Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World

Featuring original interviews with Everest mountain guides and climbers, this is “a fast-moving, nuanced account of the peak’s transformation from the ultimate mountaineering challenge into a booming business opportunity” (Joshua Hammer, New York Times bestselling author).

Anyone who has read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or has seen a recent photo of climbers standing in line to get to the top of Everest may think they have a sense of what the world’s highest mountain is like. It’s an extreme landscape where bad weather and incredible altitude can kill; an overcrowded, trashed-out recreation destination; and a place where the rich exploit local Sherpas while padding their egos—and social media feeds.

There’s some truth to these clichés, but they’re a sliver of the story. Unlike any book to date, Everest, Inc. is the definitive account of how a few daring entrepreneurs paired raw courage and naked ambition to get paying clients safely up and down Everest. Until the late eighties, such a thing was considered impossible. Within a few years, Everest guiding was a burgeoning industry. Today, ninety percent of the people on the mountain are clients or employees of guided expeditions.

Studded with quotes from original interviews with more than a hundred Western and Sherpa climbers, clients, writers, and filmmakers—including Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker—Everest, Inc. foregrounds the colorful voices of the people who have made the mountain what it is today. As professional climber and author Freddie Wilkinson says, “Whether you are thinking about taking a crack at the world’s highest peak or are simply an armchair mountaineer trying to make sense of the complex dynamics driving the modern Everest industry, Everest, Inc. should be required reading.”

Will Cockrell has spent more than twenty years as a senior editor, writer, and consultant for national magazines including Men’s Journal, Outside, Men’s Fitness, and GQ. His work has been awarded by the American Society of Magazine Editors and Professional Publishers Association UK. A former outdoor guide, Cockrell has covered Everest throughout his career, and has visited Everest base camp in Nepal. He lives with his family in Los Angeles, California. Find more at his website, WillCockrell.com.

ISBN: 9781982190460
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: April 22, 2025

“There are more worlds at the top of the world than most of us know. The Everest guiding industry has a strange, gnarled history and Will Cockrell has turned it into a fair-minded, engrossing tale. It’s a book full of unforgettable characters in a spectacular setting that's both physically and morally treacherous.”
— William Finnegan, staff writer at the New Yorker and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“Will Cockrell’s Everest, Inc. is a fast-moving, nuanced account of the peak's transformation from the ultimate mountaineering challenge into a booming business opportunity. Beginning with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's historic conquest in 1953, Cockrell recounts how a colorful cast of moguls, entrepreneurial guides, and Sherpa visionaries expanded access to the summit and raked in big bucks in the process. His book is both a cautionary tale of the dangers of overexposure and a celebration of what remains the greatest terrestrial adventure of them all.”
— Joshua Hammer, New York Times bestselling author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and The Falcon Thief

“It’s high time our collective consciousness got an update on what it really means to climb Everest. In the deeply researched and cinematic Everest, Inc., Cockrell has mapped a new route expertly. Whether you want to climb the world's tallest mountain or laugh at those masochistic and wealthy enough to try, this is a page-turner."
— Diana Helmuth, author of How to Suffer Outside and The Witching Year

“Although Mount Everest perpetually makes headlines, there have been precious few attempts to objectively chronicle its tumultuous recent history. With deft storytelling and in-depth research, Will Cockrell fills that void, providing a kaleidoscopic view that honors many different perspectives—most important, that of the local Sherpa guides who call the Himalayas home. Whether you are thinking about taking a crack at the world’s highest peak, or are simply an armchair mountaineer trying to make sense of the complex dynamics driving the modern Everest industry, Everest, Inc. should be required reading.”
— Freddie Wilkinson, professional climber, documentary filmmaker, and author of One Mountain Thousand Summits

“With exhaustive reporting, eloquent prose, and spine-tingling pacing, Everest, Inc. deserves a spot alongside the great mountaineering narratives of the last decades. But it's also refreshingly different than any alpine tale before it. Unpacking the mountain's mystery like a detective on a crime scene, Cockrell shows that the story of Everest's industrial complex is every bit as gripping—if not more so—than the challenge of ascent. This book had me glued from the first chapter and gathered momentum like an avalanche.”
— Jaimal Yogis, author of The Fear Project and Saltwater Buddha

“There’s something both inspiring and off-putting about humanity’s fascination with Mount Everest . . . Adventure writer Cockrell (Outside, Men’s Journal) teases out both sides of the issue, clearly conveying how exceedingly difficult the climb can be while describing in great detail the exponential growth of the industry … Cockrell has done readers a service in setting it all down.”
— Booklist