The offer
It costs a hundred thousand dollars a month.
$100,000
A month. By card. For as long as it takes.
Everyone else in this market writes enquire for prices, which means they want to see your face before they pick a number. There is the number. It does not move for who you are, and it did not go up because of the car you arrived in.
It is a rate, not a total. There is no invoice at the start with a figure at the bottom of it, and there is no second invoice for the climbing. One number, charged on the same date every month, for as long as this takes — which is the honest length of it, because nobody knows yet how long you take.
What is known is the shape. Six seasons. Twelve real places in the only order that works, from a floor in the Kathmandu Valley at 1,400 m to the top of Everest at 8,849 m. Six lines below say what each month is doing. Then we do the multiplication you were going to do anyway.
- Six seasonsTwelve steps, in order, until you summit. The plan, not a term.
- 1,400 → 8,849 mEach step higher than the one before it.
- One clientAt a time. The whole business. Not per guide, not per season.
Where each month goes
Six lines, and the same six every month. The fifth is the one most people read twice. The sixth is the one nobody is allowed to take out.
01
Your partner, 1:1, all twelve steps
$60,000
a month · 60% of it
One person. One client at a time. The whole way up.
Sixty cents of every dollar buys one person's calendar for as long as this takes. Not a place on a rope with seven other people on it. Not a group moving at the speed of whoever is slowest, who on a commercial expedition is a stranger who was optimistic on his form.
There is a photograph halfway down the front page with a line of other climbers strung out along the ridge behind one man. Being out of that line is the single most expensive thing on this page, and it is the one you would miss first.
It is the same person for all twelve steps, and for the months between them when there is no mountain in it at all. That matters at step nine, when the man telling you the day is finished is the man who watched you fail to sit still for twelve days at 1,400 m. He is not reading your file. He was there for it.
This is also the answer to what the partner page is selling, which is this. One engagement, one number, one client at a time. There is no version where you buy the person and the climbing separately, and there is no version where you buy the climbing and get somebody else.
02
Conditioning & altitude programme
$8,000
a month · 8% of it
A coach who comes to you, between steps, wherever you happen to be.
You are on a mountain for a few weeks a year. Everything that decides how those weeks go happens in the other eleven months, in hotel gyms, at six in the morning, in cities you are working in, with a coach who flew to you because you were never going to fly to him.
This is the least interesting line on the page and it governs the other five. The gap between step seven and step eight is not made up in the three weeks before step eight. It is also the clearest reason the price is monthly: most of these months have no mountain in them and all of them have this in them.
The part we will not lie about
A hypoxic tent is a head start, not a substitute. Your body still has to do the weeks. That is the entire premise of this programme, and we are not going to sell you a machine that gets around it.
03
Medical
$9,000
a month · 9% of it
A doctor on the hill. A consultant on the phone. Blood work between steps. None of them signed yet.
This line is an expedition doctor on every step. Not on standby in Kathmandu — on the mountain, in the same weather you are in, sleeping at the same altitude. That is what the money is for; the paragraph below says where it has got to.
An addiction-medicine consultant reachable every month this runs, including the months you are at home. That is where this gets decided, and everybody in your life so far has been paid to be optimistic about it.
Blood work between steps, and continuous monitoring above 6,000 m. Not so you have a dashboard to look at. Because the number that says you are not acclimatising arrives days before the feeling does.
The part we will not lie about
The expedition doctor and the addiction-medicine consultant are not yet signed. No name appears here because none has been handed to us in writing, and a doctor invented for a web page is the one thing on it that can never be taken back. Understand what a doctor can do at 8,000 m, which is less than a doctor can do in a corridor at sea level. Most of what keeps people alive up there is being turned around early by somebody willing to be unpopular.
04
Logistics & lodging
$15,000
a month · 15% of it
Private transfers, five-star Kathmandu, a base-camp suite with a door that locks.
Private helicopter transfers wherever a helicopter can fly. Five-star in Kathmandu between steps. At base camp, a tent with a floor, a bed, heat and a door that locks — which sounds like a comfort and is actually a lock, on a door, on the one place nobody can follow you into.
A chef who knows what you can and cannot have. So does everybody else who hands you a cup. Nobody puts a drink in your hand on this programme. Not at the hotel, not in the lounge, not at the end when everyone is pleased with you.
The part we will not lie about
Weather outranks this entire line. A helicopter does not fly into the Khumbu because you are due somewhere on Thursday, and no part of $15,000 a month changes that.
05
Discretion
$4,000
a month · 4% of it
What $4,000 a month of silence buys
Everybody who gets near you has signed something first.
Every guide, porter, cook, driver, pilot and doctor who comes within reach of you signs a non-disclosure agreement before anybody tells them who the client is.
Phone custody at the trailhead, and it binds the whole team, not only you. A rule that applies to one person is not a rule, it is a courtesy, and courtesies leak. Devices come back at the end of each step.
- No press. Nobody is briefed, nobody is invited, nobody gets a call the day you summit.
- No posts. Not a guide, not a porter, not the hotel, not the helicopter company, not us.
- No geotags. Not on the day. Not eight months later with the location quietly left on.
- Every month of it, and then it is yours. The whole thing stays shut until you say otherwise in writing, and it does not open on the last invoice either. If you decide at step nine that you want it told, it is your story. We are simply never the ones who tell it first.
The part we will not lie about
Here is the limit, and you should hear it from us before you hear it from somebody else. Permits in Nepal are government paperwork with your legal name on them, and we cannot make that untrue. Base camp in April is several hundred people who do not work for us and have signed nothing. We can bind everybody we hire, and we can plan the timing and the route around everybody we cannot. Anyone who promises you total invisibility on the most watched mountain on earth is lying, and it is worth asking what else they are prepared to say.
06
Sherpa welfare & community fund
$4,000
a month · 4% of it
Included · non-negotiable
Included. Non-negotiable. Not an upsell, not a round-up, not a logo in the footer.
This is in the price, in every month of it. There is no version of the invoice without it, no tick box at the end, no partnership we are going to ask you to be photographed at. Ask for the $96,000 edition and the answer is no. That is the only part of this negotiation that was over before you called.
The most dangerous job on that mountain has never been the client's. Somebody crosses the icefall more times in one season than you will cross it in two years, carrying what you are not carrying. This line is for those people and for the villages the whole programme runs through.
The part we will not lie about
What we will not do is print a figure about how many people this helps. We do not have one. How the fund is split each season is being worked out with the people it is meant for and it is not settled yet. When it is, it goes on this page. We are not inventing a pie chart so the page looks finished.
The six, added up
$60,000 + $8,000 + $9,000 + $15,000 + $4,000 + $4,000=$100,000a month
That sum is checked by the code that draws this table, every time this page renders. If those six numbers ever stopped making $100,000, you would get an error instead of a price list. The rate is not typed here either — it is read from the same file the card is charged from, so this page and the partner page cannot quietly come to disagree about what you are paying.
The arithmetic
Twenty-four months is how the plan is priced. It is not a schedule.
You were going to do this multiplication in your head on the way to the next page. Here it is done in public, with the part nobody else prints attached to it.
The rate, times the plan
$100,000 a month×24 months=$2,400,000
The months are a unit of price, not a calendar: they say how the twelve steps are weighted against each other, not when anything happens. Silence in the first season, Everest in the sixth, and a great many months in between with no mountain in them at all — which is where most of this is decided and all of it is paid for.
Now what that figure is not. It is not a total you agree to. It is not a number anybody signs. It is not a forecast of the calendar. It is one multiplication over twenty-four priced months, and the engagement runs until you summit. If a season passes without a weather window — and seasons do — there are more months than the sum counts, and every one of them is the rate again.
The part we will not lie about
Not written down yet: whether there is a minimum number of months, what stopping looks like, and what is owed for a season already committed to at the point you stop. None of it exists on paper, and none of it is going to be invented on a web page because the page would read better finished. Ask for it on the call. Then read what arrives, rather than what was said.
The gate
Having the money is the least interesting thing about you.
It is also not enough. One person at a time does this, and he is not chosen by who transferred first. Here is every way to fail before you have started.
- One client at a time, until the summit.
- Not one a season. Not one per guide, because there is no second guide. One, for the whole business, and the engagement runs until that client summits — so the calendar is spoken for a long way ahead of you picking up the phone, and if the answer is a year from now then that is the answer. Nobody here finds a slot because you asked a second time, or because of who asked for you.
- Medically cleared, by a doctor who examined you.
- Not the one who signs what you put in front of him. He will be asked to put in writing that you can be taken above 8,000 m. If he will not write it, we do not take you — and you might want to think about why you have been keeping him.
- Past supervised detox. Past it.
- Not starting it. Not most of the way through it. Not doing it quietly on the flight over. This programme is not a detox and does not stand in for one. Coming off alcohol or benzodiazepines without medical supervision can kill you a long time before altitude gets its turn.
- Willing to be told no.
- By somebody earning less in a season than you spend on dinner. He will stop you at one in the afternoon on a day you feel superb, he will be right, and you do not get a vote. If your first thought just now was how you would get around him, you have your answer and it did not cost you anything.
None of that is a technique. One at a time is simply what one person's entire attention divides into — there is no second unit and nobody else on the call sheet. But notice which way round it is: this is the first thing you have been offered in a decade where the money is the easy part and somebody else decides. That is either the most annoying sentence on this website or the only interesting one, and which it is tells you whether to call.
The other page
The partner page is this page.
There is a page on this site called the partner, and it costs $100,000 a month. So does this. They are not two products, they are not two tiers, and there is no version of any of it where you buy one of them.
This used to be a second door at a fifth of the type size, for the reader who had just decided the big number was not him. That door is shut. There is one engagement now, one client at a time, one rate, and the twelve steps are what that engagement spends its time doing.
- This page is the plan. Twelve places, six seasons, and where each month's money goes.
- That page is the person. Who is on the phone, who flies to you, who tells you at one in the afternoon that the day is finished.
- Same rate, same one client at a time. One engagement, described from opposite ends.
So if you came here to work out which of the two is the expensive option: neither. There is one door and you are standing in it.
- This page
- The plan · $100,000 a month · twelve steps, six seasons, in order
- The partner
- The person · $100,000 a month · one client at a time, and until the summit it is you
Two things about that page are not settled, and it says so there as well: who you get, and what happens the week after you start. When they are settled they will be printed. Until then they are not printed anywhere, including in a brochure.
The questions you were going to ask on the call
Answered here so the call can be about something else. Where the true answer is that we have not decided yet, it says that instead.
Is that a rate or a total?
A rate. $100,000 a month, charged monthly, by card, for as long as this takes. There is no invoice at the beginning with a number at the bottom of it, and there is no second invoice for the climbing.
The plan is six seasons and twelve steps, in the order they are in, because that order is the medicine. We have priced it as twenty-four months of the rate, which is $2,400,000. Those months are a unit of price, not a calendar: they say how the twelve steps are weighted against each other, and nothing about when any of them happens or how long the whole thing takes. You can do that multiplication without us — so we have done it on this page rather than leave it looking like something we were hoping you would not do.
What that figure is not: a total you agree to, a number anybody signs, or a forecast of the calendar. It is the rate times twenty-four priced months and nothing more. The engagement runs until you summit, and every month it runs is the rate again — more months than the sum counts, if a season passes without a window.
Whether there is a minimum number of months, what stopping looks like, and what is owed for a season already committed to — none of that is written down yet. It is a contract conversation with the operator, in writing, and if nobody can send you that paper when you ask for it, that is the answer to a different and more useful question.
Can I actually do this?
We do not know. Neither do you. Anybody willing to tell you at this stage is selling.
Everest is mostly not a technical climb. It is a tolerance problem, and tolerance is built in the order these twelve are in. That is why step one is twelve days of sitting on a floor and step two is a walk. If your body does not do what this needs, we find that out at 4,130 m in a tea house, over a fortnight, for the price of a fortnight. Finding out late is the expensive version, and the ladder exists to stop it.
We are not going to quote you a success rate. We would be making it up, and it would be the most expensive sentence on this website.
What if I relapse at 7,000 m?
Then the season is over and you come down. That is not a punishment and it is not a negotiation. It is the only safe answer there is.
Withdrawal and hypoxia together, days from a hospital, in weather that decides when anybody moves, is a serious situation for you and for everybody who would have to carry you out of it. Your guide can end a step at any moment without asking anyone, including you. The addiction-medicine consultant is reachable every month this runs, at home as well as on the hill, and the sooner you make that call the more there is to be done.
What it costs you, and whether the season restarts, is not a clause we have written. We are not going to invent one for a web page. It is a conversation with the operator and the doctor and it will be in writing before you agree to anything.
Who will know?
Everybody we hire signs before they meet you. No press, no posts, no geotags, for every month of this and after it, unless you say otherwise. That is what the discretion line above pays for, and it is the line most people read twice.
What it does not buy: your legal name off a government permit, and silence from several hundred people at base camp in April who have never worked for us. We plan the timing and the route around them. We cannot make them sign anything.
So the honest answer is: everybody we pay, nobody else by our doing, and no guarantee about the rest of the mountain. If somebody offers you that guarantee, ask yourself what else they will say.
What if I quit at step four?
Then you quit at step four. Nobody stops you, nobody talks you out of it in the moment, and nobody tells you that you have wasted his time.
People leave. Mostly they leave at step one, mostly on the third morning, and mostly because twelve days of silence is the first thing in years that could not be delegated.
Whether you can pick it up again in a later season is a conversation, not a policy. We do not have a policy. The money question is the next one down, and the answer there is the same: not written yet.
Four steps of this is four more than the last ten years have asked of you. That is not a consolation prize and we are not going to pretend it is one.
How does it stop, and is any of it refundable?
We do not have terms to give you and we are not going to invent some so this page reads tidier. Not a minimum term, not a notice period, not a refund clause. None of it exists in writing yet, and a monthly price makes it look like it must, which is exactly why this answer is here.
What we can tell you honestly is the shape of the problem. A month that has been charged has been charged. The harder half is everything committed ahead of it — permits bought, a season booked, one person's calendar held for you, when nobody else can have it. How much of that is live at any moment, and what happens to it, is a contract conversation with the operator.
Ask for that paper on the call. If somebody tells you the terms are simple, ask them to send them to you, and read what arrives rather than what was said.
What if weather kills a season?
It happens, and no part of $100,000 a month changes it. A season can pass without a window. You can be turned around a few hundred metres under a summit by a forecast, and that is the system working, not failing.
Twelve steps in six seasons is a shape with slack built into it. A lost season means you go again, and the acclimatisation you earned is not refunded by the weather either — you keep the fitness and you lose the calendar.
Here is the one place monthly billing is straightforwardly honest rather than awkward: a season that takes longer costs the months it takes. Nobody has to renegotiate a total, and nobody is quietly absorbing anything. What a lost season does to the rest of the plan is still the unwritten conversation in the two answers above.
One call. That is what this page is for.
No brochure. No deck with a mountain on the front. No starter package. An hour on the phone, most of which is spent working out whether the answer is no.
If the gate above already ruled you out, the call will rule you out too. Nobody here is going to pretend otherwise for an hour of your time. And if you would rather talk to somebody before $100,000 moves anywhere, that is the right instinct and this is the right button.