JENKINS: I think what you're all saying-and it's also what I've experienced with many trips to Asia-is that the complications with regulation, whether it's numbers or whether it's peak fees, is very very difficult, and probably not feasible. Is that what I'm hearing?

VIESTURS: Yeah, I would tend to agree with that. Especially in a foreign country. Here in the U.S., where things are very well-organized, we're able to set up committees and regulations but to go somewhere else and ask other governments to do what we think is true and what we think is right is kind of hard to do and hard to assume that we have the right to go and do that.

HAHN: I think we've hit on a little bit of an irony here. In '96 it seemed like what was part of the public surprise was that Everest had, in their eyes become a domain of the wealthy. And maybe in reaction to that, here we are ten years later, and no, you don't have to be wealthy to go to Everest. People can go for less than the cost of a car. There are plenty of not-wealthy people on Everest, and I was saying before…

COTTER: The guides

HAHN: What? Ohhh…yeah! [Laughs] Plenty! But I was saying before, I didn't want to be around someone who wanted to save money on Everest, I meant that as far as someone who wanted to save money and save time and not put in the years but there are plenty doing it on the cheap that I respect, that are doing it well. Yeah, I wouldn't want to see something get in the way of that. I wouldn't want to see the bar put so high financially by a permit system that it was out of reach.

JENKINS: Ok guys, now I want to go on to a bit of a contentious issue. As sports have matured across the world-,if you take track and field, you take cycling, you take any of these-performance-enhancing drugs, or substances of any kind, have been, they're trying to ban them. Especially cycling, especially…we all know about this. And oxygen is a form of performance-enhancing substance. Now one way to reduce the numbers and perhaps reduce risk—I don't really think so—is to change the use of oxygen. There certainly are a number of climbers that have said this is the easiest solution you can imagine. Oxygen becomes an unethical aid to climbing on Everest. Then you would have very few people there and things would be different. I would like some kind of sense if this is a sensible suggestion, or even realistic. Particularly when we start talking about no-oxygen we start talking about increases or risk and frostbite and so forth. Anybody.

COTTER: I'll start on that one. The Brazilian guy that died on the North side of Everest this year was a classic case of somebody that…

BIEDLEMAN : Who was that guy?

COTTER: I can't remember his name.

JENKINS: He was a classic case of going without oxygen. Guy, is that what you said?

COTTER: Yeah, going without oxygen. He had Sherpa support, he told the Sherpa he…the Sherpa was carrying oxygen, he told the sherpa "no, no I don't want you to come with me, I want to do this plain and pure." I think it was his third time on the mountain. He got back, he summitted and came back down somewhere around the second steppe and lost it. He made it back down to the top camp, but I think…Ed would probably be a better one to answer this, but it seems to me that most of us are not capable of climbing Everest without oxygen and I think there would be a much higher fatality rate. I mean, there would just be a big stack of bodies up there and I personally think from their perspective, from a safety perspective, it wouldn't work.

But there's another side to it as well. Mountaineering is a personal sport, where we get out of it what we get out of it. You don't have to do things by a certain time. It's not breaking any records or the rest of it. If you were up there on Everest and you were using gas and you were having a good time and enjoying the view… why not? As long as you were open to everybody about the style and the intent that you've done the climb—and as long as you reduce your environmental impact by bringing your bottles down—I can't see a reason not to use it.

BEIDLEMAN: I think Ed would be a good one to talk on this seeing as he's the one among us who has done it without oxygen, but as I mentioned to Mark the other day, this isn't a debate that goes on on Everest. The debate that goes on on Everest is not so much a debate but, it's so sad. Over and over and over, year after year to see somebody dying without oxygen. Climbing without oxygen, that's a great ethic but knowing your limits is an even more important ethic, I would think.

VIESTURS: But wouldn't you guys say as well that there are people who die who use oxygen, simply because the fact that they sometimes use way too much of it on the way up and they haven't budgeted enough of it for the way down, and on the way down all of a sudden, they run out of oxygen. It's like pulling a plug. Those people get into trouble as well, and we've seen that. Isn't that true?

HAHN: You bet. No substitute for experience.

VIESTURS: Right. And I agree that most of the people that go up there need oxygen, require it, but you have to be very careful in remembering that that is basically your life support system. And if it goes wrong, and if it breaks or if you run out, you're in big trouble. You're dependent on that. And I think the guides and everyone using oxygen—you're smarter, you're stronger, you're faster and most people in the world couldn't do Everest without oxygen.

So I don't think it's going to ever go away and I don't think we can start regulating that as well and start saying, "Well, you can only climb mountains without using oxygen." Mountaineering is about freedom and it's about how you choose to do what you do in the mountains and the experience that you get out of that. So we can't tell people that you can't use it.

HAHN: And yeah, let the buyer beware in that department too. Let the lecture audience look a little more closely into what their lecturer claims he did if they want to look up to somebody and admire them. It's their responsibility to know what's a real achievement over there and what's just another achievement.