Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES Reviewed in NYT

The Higher They Climb
By BRUCE BARCOTT
New York Times Book Review, March 2, 2008

In 2003, on the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Mount Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, who died in January, returned to the mountain. He looked around at base camp’s satellite dishes, electric generators and free-flowing booze, and despaired. “Just sitting around in a big base camp, knocking back cans of beer, I don’t particularly regard as mountaineering,” he said.


HIGH CRIMES
The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed.
By Michael Kodas.
Illustrated. 357 pp. Hyperion. $24.95.

MOUNTAIN MADNESS
Scott Fischer, Mount Everest and a Life Lived on High.
By Robert Birkby.
Illustrated. 342 pp. Citadel Press/Kensington Publishing. $24.95.


How did we get from Hillary’s noble ascent to a Himalayan version of Burning Man? Two new books lend some insight. One is a biography of a man who helped open the era of guided climbing on Everest; the other offers a portrait of the mountain as a magnet for selfishness and bad behavior. ...

Privacy was the least of the losses. In the years after Fischer’s death, camaraderie and common decency all but disappeared too. According to Michael Kodas, the author of “High Crimes,” base camp today is a lawless village, complete with thievery, extortion, prostitution and occasional violence. In 1996, 98 climbers made it to the top. In 2007, more than 500 summited. “Along with that rush of visitors,” Kodas writes, “has come a new breed of parasitic and predatory adventurer.” It’s gotten so bad that some expeditions hire Sherpas to stand guard against burglars.

Kodas, a reporter for The Hartford Courant, knows the situation firsthand, having tried to climb Everest in 2004 and 2006. (He was turned back by bad weather and poor health.) “High Crimes” looks at the mountain through the eyes of a fascinated and appalled climber. Kodas weaves accounts of his own hilariously awful adventures with the not-so-funny story of Nils Antezana, a 69-year-old American doctor who fell victim to the underhanded practices now common on the mountain. (Both attempted Everest in 2004 but never met. Kodas climbed the mountain’s north side, from Tibet; Antezana took the southern route, from Nepal.)

Like too many of today’s Everest climbers, Antezana wasn’t a mountaineer. He was a man with a dream: to conquer the world’s highest peak. To reach that goal, he hired an Argentine guide named Gustavo Lisi. In climbing circles, Lisi was known as a scoundrel who once stole a dying climber’s Everest summit photo and claimed it as his own. Antezana was unaware of Lisi’s history because he hadn’t spoken with any climbers who could have clued him in. He knew only that Lisi’s Web site claimed — falsely — that he had conquered Everest.

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