By Guy Cotter (Potton & Burton, 2023)
Since first climbing the mountain in 1992 as part of the Adventure Consultants team, Guy Cotter has become one of the industry’s most respected Everest guides. In the three decades since, he has accumulated a proper shopping list of accomplishments, including summiting Everest five times and scaling seven of the world’s 14 above-8000-metre peaks.
Guy was also present for many of the mountain’s notorious tragedies: the 1996 storm that killed eight climbers, including his good friend and mentor Rob Hall, and was immortalised in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air as well as the film Everest; the icefall collapse in 2014, in which 16 Sherpas were killed; and the 2015 Nepal earthquake, which saw Guy and some of his team trapped at Camp 1 after an avalanche swept, fatally, through Base Camp.
The strength of the book is the matter-of-fact detail Guy is able to provide about these already well-documented events, and his nuts-and-bolts descriptions of the world of high altitude guiding.
Sometimes this borders on black comedy; the descriptions of frostbite injuries and the effects of altitude on sleep and patience and appetite (just another day in the hills coughing up bile) are ongoing reminders that humans do weird things for kicks. But as Guy explains, after reaching the top of the world’s tallest mountain for the first time, “this ascent was the ultimate definition of my craft and I felt that I belonged.” Everest Mountain rollicks along thanks to a raft of fascinating details outlining how it all works in the mountains.
(A big picture side note: Early in the book, Guy mentions missing a couple of seasons due to having young children, then doesn’t bring up the parenting juggle again. He may have made the understandable decision that he didn’t want to include his family in what is a very public story, and that’s totally fine. But it did bring to mind the criticism of women like American guide Melissa Arnot Reid, who has described being relentlessly interrogated about the decision to carry on doing, you know, her job after having kids, while her husband and fellow guide was never questioned once. Mountaineering is an industry that highlights the way we still (!) shame mothers for going to work in a way that we do not shame fathers. Can we just not?) – LW
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