JENKINS: Let's talk about back-up, and anyone can jump in here. This is something you've all brought up quite a bit: if something goes wrong, you need back-up. What does this really mean? Probably, what you're saying is that it's costly; its costly to have guides that are capable, it's costly to have Sherpas that are ready to go. Is that what back-up is?

COTTER: Who are you asking?

JENKINS: I'm asking...you! Haha...why not?

COTTER: Ok, alright. Yeah, all that stuff costs money, and every additional person you put on the expedition, it all costs a whole lot more, and to be "responsible" (as Dave used that word earlier on) means paying for a lot of services that you probably aren't going to use, so you have switches in place. You have extra oxygen, you have medical supplies, you might have a doctor. And so on and so on.

COTTER: Yup, radios, Sat phones, the whole bit. And this can actually only be accumulated over time, so those operators that have been around, offering services for a long time have built up a good system for dealing with it. And each year we tend to spend more and more and more on tweaking things and making them better, and this is one area where the commercialization, the fact that we're returning, has actually helped a lot.

I think that we who do this want to be able to sleep at night—or some of us do—not that I'm sleeping now, (laughs) but, we want to be able to sleep at night. We want to be able to know so that our expeditions can run and if something goes wrong we can do whatever we can to make it right. And this is often happening, we're actually working with other teams that don't have the back-up to help them, because we often find ourselves in the situation where we are getting involved in helping people on the cheap expeditions out, fixing up their problems.

JENKINS: Ed, I want you to jump in here. Having guided there yourself a lot, because of the money involved, is there a certain amount of pressure from the clients on the guides to get them to the top, and does this influence your decision-making as a guide? And Neil, I want you to jump in here at a point too, because I know on the '96 trip, there's been a lot of questions about whether money influenced decisions.

VIESTURS: Well, I would say in general, "perhaps" but for me, I would say that the fact these folks are paying a lot of money doesn't come into play.

I think I figured it out that as Dave said, it does cost a lot of money to run an Everest expedition and I think the perception as well, since '96, people read about "hey you buy a ticket to the top." And for that expensive ticket, "you better damn well sure get me to the top" That's the perception from the client's point of view fairly often.

But I think most of the guides—at least the ones that are thinking straight and running legitimate operations—know better than that. They say "listen, we know that this costs a lot, but the rules on Everest are going to be the same as on any other mountain that I guide on, if not more stringent."

But you can see that perhaps there is a little bit of added pressure to perform, and for that investment of time and money to maybe help these people get to the summit, maybe nurture them high onto the mountain when in other cases you might be saying, "listen, I don't think you're capable of going further."

So I think there might be a little bit of that pressure that's going on. And also the fact that if you succeed this year, with that team and that company name, that could be your calling card to sign up people for the next season.

Then there are all these teams up there and maybe one is pushing ahead, and then another one maybe is deliberating on whether or not to go up or what to do, and maybe they're getting pulled along as well, while when they're on their own they may be making different decisions. So there's a lot of things coming into play when people are making decisions up there when on the mountain.

BIEDLEMAN: Yeah, I'll jump in there as well.

JENKINS: Please…

BIEDLEMAN: Yeah, I think that's…sorry, go ahead Mark.

JENKINS: No, I was going to say "go for it, Neil."

BIEDLEMAN: Yeah, I think that's well said and a very good perception. Certainly back in '96 I think, there was some background pressure on Scott to perform well. I'm not so sure you could call it "direct competition" with Rob Hall, but certainly there is pressure in Scott's mind to provide good services, to make good decisions, to try to get people up the mountain.

I think that Scott clearly knew that if Rob succeeded in a fabulous way and we were sitting at base camp waiting for something else, that might be the end of his guiding up at Everest.

So I think it's in the back of people's minds. Maybe not as much now, just because of what happened in '96, but prior to that time, there really hadn't been any major tragedies or episodes with guided trips—at least not publicized—so, yeah, I think Scott felt the pressure.