JENKINS: Dave, Ed, all you guys, is this a common occurrence? The kind of thing we don't hear about that we should be?

HAHN: Yeah, people do the right thing up there—they often do. It seems to be the popular media story that people are kooks, and in my experience, yeah there are some kooks out there, but by and large there are some pretty good folks and they do help each other and I'd say that's the norm. And yeah there are going to be some cases where people are unable or do not help each other for whatever reason, but I'd say more often, it's one of the reasons I like being there. There are good people and good things happening.

VIESTURS: I agree with Dave. And it's the good things that happen that the media really isn't interested in. They want controversy, they want conflict. They want to talk about the things that are going wrong.

It's quite often the things that are going well. The people that do the right thing don't go around and toot their horn and say "here, look at what we just did." They just feel that that's their moral obligation, that's the right thing to do and if something happens they go and do it. And quite often as well it's the people that get rescued or barely, barely get away with something—they don't want to admit it either so it very rarely comes out.

I think there's a lot of (more often than not) close calls on the mountain but you never hear about it. People don't want to admit the problems that they had: "Hey I got to the summit, but by the way I'm not gonna tell you that somebody dragged me on the way down." I'm not gonna want to admit that, and you never really hear about that.

JENKINS: Guy, I think that you had similar sentiments to what Dave said, about the fact that you are frequently involved in rescues and they often work out successfully, but there's nothing ever written about them.

COTTER: Umm, no, absolutely. I mean I can't really elaborate on that much. What these guys are saying is absolutely right. And part of it is that we haven't been very good at promoting that side of things. We do dispatches from the mountain, we send out a little bit of information but yeah, we certainly don't jump up and down about it.

What was interesting this year on the mountain was that we did a couple of dispatches about a dog that came up on the mountain, up to the bottom of the Lhotse face. And we actually got more feedback from people about that, and more concerned people writing about the dog than anything else that we've ever had.

JENKINS: A man's best friend is not a man! [Laughter]

JENKINS: If some of the negative aspects about Everest—particularly it seems you guys are talking about people who are inexperienced and also inexperienced enough to believe that they can go cheap and then get themselves in trouble—are there ways to change the Everest experience for the positive? One thing that we've already brought up that I thought deserves a little more attention is the possibility of limiting numbers on Everest. This happens of course throughout the U.S. in backcountry areas. Could this happen on Everest, and would it make a positive difference?

HAHN: I'll take a stab: Yeah, definitely limit the numbers as long as you let me in. [Laughs]

JENKINS: And that's what everyone's thinking, right?

HAHN: Exactly. And that's when you love it in an American part, when you're one of the few that are let in to one of these areas. But I don't think it's gonna happen. I don't think it's realistic. Again, we're talking about the Chinese/Tibetan government and we're talking about the Nepal government and yeah, personally I don't believe it's a practical idea because I don't think either of them are going to limit that.

VIESTURS: For them, selling permits is a commodity and for us to come in and say listen, we want you to sell less of those, who are we to go in and tell them how to do that. And as Dave said as well, yes as soon as you start regulating, yeah the people who happened to get permits, they're the lucky dogs, and then you have all the other people and other operators that are kind of banking on the fact that they can get a permit. And when they don't, they're going to run out of business and that's the way it used to be in the past. We were all stomping and screaming and like, "Hey give more permits! We really really want to go." And now the floodgates are opening—and open—and everybody is happy but we're also suffering some of the consequences of all the people that are going on the mountain.

BIEDLEMAN: Then the supply and demand issue comes in. If you were to regulate it somehow, the cost goes up because it's such demand, and going to Everest becomes something only a few people can afford and you cut out all the folks that are just everyday, normal climbers as well. I guess if there was some kind of regulation that allowed different types of groups in, I guess that would work, but I don't know how that would be regulated or how you could even possibly write something like that.