The Panel
NEAL BIEDLEMAN, 46, Aspen Colorado. One Everest summit. Beidleman worked as a guide on Scott Fischer's 1996 Mountain Madness expedition on Everest.

GUY COTTER, 43, Lake Wanaka, New Zealand. Three Everest summits. Owner of Adventure Consultants, the New Zealand-based guiding company formerly owned by his friend Rob Hall.

DAVE HAHN, 44, Taos, New Mexico. Seven Everest summits. A longtime Everest guide who has been on 14 expeditions to 8,000-meter peaks.

ED VIESTURS, 47, Seattle, Washington. Six Everest summits. The only American to climb all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen, Viesturs helped carry out rescues during the '96 season.

JENKINS Ok, first of all, welcome to all you guys. I've spoken to each of you before, and I really appreciate what you're doing. This roundtable thing will probably provide some kind of a foundation for future discussions about what Everest is like right now, and what it will be like in the future…that's what I'm hoping for. For this roundtable, what I'd like you to do is first go around the roundtable, doesn't really matter who starts, Ed you were the first guy on, maybe we can start with you. Go Ed, Guy, Dave, Neil, give your name, age, your occupation and the number of times you've been on Everest. Alright, let's just start. Ed, you can start and we'll get going.

VIESTURS: My name's Ed Viesturs, I live just outside Seattle, Washington. I'm 46 years old. I've been on ten Everest expeditions and I've been six times on the summit.

JENKINS: Great, ok Guy, go ahead.

COTTER: My name's Guy Cotter, I live in New Zealand (As the transcriber will be able to get by my accent) I'm 43 years old, I've been on Everest four times mountaineering, five times total....summitted three.

JENKINS: Alright, Dave, lay it on us.

HAHN: My name's Dave Hahn, I'm from Taos, New Mexico. I'm 44 years old, I've been on Everest 11 times, and got up seven times.

JENKINS: Neil, Your turn.

BIEDLEMAN: My name's Neil Beidleman, I'm from Aspen Colorado. I guess I'm the rookie here, I've been to Everest once and summitted once.

JENKINS: Ha ha, nice clean record. Well, we're all of very similar ages, which is kind of neat. We've all spent an enormous time over the last 25 years in the mountains, so this should be fun.

What I'm hoping is that everybody will feel free to just throw out thoughts and ideas as I ask questions and I'll probably direct some questions to specific individuals since I've spoken to all of you and know some of you have specific thoughts, but ideally I wanted to have all of this in one room after about a six-pack each, and really talk about this stuff…but that's not happening so it can be as informal as we can make it just by being on the phone.

I'm just gonna dive in here and this doesn't have to follow the protocol that I created, these are just questions I've come up with after talking with you guys and also talking with folks at Outside .

So, what we're doing, why we're all together is to talk more specifically about kind of the commercialization of Everest, what that means, and at the end I hope we can move forward and talk not about the past or even the present but about what Everest could look like or perhaps even should look like in the next five, ten, 20 years.

Alright, first question. Dave, I'd like you to give a crack at this, just to get started. What does the commercialization of Everest really mean on the mountain? If you could give us a picture of what's happening on the two commercial routes on the mountain, the north col and the south col, just for starters—what does it look like?