Listen carefully, he said: This will be different. It will be the story of the entire guiding industry that was created on and around the world’s highest mountain. He planned to call it Everest, Inc.
That got my interest, because I put about a quarter century of blood, sweat, and tears into this "industry." I first went to the Big E in the early 1990s, which turned out to be the dawn of the commercial era on the Goddess Mother of the Earth. Following years of adventure in the Himalayas, I quit guiding 8,000-meter peaks after the twin disaster years of 2014—when an avalanche on Everest killed 16 Nepali workers in the Khumbu Icefall—and 2015, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed 19 people at Everest Base Camp and a total of 9,000 people in Nepal.