JENKINS: So, once again the onus kind of falls upon the guiding services to help your client through an earlier apprenticeship to understand the very mortal risks of mountaineering at any level, and then explain what it really means to be on Everest and how dangerous it can be. Does that sound right?

Ok, we're doing great here guys. I'm sure you are all familiar with this—among mountaineers and alpinists and certainly the hard-core, Everest has sort of lost its cache. Because of so much negative media attention, it's become as much an icon for greed, ambition and incompetency. I mean these are antithetical to the mountaineering ethic—I think they are for you guys as well. I want to first ask, if this sentiment (that Everest has nothing to do with mountaineering anymore, or climbing) is this sentiment actually accurate to what you guys have actually seen on Everest?

COTTER: I would like to say that, to a point, it is accurate. High-altitude mountaineering, to be good at it, you have to be an expert in the art of selfishness. And mountaineering, when you're climbing with a partner, the two of you, you just deal with your own issues. You help each other out when you need to but you do your bit as best you can, your partner does their bit as best they can, that's mountaineering and that's part of the beauty of mountaineering.

But that's very different up on Everest for a whole bunch of reasons, but part of it is that you're running into all these other teams and having to deal with other groups in addition to your own. It's all well and good having this ethos of mountaineering that people think about, but it's a bit different when you come across a team of people with a completely different culture that are part of some big national group and you don't like the way they do things anyway, and then you find out you've got to rescue them, they're idiots—then you've got to confront a few things that you might not have to in any other form of mountaineering.

I also think that the opposite is coming out of it, we're just not hearing it. One of the things I took away from '96 was how amazing it was that all these teams who all had the ambition to get to the summit all dropped everything and went to try and rescue climbers who were lost and out there and frostbitten and need help. It was amazing watching that happen.

JENKINS: Guy, is that still happening? I mean, all you guys—give me a sense hear. We generally hear about Everest when things go wrong. But there are many many expeditions there every year and I'm assuming many things go right with many of them. I know with my climbing personally, you don't say much. You do your trip and come home. You may actually have done rescues on your trip, and again, if that works out, you don't say much about it. Is that what's happening on Everest?

COTTER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's happening all the time. There's a lot of very positive things going on.

I think that as far as all of us commercial operators, the communication is way better than what it used to be. We're doing a lot to actually avoid accidents, we're all getting together to work on the mountain and all these little teams who never did anything to help anyone in past, they're still not, and were not even asking them to.

We're just making up for it, because we want things done right. I think there's a lot of good stuff going on that we haven't been very good about telling everybody about as an industry, if you like, because we want to get on with our own thing, we don't want to comment on what other people are doing or how we've helped other people out too much. We just get on with it.

HAHN: Yeah I would agree. I see lots of good things going on. I see people helping each other all the time. A specific case this year, when a Czech climber fell on the Lhotse face and was near death before anybody even knew he'd had an accident. They discovered him the next morning. I saw great stuff—a Chilean team going out of their way, putting themselves at risk to get to this climber, get him back on the route. It was clear to almost everybody that he was going to die, but they took the time and effort I think it was right up by the yellow band on the Lhotse face—right by 25,000 feet, getting close to that, and again, this man had suffered some very serious injuries and had been out all night, unbeknownst to anybody, so everybody witnessing this knew he was going to die.

It was sad, but this Chilean team that hoped to summit Lhotse the next day,When you get the kinda thing hanging over your head you don't want to waste energy, you don't want to use up energy. You want to get into your high camp early and prepare. But no, these guys—the leader of the team, their doctor—they changed their plan. They enlisted the help of all the Sherpas that were up there to move this climber. The Chilean doctor stayed with him until he died and put his own summit plans back a day. He decided to stay down at camp 3 for that day.