other climbers from Connecticut who, one by one, dropped out on her. Somebody got sick, somebody got scared. Somebody had to help the sick and the scared person off the mountain. And she ended up sitting in base camp knowing that she was strong enough and well equipped to climb the mountain, but that she couldn't do it by herself. And she was approached by a guide for another expedition with an unusual proposition. He came and told her that she could climb with his team and eat his food, tie into his ropes, go all the way to the summit with his people. Allowing that, she took care of one unusual chore, which was he had a climber who was halfway through a sex change and desperately mountain sick. And none of his male guides wanted anything to do with the climber that they nicknamed Shehila. And this guide, recognizing that he had a coach of women's sports in the camp next to him, maybe there was some help to be had there. So if she would agree to take care of this climber, she could climb with the team. And she did that and summited Aconcagua and found kind of a backdoor into the world of high altitude mountain guiding. She went back to South America and climbed Aconcagua again the next summer. And after that went to Alaska and guided a team on Denali, Mount McKinley and then called me in 1999. Knowing me, really only in passing, but knowing I had a great interest in a mountain in Nepal called Amidablam. And she called to say that she'd just been invited to guide on her first expedition in the Himalaya and she was going to Amid Iblom. And you've always talked about how beautiful that mountain is. Maybe you can get a piece of this. At the time, the Current, the newspaper I work for in Connecticut was doing a year long series on the changing roles of women in sports. And a light bulb went off in my head. That, boy, Anne would be a great subject for that. She's suddenly got all these gigs as a mountain guide. And there at the time were very few women working as high altitude mountain guides. There were a lot of opportunities for them because the boom in adventure sports and in a lot of cultures, particularly cultures from Asia and Muslim cult women really don't like to be guided by men. They want to be guided by other women. So Anne was finding increasing opportunities and I thought that would be a really interesting story. Amitabh was the perfect mountain to tell that story on. It actually means the name means mother's jewel purse. And just below the line of sun that you see on the mountain here, there's this glacier that hangs off of it that the Sherpa women think looks like a pendant. And they believe that the two twin ridge lines you're looking at look like a woman with her arms outstretched. So they see this as a very sacred motherly mountain, which made it a really great backdrop for a story about women in the mountains. It also provides an amazing view of some famous neighbors. That's Mount Everest on the left and Lhotse, which is the fourth tallest mountain in the world on the right. So you're 12 miles from Everest. You can see six of the 14 tallest mountains in the world from the summit of Ahmedablam. And it's also a very technical climb, really very beautiful. It keeps your interest. It's not one of these climbs where you're basically just putting one foot in front of the other all the way up. It's got a lot of technical rock and ice climbing on it and stays very interesting and very pretty. Anne and I had both heard of various troubles in the Himalaya. We didn't know that much about them. But our expedition chose to go in the winter onto Ama de Blam because it was getting very popular. And we hoped climbing in the winter, we really wouldn't have much problem with crowding. As it turned out, there were five other expeditions. Eventually our own summit bid was threatened. When a guide for another expedition came soloing against his team's will and fell into a crevasse on our summit day, a crevasse at 22,000ft. And first myself and then Ann got involved with rescuing this climber. It took about an hour and a half to get him out of this hole. He'd broken his arm and couldn't get himself out on his own. And had we not return for him, certainly would have perished in this crevasse. And then we went on to break all of the rules that say Jon Krakauer writes about in Indithen Air about turning around, setting a turnaround time. So we had a turnaround time of 2. And I think I reached the summit at 4:30 after this rescue. But it's quite a worthwhile place to get to. You don't really see Mount Everest while you're climbing amid Oblom, while you're actually in the climb. But the first thing you see when you get to the top is Mount Everest. You kind of of step onto the summit and it's right there in front of you and it's a really stunning view of the mountain. Up to that point, I had never had an interest in climbing Mount Everest. It's really expensive. You spend months on the mountain. It's not a very comfortable place to be. And for the time and the cost that would go into climbing Mount Everest, I figured you can go to the Andes or a lesser range and climb 20 mountains. And standing on top of the world just. It didn't interest me that much. But seeing it from that angle was pretty interesting. It was a little more compelling. I still didn't really think I'd come back for it. But Ann, at the time before we descended, said, you know, I think I'm going to come back and I'm going to get a shot at Mount Everest somehow. And as it turned out, that opportunity came out of these stories. I did a long series of stories for the Current about Ann and her new career as a mountain guide and some climbers that live in my neighborhood. A husband and wife who between them now have climbed Mount Everest 15 times, saw those stories. He's Romanian, she's a Sherpa. And George Dimorescu, the Romanian, had really wanted that kind of attention that I had shown Ann for his feats on Mount Everest. And I ran into them in front of my house, actually pushing their, their child in a stroller and stopped to chat with him. And George mentioned that he really wanted to put together a Mount Everest expedition from Connecticut. But he didn't really know any climbers in the States. Could I introduce him to some? And particularly could I introduce him to Ann Parmenter, that woman that you did those stories on? And, hey, maybe you could come along and do a series of stories for the Current. This is about four years after the climb of Ahmed Oblom. And sure enough, I pitched the story to the newspaper, thinking there's. There's absolutely no way they're going to send me to Mount Everest. And they like the idea. They'll go to great lengths to get people off the payroll right now. So, you know, in a few months, we found ourselves on our way to Mount Everest. That last picture was actually, we threw the expedition together so quickly that we got brought into the state capitol and introduced to the state Senate and the House of Representatives on the same day that 15 tents arrived that we had to take on our expedition. And we were leaving in two days. And we needed to set up every tent to make sure that the poles aren't busted and there aren't any tears. So we just did it in between meetings with the legislators in the park next to the capitol to give a sense of just how kind of lightning quick and how madly we were putting this expedition together. But before we could get to Everest, we ended up having to go to Kathmandu. And things were unusual in Kathmandu. There were a lot of unusual things about our expedition. Since 2000, when the Crown prince of Nepal murdered his parents, the king and queen and most of his immediate family, and then committed suicide, Nepal had been increasingly approaching the brink of civil war. There was a Maoist revolution in the countryside, and the current king, the former king's brother, had dismissed parliament, causing all kinds of political protests in the capital city. There were bombs went off by our hotel. When we arrived, there were. Nepalis were dying almost daily in protests against the government. And we still had a lot of gear to buy that we had to pick up in Kathmandu tents. We had to pick up boots for, believe it or not, boots, stoves, and all of our oxygen and then somehow get across Nepal and into Tibet. And we managed to do that before a strike shut down the entire country and then headed into Everest on the Tibetan side of Everest. There are two trade routes on Everest, as they call them, where most climbers make their ascents, and most being 95% or more. And the famous route on the south side, the route that was pioneered by Ed Hillary, goes up through the South Col from Nepal. The route on the north side is famous for the most famous thing that happened on it was a failure, which was George Mallory's attempt to reach Everest several times and then vanishing on the mountain prior to Hillary's ascent. And that climbs through the North Pole from Tibet in China. And they're very different places. You actually hike to the Nepal side. It takes a week, 10 days, and you acclimatize the whole time you're there. The Chinese really don't like mountaineers traipsing around Tibet, so they actually haul you to Base Camp in trucks on the Tibetan side. And you almost always arrive and you're a little sick from the altitude and everything else, and it takes a little while to adjust to it. And it's not a particularly pleasant, snowy place. This is just at the entrance to it. But the real strange thing about Base Camp on the Tibetan side of Everest is because everything gets hauled in tents is just the economy and the community that's built up there. So these are just tents right at the entrance to it. But the last time I was there, I counted 84 Chinese and Tibetan tents that are set up, and they're really just there to sell things to Westerners. So it gives the place this very much of a mining town atmosphere. So when my teammates and I would wrap bandanas around our faces to keep the dust and the cold from wrecking our lungs before we started the climb, we'd look like bandits. And you fit right in. I mean, it really has this very much of a Wild west atmosphere. There's all kinds of commerce going on. This is kind of a little town just outside of Base Camp and the equivalent of a Tibetan Motel 6. There are these pony carts running back and forth, sometimes with climbers, sometimes with just things that the Tibetans are selling so that they kind of look like stagecoaches dressing the place up. There are literally scores of Chinese and Tibetans showing up looking for work of any kind. They'll come and ask to wash your clothes or to cook for you, to carry gear for you. There are all these tents set up with something to sell to a Westerner, be it booze or banks or, more and more commonly, the company of women. And there are brothels in Base Camp on the Tibetan side of the mountain. And any man that shows up will only be there for a few hours before either a woman or a man representing a tent full of women will try to usher you in and offer you services and list the prices. Out of Base Camp, you have hundreds and hundreds of yaks that are hauling stuff up to the higher camps, and they're hauling all. Basically, they're building A little village up at 21,000ft. So they're hauling not just tents and basic comforts, but all kinds of tables and heaters and computers, video screens. It really functions much more like village, like a mining town than a mountaineering camp. Advanced Base camp, which is 13 miles away from base camp and 4,000ft higher, is really just as crowded and has just about as much commerce going on, Although a lot slower, because it takes you a while to move from tent to tent while you're shopping. And then up into the higher camps. The crowding has reached quite epic proportions. And I hadn't really realized how much Everest had changed since 1996, which is the year of the disaster that John Krakauer wrote about on Mount Everest. But to give you a sense of the way the economy is built there, in 1996, 98 people reached the summit of Mount Everest. And that was considered pretty epic. You know, just an amazing number of people to summit Mount Everest. Last May, well over 500 people summited Mount Everest. And this year, the estimate was that they would break 600. Except that the Chinese government. There are different sources on this right now. It just happened three days ago. Has announced that they are closing the north side of Everest until May 10th because they are running the Olympic torch to the summit of the mountain. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So I have a question. So I often hear these figures about this many people ascended Mount Everest. Do Sherpas just not count? I'm counting Sherpas in those numbers. So, yeah, no, they. But you're right. Very often people don't include Sherpas in the figures. And when the book first came out a month ago, I actually was in a talk, and somebody was explaining how the Khumbu Icefall on the south side had become so much safer because nobody had died in, like, 10 years in the Khumbu Icefall and just failed to mention that, oh, no, a lot of people have died there. But they were all Sherpas who were fixing ropes for western climbers and doing the work for Westerners and taking all of the risks, and that's who died. But it's very easy for westerners to forget that. So I was learning a lot about the kind of the other side of Mount Everest. And it was reasonably shocking. But the bigger concern was what was going on on my own team. And I was learning very quickly that the charming man who had invited me on this expedition to Mount Ever had quite a reputation and had been accused of any numbers of things by any number of other guides. And we Actually had notes sent to us by other teams saying you should know about the people that you're on the mountain with. And George actually admitted that he had beaten his wife's 15 year old sister in the death zone on Mount Everest. When the girl became the youngest person ever to climb the mountain the year before we were there with him. Other guides accused him of theft and all kinds of other things. And George became increasingly hostile towards me and a number of the other teammates, Our Sherpas, who. It's okay. Should I stop? No. Okay. Our Sherpas, who we had all hired actually in the end, really worked for George. And so they came back to us repeatedly asking for more money that added up to thousands of dollars that particularly Ann Parmenter and I didn't have with us and really couldn't afford, but have finally came up with. And after paying them off, went off and worked for the rest of the expedition and basically abandoned us. And by the time Ann and I started our summit bid, George had openly threatened my life and told teammates that he could sabotage my oxygen gear or light a tent on fire to make sure that I didn't get down off the mountain and report what I been learning. Four of my teammates went on to the summit of Mount Everest. Anne and I realized at about 25,000ft that we were being presented more danger by some of the other climbers on the mountain than we were by the climb itself and decided to turn back. And although four of my teammates did summit the mountain, the expedition actually climaxed when George beat his wife and left her unconscious outside one of the team's tents, forcing the other women on the team, Carolyn and Ann Parmenter, to go rescue her and then get her medical attention from another expedition. Needless to say, we didn't come down in a very good mood. However, we also realized pretty quickly that there actually were people on the mountain that had it far worse than we did. One of the things that's very interesting about Mount Everest in particular, but a lot of the high mountains now is that there are as many laptop computers on this mountain as there are stoves. And every team is plugged in. They've all got satellite modems. I use the same equipment that some of my colleagues use to cover wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I was plugged in and we were filing blogs and sending photos and video back basically every day. And when I got down to base camp and I got back to my equipment, I logged on and checked on a variety of other expeditions and what was happening and learned that Seven people were either dead or missing on Everest. All of them perished during the Connecticut expedition summit bid the few days that we were going to the summit. So it was really a harrowing time to actually be on the mountain. And it was very hard to sort through what had happened to various people. A number had been left behind.

That's okay guys, if you're on the BC dialed in, can you put yourself on mute?

So in trying to find out what had happened to various people, a number of whom I'd met in passing and you know, there were three Korean climbers, all of whom were alive and walked past by other climbers and trying to be rescued or rescue one another, who ended up perishing and a variety of people missing and. But one note really stood out and it was from a woman in London. And basically all it said is that, please, my father is missing on Everest. Can somebody help? That email actually went out around the world to various climbers websites and into climbers email boxes. And the climber in question was named Nils Antazana. And Nils was a doctor from Washington D.C. he reached the summit on the day that I turned back from from the summit, but on his way down he vanished. However, nobody on the mountain realized this for two days because his guide came down, filed a report in South America, where he's from, in Argentina, saying congratulations to himself. He's made it to the summit of Everest. He got his client to the summit of Everest and he's on his way back to base camp, never mentioning the fact that his client was missing and presumed dead. He didn't contact the family for two days. The woman who had written the note to us was his daughter Fabiola, who's on the right in this picture, on vacation with her parents, Gladys on the left and Neil's in the middle. And the man he climbed with is a guide from Argentina named Gustavo Lisi. And Fabiola was already suspicious about her father's guide before they even headed for the summit. It was very obvious to her in some satellite phone calls to her father that things weren't going well, that her father didn't trust his guide and probably wasn't sharing everything that was going wrong on the expedition. But it was very clear that Niels Antesana was both sick and also climbing with somebody that he distinctly did not trust after he arrived on the mountain. After two days, Gustavo Lisi called Neil Zontazana's wife in Washington D.C. at the prodding of other guides on the mountain who basically, you know, found out that the family had not been notified that their loved one was missing. And Gladys Antazana called her daughter in London. And immediately upon learning that her father was missing, she sent out her note. And she tried to arrange a rescue in Nepal for her father, and then began to research the guide. And in really a matter of hours, Fabio Lantazana had connected through that one note with climbers in Europe and Asia and in South America. And each brought a different piece to the puzzle of how her father had died on Mount Everest. The first person that she discovered was a bass climber named Juan Carlos Gonzalez. And Juan Carlos Gonzalez told her the story that would be the most harrowing that she would hear. The reason that Niels Antizana had selected Gustavo Lisi to go to Everest with is that he believed that Gustavo Lisi had climbed Mount Everest before. He also believed that Gustavo Lisi had very coveted and difficult to attain international guiding certifications. Juan Carlos had a letter online that Fabiola was able to to find and then contact Juan Carlos himself that disputed that first claim. In fact, Gustavo Lisi had never been to the summit of Mount Everest before. What he had done was on an expedition in 2000. He had climbed on a team with Juan Carlos Gonzales, and Juan Carlos had continued to the summit of Everest When Gustavo Lisi had turned around and retreated. Juan Carlos got stuck in a storm and was actually trapped overnight below the summit of Mount Everest and ended up losing seven of his fingers to frostbite. But he survived, which is so much more rare than actually summiting Mount Everest, to actually spend a night out above 8,000 meters and live through it. And he crawled back to the camp where Gustavo Lisi was. And Gustavo, according to Juan Carlos, had offered him aid and assistance. And Juan Carlos passed out at one point, woke back up, and Gustavo Lisi was gone. And other climbers from the team Italians came up to this camp, it's the highest camp in the world, actually, and rescued Juan Carlos and actually had assisted Gustavo Lisi down before rescuing Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos was evacuated from the mountain and went to Zaragoza, Spain, and spent two months in the hospital there, having his fingers amputated and sent his pictures in to be developed and heard back from the lab that basically said, hey, you've got some really beautiful pictures from Nepal. But that camera that you took up to the summit of Mount Everest, there's no film in it. And for a climber, particularly on an expedition like that, I mean, getting your camera working right is about second only to making sure your crampons and your ice axe is sharp. He was certain he had film in his camera and began to investigate what had actually happened to his pictures. And didn't really see suspect Gustavo Lisi at first, but some of his teammates did. And they looked into it, and they discovered that Gustavo Lisi had published photos in the media in Argentina from the summit of Mount Everest, claiming that the man behind the hood and goggles and hat, whose face you can't really see, was him, Gustavo Lisi, not Juan Carlos Gonzalez, on the summit of the mountain. And using those photos, he could start looking for clients for big mountain expeditions. That was the first piece of the puzzle Fabiola picked up on. The next piece came only a couple hours later when she got a phone call from a couple in New York City named Tom and Tina Shoren. And Tom and Tina Shoran are really fascinating characters. And that's one of the things that really drove me in writing this book, is how amazing so many of the characters are in the book. Tom and Tina Shoren are Swedish, and they made a lot of money in business. But before they'd gone into business, they had trekked into Tibet on the first year that China had opened Tibet to Westerners. And they'd gone and seen Mount Everest and kind of made a commitment to one another that they were going to come back and climb this mountain, even though they had no mountaineering experience. And they came to Mount Everest in 1996, the year of the really horrible disaster. Didn't get very high, but saw some really awful things and learned a lot about. And they came back in 1997 and again in 1998, and finally in 1999. Basically, now understanding how these expeditions work and running it all themselves. They summited Mount Everest, but they didn't just summit Mount Everest. They wired it. And they kind of proved to be a tipping point in the way Everest is climbed and covered. Now, they actually took computer equipment all the way to the summit and had a wireless network set up throughout their climb so that they could transmit photos and video and stories pretty much every step of the way of their climb of Mount Everest. They came back down, and in the subsequent years, they skied back to. Back to the South Pole and the North Pole, gradually developing these technologies, writing a program that they call Contact. I think it's 4.0 now. And using that and some handheld computers and other very small equipment, they have created a system where adventurers can file railroad reports from pretty much any square inch of planet Earth at any time. And along with that, they created a website called Explorer's Web, which is an umbrella of a number of different Adventures websites. There's MountEverest.net and there's another site for K2. There's a site for ocean rowers and for polar explorers. And so they provided also a site where all of these people that are buying their technology could file stories as well as to their own site. But the most interesting thing about Tom and Tina was that as they went through their adventures, they had become increasingly outraged about the behavior of other adventurers and incidents of crime and malfeasance that they thought were putting people's lives at risk in the wilderness. And they became incredibly outspoken about that. Whereas, like any other sport, there's a large group of people that are unwilling to speak out about problems, even if those problems aren't something that they're involved in, because they fear that any information that gets out sullies the reputation of everybody that's involved in the sport. Tom and Tina became very loud and very vocal about every incident of theft or fraud that they witnessed in the mountains. Pardon me. So when they saw Fabiola's nose, they began looking into the guide as well, and contacted her almost immediately to say, we really have some suspicions about the person your father was on Everest with. Within a few hours, they had been in contact with another mountain guide named Damian Bonegas. And Damian Bonegas is part of two twin brothers who are both mountain guides, North Face sponsored athletes, and very revered in the mountaineering and climbing community. They've done, you know, have two of the most thorough and incredible resumes of climbers and guides in the world. And they're from Argentina, so they knew a little bit about Gustavo Lisi. Damian Bonegas was in Salt Lake City preparing for an expedition in Pakistan. But his brother, his twin brother Willie, was on Everest because he guides Everest every year. And Willie had seen Neil and Gustavo Lisi and had seen enough to be very suspicious about what Gustavo Lisi was doing and how he was running the expedition. And had contacted his brother as soon as he heard that somebody was missing on the mountain and learned that it was Gustavo Lisi's client to say, you know, we've got to somehow figure out who this guy is and contact the family. You know, Gustavo Lisi's done something horrible. I know it. And so Damian contacted Tom and Tina to pass on this information. And through Tom and Tina, Damien was able to track down Fabiola Antazana in London. And within 48 hours, at this point, of Fabiola Antazana learning that her father was missing and presumed dead on Mount Everest, she was on a flight from London with her husband and with Damian Bonegas from Salt Lake City, who had volunteered out of the blue to go to Kathmandu with her and try to get to the bottom of what happened. And they went and spent 10 days there taping interviews with all of the witnesses, searching for documents, searching through the gear that came off the mountain from Gustavo Lisi, and gradually putting together what began a year and a half investigation into how her father ended up on the mountain with this man and how he ended up dying with him. The first thing that she learned after hearing from Damien, when Damien passed on, what he learned from Willie was that her father was alive when he was left on Mount Everest and was grabbing at the legs of the Sherpas as they walked away from him. So now, one of the things that really fascinated me, as I mentioned before, were the characters. And I really wanted to know what it was that motivated a handful of people to speak out and begin this investigation that Fabiola spent about a year on before passing it on to me, and exactly just what their motives were. I ended up crossing paths with Fabiola in the same hotel in Kathmandu. While I was investigating what happened with my expedition. She had arrived and was in the hotel in Kathmandu. And I never spoke to her, but I spoke to Damian. And amid all of that and all of the stuff that was going on on Mount Everest, it really came down to, you know, six or seven people that decided that they really wanted to. To do something about what had happened to her father and to speak out about what was going on. And when I spoke to the Bonegas brothers and another guy named Luis Benitez, who's one of the people who prompted Gustavo Lisi to contact the family after his silence, and two other climbers involved in it, they all brought up the anniversary season on Mount Everest, which was 2003, and that was the 50 year anniversary of Hillary's first ascent. And as I was saying before, there's almost what feels like an exponential increase in traffic on the mountain every year, and each year sets new records in visitation. But 2003 was really more of an Everest circus than ever before. I mean, there were teams that were carrying ironing boards to the summit. There were all kinds of handicapped people with various motives for climbing the mountain. And there was just huge crowding on it. And it was actually so crazed that Willie Binegas decided he wasn't going to guide on Everest that year. He was going to just get as far away as he could from it, which ended up being two miles. And he and his brother Damian put up a new route on a mountain called Nuptse, which is right next to Everest. They picked a line they called the Crystal Snake. Never been climbed before on a mountain that has been climbed a tiny fraction of the time, number of times that Everest has been climbed. What they did was considered by many mountaineers, myself included, to be the most bold and dangerous and coolest climb of the year. And they got absolutely no attention for it because they weren't on Everest. But they had a pretty amazing time. Spent about 10 days putting up this route, and then came down the route totally wrecked. They've lost £20 each. They've been out of food and water for days. Damien has cracked a rib. They've fallen in crevasses. They've just barely gotten away with their lives. And they came down and they got. Basically, the descent route they took brought them into Camp 2 on the south side of Mount Everest, where a commercial team, who they had friends on, put them up for the night. And in the morning, they were preparing to crawl off the mountain, which is basically all they had left in them. And a Sherpa was coming down the mountain, obviously very sick, and they went to investigate and discovered that the Sherpa, they didn't know what was wrong with him, but that he was probably going to die, and they couldn't get him off the mountain. And you got to keep in mind that there are hundreds of people on the mountain. And they immediately tried to put together a rescue, which they didn't feel they were fit enough to do at that point, and were just roundly refused by dozens of Western climbers who just literally would step over this poor guy laying in the trail or walk past him and just make one excuse after another. And it finally dawned on him that the only people that were going to bring this guy off the mountain were the two climbers and whoever else they could round up to try to get him down. So in researching this, I found an Italian climber. He actually was one of the climbers who helped put together Niels Antizana's expedition, who was on Everest that year. And he had video from this rescue that all of the people that helped out Fabiola mentioned at one point or another. And so I've got that here, and I just want to share that with you. This goes for about five minutes. There's a moment in this video where one of the climbers becomes a little more involved in the rescue than the others, and that's Damian Bonegas, who flew to Kathmandu to help Fabiola and it's good to keep in mind that at that point, he's nursing a cracked rib and has been climbing for some 10 days straight. Okay, thank you. Okay. Yeah. Gotta come onto the rope. It. Why you walk. Okay, So two points to make with that. That's five minutes of a rescue that went on for more than 12 hours. And that Karma Sherpa died in the middle of the Khumbu Icefall in the middle of the night. And I think that really changed all of the people that were involved in that particular incident. Anyway, now I've got just a collection of photos from my expeditions, but I'll take questions. There's a number of other aspects to the book that deal with everything from faulty oxygen bottles that people sell and oxygen. Oxygen bottles, they get stolen, to the prostitution, everything else. But that's the story of the main narrative that kind of drives the book. But does anybody have any questions? So what ended up with the villain of the story? Pardon? So what happened to the villain of the story? What happened to the guy who's in Argentina? Gustavo Lisi. Gustavo Lisi actually just put up video from his. His Everest climb 10 days ago on YouTube at the summit with Neil Zontazana. And he's still trying to work as a guide. You know, one of the issues is that nothing that he did on Mount Everest is seen as a crime. You know, Argentina is not likely to prosecute him for it. The Spanish climber whose picture he stole actually tried to get them to prosecute him for it and failed. And the governments of China and Nepal, I mean, I think we've seen, you know, how reluctant China is to monitor things like that. And Nepal, I mean, we're dealing with the poorest country in South Asia that can barely hold itself together, much less get involved with policing the behavior of mountaineers on Everest. So not only is Gustavo Lisi not been pursued for any criminal behaviors, but he actually could go back. You know, the governments would eagerly take his permit fee again and again, again and let him go back. Which is how you end up with some of the guys that get into trouble on Mount Everest. Able to return year after year and do the same things year after year. Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

You address a lot of the sort of petty theft and obviously more violent crimes that have gone on in the mountain. Another thing you hear a lot about Everest are guides who are willing to take untrained climbers up. Maybe against our better judgment.

Is that.

Can you speak to that at all?

Sure. I mean, it's a. You know, it's that's the basic economics of Everest, actually. The average skill level decreases every year, and there are people that show up that don't know how to tie the most basic knots. You know, I've watched people try to put their crampons on upside down. And, you know, in the. Not to sound like I'm defending guides, but I interviewed a friend of mine who's a very good guy who said, one of the problems with that is if I turn that guy away, he's just going to show up with another team, and he's going to be right next to my camp. And if we're all on a summit bed at the same time and he gets into trouble, I'm as likely to have to rescue him as somebody else's. A really good example of that is something I write about in the book. There was a German climber in 2006 when I was on the mountain, and he had had a tumor removed from his brain. And that left him with something to prove on Mount Everest and a very strange health problem that came with it, because what it led to was he would gradually go blind as the air pressure decreased. So he got more and more blind as he got higher and higher on the mountain. And there was a climber who he hired as his guide. It was the first time this guy had guided Everest. He climbed it once before and had to be rescued himself. But he had a very nice website and was very great photos and was really good at marketing himself. The climber who was stricken with this ended up being turned back, actually, by a group of my teammates. He fell at the Second Step, actually just got very sick and died almost instantaneously, but fell down the Second Step. And a guide on my team, Scott Woollums, climbed down the Second Step to try to revive him and ended up being the first responder and spending an immense amount of time with this guy, trying to keep him alive and then dealing with going back to his own tent. And then two weeks later, when I was talking to Scott, he kind of scratched his head and he goes, you know, I know that name. And he gets into his computer and here is the letter from the guy trying to hire him as his guide. So, you know, not only did Scott not take this guy, but he ended up being the person with him dying in his lap. Anyway, so it's a really weird economy that's going on up there. But, yeah, most of the people that go to Everest now are not seasoned mountaineers. And nothing against them, if that's really what you want. To do. But you've got a lot of politicians and business people or accomplished athletes from other sports who feel incomplete without Everest on their resume. And more and more of that kind of climber who doesn't have anything else on their tick list other than Everest. It's the only mountain they want on their resume. Yes. I have a good friend who I don't know if she's mountaineering. She did Denali a couple of years ago and has been talking about rewarding herself when she finishes her PhD by climbing Everest. Is there any advice that you have for someone who wants to do that as far as finding a good, reputable guide? Doesn't she have enough suffering with doing a PhD? Yeah, I mean, there are. Everest draws the best and the worst guides in the world because it has the lowest requirements of guides, which is none. Actually. The government of Nepal won't even call somebody a guide. So it's really important for people to look into the people they're going to the mountains with themselves. And I think one of the interesting things for me about speaking at Google is that Nils Ontazana in the end is fully responsible for what happened to him. If his daughter could find out all this stuff, he certainly could have found it out. But he was, although a very smart guy and an incredibly accomplished physician, he hated the Internet and he hated to use computers. And he did no research beyond word of mouth of a few people about the guy he was going to Everest with when he could have found out quite a bit of information about him pretty quickly. So that would be the first thing. Talk to clients both successful and not successful that they've had and particularly go talk to the guiding companies because even if you're not going to go with their company like Alpine Ascents or Mountain Madness or International Mountain Guides, they certainly know if a guide has been a problem or there's a history that should be known about somebody.

Yeah, I was actually in Tibet pretty recently and I was discouraged from going to Everest. I'm not going to fly, but just go visit the base camp. Because there was some political unrest, especially dealing with the Olympics like China and some foreigners sort of protested and I heard that there was occasionally some pretty severe violence that happens in political Ms. I wondered if you had.

Yeah, I write about that, what happened and you know, in keeping with what Everest was the last time I was there in 06, which was before this incident, I mean, there were actually tourist buses that were designed to get you into base Camp. And I mean, there actually are buses that unload People, people in Base Camp. And you can walk around in Everest Base Camp for a while and then take off. But later that year, in the fall of 2006, there's a mountain called Choi, which is about 14 or 15 miles from Mount Everest. And it's considered the easiest of the 8,000 meter peaks. And a lot of guiding operations require clients that want to climb Mount Everest to have climbed another 8,000 meter peak. So Choi seems to be the big pick. So it's getting the same kind of crowding that Everest is. And the most popular season on Choi is in the fall. So there were hundreds and hundreds of climbers on Choyu in the fall of 2006. Choyu overlooks the Nangpala Pass, which is the traditional pass from Tibet into Nepal. It's the pass that most of the Sherpa people used to go to Nepal from Tibet when they migrated hundreds of years ago. And it's still the most popular route into Nepal for Tibet that want to escape China. And almost any day during good weather, you can find Tibetans trying to make their way across this pass. And military will show up and arrest them on occasion. What happened in 06 is that military showed up and opened fire on a group of Tibetans and killed a Tibetan nun, dumped her body in a crevasse and dragged away a bunch of children. There were scores of climbers that witnessed this. And the, the real harrowing thing to a lot of people that came out of that is that no word got out of it about it for several days. And eventually it was actually one of the climbers who helped Fabio Lantazano, Luis Benitez, who's an Ecuadorian American climber, who called anonymously to say that there's a story that's not getting out that somebody needs to report. And it came out on Explorer's Web and then made news around the world. Romanian was there who filmed the. And put that up on TV in Europe. And China is incredibly sensitive to embarrassments like that. So this year they just announced three days ago. And as to whether it will actually prove to be what was initially reported, I don't know. But they were going to close Mount Everest until May 10, which almost ices all the climbers out because you have to. You need about six weeks to acclimatize before the monsoon hits. And the monsoon usually hits in the first week of June. But they also closed Choi. And so the argument that a lot of people had that they were closing Mount Everest for their torch climb doesn't quite ring true because why would you close another mountain nearby. And the other instance with that is that they've already done the torch climb once. They did a dry run of the torch climb last spring. They actually took five or six torches up to see which model burned best on, on the top of the planet. So they've kind of gone through it before. Last year they did have some Tibetan protesters wave a flag in Base Camp and they arrested them. Some of them were American and deported them. But I think they're really trying to put something of an iron fist on Mount Everest at least while the world's sports cameras are on the mountain. Yeah.

Are you experiencing any backlash from what seems to be a very tight knit and sort of guarded community after writing this book?

Some of my friends are a little more guarded in talking to me now and some of my sources. But no, I've actually had, so far the response has been reasonably positive. You know, I'm sure I will experience backlash and it's, you know, there's a certain amount of myth busting going on here and it's Investigative Journal and yeah, I mean you all are close enough to remember that at the time that I was writing the initial newspaper series on the Connecticut expedition, some of my other friends at the Harper Courant were writing a series of stories that eventually got John Rowland impeached, got him to resign and had him thrown in jail. So, you know, if you're going to write stories that expose this kind of thing, then you're going to have to be prepared for a certain amount of backlash. So, you know, I'm certain I will.

Does the onus of sort of regulating what everything that you described that's going on completely fall on the government and Nepal. Are there any international organizations that can or do get involved to provide some sort of monitoring regulation?

There was an attempt to put together an organization that just monitored, that was a climbers organization that monitored guides and their qualifications to work on the 8,000 meter peaks a number of years ago. And it fell apart fairly quickly because it really proved to be a way of kind of icing some people out of the work. And it's very difficult with mountaineers. I mean, the whole nature of the sport is to be somewhat iconoclast and rebellious and make your own way and be independent to try to put regulations on it. Although I do think that the only real change is going to come from climate. I mean, what changes China has put in place for this year are very obviously just to clean the place up for the Olympics and they'll probably let it go right back to what it was as soon as that's over. Anybody else? Sure.

Do you see prospects for things getting any better in the foreseeable future? Talk about climbers, how do you do things and there's some certainly information becoming available at least you said in ways that wasn't available before. Do you think it's going to change anything?

Well I think it does change things that there's that high tech, high touch thing going on here. So climbers tend to be very technologically savvy people generally so that helps and I think more importantly is the number of climbers that have been willing to speak out about issues like this just in the last few years. So I think that there's some chance of change through that but we are dealing with a lawless place and you've got people spending literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in a place with absolutely no legal oversight so it's hard to imagine that any change is going to come easily or quickly. Thanks for having me.