JENKINS: Well how about this then, guys? Question five is: does it seem to be possible—at least the way you guys are describing it—should clients, prospective clients, prospective Everest climbers, have some kind of competency test? Now this would probably come down to the individual guiding services, would it not?

COTTER: Absolutely, and I mean it was proved again this year that anybody who doesn't get on one of the guided expeditions just goes shopping. And what ends up happening is they end up getting on one of these expeditions being run by a Nepalese trekking agency that has no requirement apart from the ability to pay. And no back-up once they get these people—people who are quite often not going to make it onto a commercial team because of a lack of experience—they're going to find themselves on Everest. And then what happens is that these commercial teams that have turned these people down often have to rescue them—these same people who they've turned down from joining their team. So they get rescued without paying anything to the guiding company that's doing the rescuing.

JENKINS: Not to mention the danger that they put the guides and Sherpas in, correct?

COTTER: Absolutely. So therefore, we don't like to see it, but you're going to have that same thing of the people who really need to do a competency test for their clients are the ones who are least likely to.

HAHN: And we talked again about who it would be-like the possibilities, do you invite the UIAGM in? (The International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations, the regulating body for guides in much of the rest of the world) and I'd say well, no, I'd rather that not happen.

The UIAGM doesn't have particular experience in guiding the highest mountains, so I wouldn't really want to see a body like that trying to tell us what to up there. And yeah, as somebody who works in heavily-regulated parks like Mt. McKinley, yeah that's a whole lot of government presence on the mountain, it's bad enough in the ministry of tourism! [Laughs] But on the mountain, you know, ON the mountain, that's a lot of government in those parks.

JENKINS: So you guys are saying in effect, that in the better guiding services on Everest, they are already doing these competency screening for clients?

GROUP: "You bet." "Very much so"

COTTER: And it's personality testing as well. Obviously we want to try and avoid wingnuts as much as possible. So we are always screening people and a big part of what we do as a responsible guiding company is actually help people achieve a standard they need to get to before going to Everest. So often, our clients we've known for years before they've even come to the mountain. We've taken them on other expeditions, we've trained them up and gotten them ready.

Actually, a reasonable proportion of our business is preparation for people to get to Everest. Because we want people to succeed, we want people to come on expeditions and be successful as much as possible. We've alluded to it a little bit before, but what we'd like to see is staking the odds in the favor of the client and in the expedition as a whole to succeed, so therefore the whole process of getting people to the mountain is a long one for us.

JENKINS: Is that true guys, with you and Ed and Dave? That you find that many of your clients kind of do work their way up, at least partly through this mountaineering apprenticeship before they come to Everest?

VIESTURS: Oh for sure. The people that we believe take on Everest for the most part (whatever company that they go with) they quite often have been on other trips with that same company. They know the guides, and the guides know them.

As Guy said, these people kind of come up through the ranks—they don't just get up off the couch and say: "I'm going to go to Everest." That's not the kind of people that Guy would accept on one of his trips.

The client pool is quite small and once they attach themselves and work with a certain guide organization and if things go well, they'll continue to work with that same organization and with that same guide. So everyone kind of gets to know each other and by the time they do have the qualifications and do sign up to go to Everest, quite often there is some cohesiveness within that team. And here again, you're going to get a better outcome. It's going to be safer, it's going to be more enjoyable and the people within that organization and within that team are probably going to help each other more than the cheaper teams.

So again, you get what you pay for. You're paying more, but the quality and the safety and the chances of success, of walking away and getting home, like Guy said, is what you're gonna get out of that. And that's what you have to try to convey to people when they're shopping around. And the ones that don't get it won't ever get it.