Makalu, at 8,463 meters, serves as both a proving ground and a point of connection in the book. The mountain’s first commercial expedition, led by Thor Kieser, produced a limited summit success but established consequential ties among Anatoli Boukreev, Neal Beidleman, and Martin Adams. Their experiences there would inform later decisions about joining an Everest expedition, while Makalu’s high-altitude demands offered no guarantee of readiness for Everest itself.

The 1994 Expedition

In 1994, Anatoli Boukreev joined the first commercial expedition to Makalu, led by his friend Thor Kieser of Colorado. The results were modest: only three climbers reached the summit, including Boukreev and Neal Beidleman. The attempt nevertheless became an important shared reference point for the climbers. Boukreev had assisted Beidleman, who was making his first attempt on an 8,000-meter peak, and came away impressed by his determination and extraordinary endurance as an ultramarathon runner. He also recognized a distinction that would matter later: endurance in long-distance running did not substitute for high-altitude climbing experience, and Beidleman had never climbed Everest.

A Measure of Experience, Not a Guarantee

Martin Adams’s Makalu experience ended below the summit. Before joining the expedition, he had climbed classic routes in the Alps and Rockies and summited Aconcagua, Mount McKinley, and Kilimanjaro, but he had not reached the top of an 8,000-meter mountain. He had turned around at 7,000 meters on Broad Peak in 1993; on the 1994 Makalu expedition with Beidleman and Boukreev, he climbed to 7,400 meters before turning back. These successive limits make Makalu part of a record of real high-altitude exposure, but not of summit attainment.

The distinction mattered when Adams considered Everest. He wanted expert guidance for the risks involved, and learning that Boukreev had contracted with Mountain Madness helped persuade him to join. Adams paid $52,000 for his place, explaining that he valued Boukreev’s direct manner and trusted his judgment and experience. His confidence was explicitly comparative: he believed his chance of summiting would be far greater with Boukreev on the team. Makalu had not made Adams an 8,000-meter summiteer; it had given him a basis for judging the guide he chose to trust.

Connections That Carried to Everest

For Boukreev, Makalu linked a successful climbing partnership to a new professional decision. When Scott Fischer invited him to lead on Everest, Boukreev was weighing an earlier tentative offer from Henry Todd. His connection with Beidleman, formed on Makalu, was one reason the Mountain Madness invitation appealed: Beidleman was a friend, and Boukreev respected the resolve he had shown on the expedition. Fischer’s offer also held promise of further climbs after Everest, but Makalu had already shown Boukreev both Beidleman’s strengths and the limits of his experience as a high-altitude guide.

That mixture of promise and qualification followed the climbers onto Everest. Beidleman had recruited Adams, who signed on partly because Boukreev would be guiding; yet the expedition would be organized around people whose prior experience varied widely. Makalu thus functions less as a simple credential than as a shared history whose meaning differs by climber: for Boukreev, a successful ascent and professional connection; for Beidleman, a first 8,000-meter summit and evidence of endurance; for Adams, a high-altitude retreat that helped shape his choice of guide.

Commercial Climbing and Its Infrastructure

The Makalu expedition also belongs to the book’s account of commercial mountaineering, in which ambition depends on arrangements that precede the climb. Mountain Madness sought clients at fees of $65,000, while Adams negotiated a $52,000 price for his Everest slot. At the broader level of expedition commerce, money, equipment supply, and contracts were part of the machinery of access to high mountains, not details separate from climbing. The negotiations could be fiercely competitive: a later oxygen purchase by Mountain Madness from Henry Todd was described as a contest in which the invoice ultimately settled the matter.

The material systems that supported Everest sharpen the contrast with the shared climbing achievement at Makalu. At Base Camp, Martin Adams criticized the old ten-channel radios Fischer had brought, arguing that reliable communication equipment was essential and that the models were a major misstep. On summit day, Mountain Madness had sixty-two oxygen canisters at Camp IV, but only thirty-eight Poisk canisters went up the mountain with the climbers; the remaining fifteen full Poisk canisters and what was left of the heavier Zvesda supply stayed at camp. Fixed ropes were another point of failure: climbers from the Fischer and Hall teams expected their Sherpas to have gone ahead, but no Sherpas had left early to install them. Makalu’s place in the narrative therefore extends beyond a mountain climbed: its expedition history opens onto the human and logistical arrangements on which commercial high-altitude climbing depended.

Labor and the Route to the Summit

The book situates expedition logistics within an unequal labor system. Sherpas hired for Everest could earn between $2.50 and $50 a day while establishing camps, carrying loads, and serving climbers. By 1996, more than four hundred people would come up the trail to Base Camp, a dramatic increase from the small spring gatherings of the early 1980s. The growing expeditions relied on local labor to make the route usable, even as organizers and foreign teams competed over the proceeds associated with fixing it.

In a later Everest account, the narrator describes seventeen teams at Base Camp and a dispute over who would fix the Icefall. Henry Todd and Mal Duff secured the work, while Sherpas from their expeditions installed the route used by the climbers. The narrator argues that Nepali teams should eventually control and contract out the full fixed route, rather than leaving its benefits with expedition leaders who did not contribute the labor. At the same time, he cautions against treating a short-staffed Sherpa team as a simple failure of effort: developing a strong, coordinated team takes years of repeated ascents and consistent financial support. This perspective places Makalu’s commercial expedition within a larger account of how climbing success is produced—not by summit ability alone, but also by workers, infrastructure, and the distribution of resources and decision-making power.