“Circus at Everest Base Camp”

“Circus at Everest Base Camp” is the book’s expression for the crowded, commercial spectacle that had come to surround Everest by 1996. It links the growth of climbing as a business to the influx of expeditions and personnel at base camp—and to concerns that some climbers might not be prepared for the mountain’s demands.

From climbing to business

In a 1997 preface to the American Alpine Journal, Christian Beckwith describes climbing as not merely mainstream but a business, with both climbing objectives and tactical decisions increasingly shaped by business considerations. He acknowledges the benefit: climbers, like skiers and sailors before them, can earn a living from what they love. But the commercial growth also brings crowded crags, more regulations, and what he calls the enduring “circus” at Everest Base Camp. The phrase therefore carries both sides of the change: greater access to a climbing livelihood, and the crowded pressures that accompany it.

The camp’s changing scale

The book gives the metaphor a striking measure. In the early 1980s, the climbers and expedition support staff gathered at Everest Base Camp during the spring could have fitted into a single Paris metro car. By 1996, more than four hundred people had come up the trail and pitched tents, making the camp resemble an encampment at a rock concert. One climber sharpened the comparison into a joke: “a circus, except there were more clowns in our tents.” The tents make the image intimate as well as expansive: the spectacle was not just a distant view of a crowded camp, but something climbers felt among the people sharing it.

Spectacle and questions of competence

The crowd also raised questions about who was prepared to be on the mountain. The Taiwanese expedition led by Makalu Gau became the subject of jokes that barely concealed serious concerns about the team’s qualifications and its prospects of getting off the mountain alive. One climber compared the prospect of joining them to being on the mountain with the Jamaican bobsled team. The Johannesburg Sunday Times Expedition drew a different mixture of public prestige and private skepticism: it had been publicly embraced by Nelson Mandela, while climbers over Henry Todd’s Scotch traded stories about the inexperience of many team members and questioned the truthfulness of its leader, Ian Woodall.

Ed Viesturs, an Everest veteran working as a guide and on-camera talent for the MacGillivray Freeman IMAX/IWERKS Expedition, put the concern plainly: “A lot of people are up here who shouldn’t be.” The expedition was led by climber and filmmaker David Breashears and had one of the largest budgets ever committed to an Everest documentary. Its planned 1998 large-format film would offer audiences a virtual Everest through wraparound screens and state-of-the-art sound. Beside that technologically produced spectacle, the camp’s “circus” points to a more immediate tension: Everest had become a destination for growing numbers of paying and working participants, even as climbers questioned whether everyone drawn there could meet its dangers.