Kenton Cool: the risks and rewards of a career in the ‘death zone’

In the spring of 2021, Kenton Cool found himself in a vast nightclub in Kathmandu called Lord of the Drinks. It was well past midnight. The British mountain guide and father of two had come to Nepal to take an Iranian-born businessman to the top of Mount Everest — a one-to-one service for which he charges at least £250,000.

Cool’s reputation and bouncy charm precede him in the mountaineering world. A few weeks later, he would reach the summit of Everest for the 15th time. He made it 16 summits in May of this year — a record for a non-Sherpa. But in Lord of the Drinks, nobody cared. All eyes were on another British climber.

“So there’s, like, 3,000 people in this club,” Cool, who is 49, tells me with the easy patter of a man who has spent a lot of time swapping stories in tents. “We don’t queue up, we’ve got our own little booth and the free drinks are coming. Then this emcee stops the music and says, ‘Nimsdai’s in the house!’ and 3,000 people are chanting his name.”

Nimsdai is Nirmal Purja, a Nepalese-born British Army Gurkha turned mountaineer who also goes by Nims. Weeks earlier, he had led an all-Nepali group to the summit of K2 in Pakistan — the first winter ascent of the world’s second-highest mountain. He had already made history in 2019, when he climbed all 14 8,000-metre peaks in a record six months and six days.

Cool, who first climbed Everest in 2004, leans forwards as he remembers that night. We are sitting outside his modern house in rural Gloucestershire, where he lives with his wife Jazz and their two children, Saffron, 12, and Willoughby, nine. “Now, no climber has ever had that effect,” he says, splaying out his hands. “Ever!”

Kenton Cool at the FT Weekend Festival

Kenton Cool will be speaking at this year’s FT Weekend Festival, in conversation with Tom Robbins, the FT’s travel editor. For details about the event, at Kenwood House in London and online, on Saturday, September 3, see ukftweekendfestival.live.ft.com

Purja, who is 39, has lifted the profile of a niche pursuit to new heights. And not just in Nepal. His achievements have been front-page news around the world, and earned him a Netflix movie and a book deal. He has 2mn followers on Instagram — more than 30 times that of Cool, who is no slouch on social media. Only the American rock climber Alex Honnold stands above Purja on the peak of outdoors influence.

Yet for all that Cool respects Purja, and welcomes the overdue recognition of Nepali mountaineers, he says the “Nims effect” is triggering an inner turmoil. More than at any other time in a 20-year career, he’s questioning the sustainability of his passion and profession. “It’s my business to take people to these summits, yet there is a conflict within me that’s really not sitting too well right now,” he says.

Cool is concerned about what may go down as a pivotal season in the commercialisation of mountaineering. It first gripped Everest in the 1990s, with big groups of mixed abilities supported by armies of Sherpas, fixed ropes and bottled oxygen. Last year, Nepal issued a record 408 Everest permits to foreigners after a 2020 pandemic hiatus. Numbers were almost as high this year; base camp is now a mile long.

But Cool is most troubled by events on other mountains, where Purja’s feats have prompted a rush of 8,000-metre peak-bagging. Several climbers are creating challenges of their own. Norwegian climber Kristin Harila is well on her way to becoming the first woman to summit all 14 8,000m peaks in a year (and with only three mountains remaining might beat Purja’s own speed record). Adriana Brownlee, a 21-year-old British woman, is on course to become the youngest person to climb the 14 highest peaks. Antonios Sykaris, 59, a Greek businessman, was aiming to be the oldest person to climb the 14. “I know the dangers but this is my dream,” he told me last year. Months later he died on Dhaulagiri, his sixth peak.

In an industry until recently dominated by western companies, Nepali guiding firms are stepping up to meet this surging demand, taking the Everest business model elsewhere. They often charge less; prices now start at $40,000 for Everest. Thanks in part to the success of #winterK2 (expeditions are now hashtags), the “savage mountain” is chief among the new targets.

Days before I meet Cool, Purja led 33 clients up K2 with his own guiding company. About 200 people reached the summit last month (including Brownlee) — triple the previous record. Video emerged on Instagram of a slow-moving queue on the Bottleneck, a notorious pitch under crumbling, car-sized blocks of ice. Such conga lines had previously been confined to Everest.

Good weather and fortune blessed K2 this summer, but Cool fears a repeat of the 1996 Everest disaster, when a storm killed eight climbers. “We have much better equipment and forecasting now, and the Sherpa teams are much more experienced,” he says. “But the average client isn’t. So what happens if we get split up? Will people have that instinct to say, ‘I’ve got my ice axe, I’ve got my crampons on — I know what I’m doing’, or are they going to sit down in the snow and wait to die?”

Cool, who has also guided on K2, has an enviable record of safety and success, failing to summit Everest just once when his client had a bad feeling. When I spoke to him in 2012, after his 10th summit success during a deadly season that was partly blamed on overcrowding, he wrongly predicted that guiding companies would stop taking large groups. Cash-strapped Nepal was never going to limit the flow of tourist dollars (permits are now $11,000 each). 

By personally vetting his solo clients, Cool can move fast. He is also very cautious. Yet in a world where myths are made instantly, triumph and tragedy are equally powerful marketing tools. In the days after Purja’s winter K2 success, five men died trying to reach the same summit. “And whenever there’s a disaster on these mountains, there’s an uptick in people wanting to climb them the next year,” Cool says.

The guide also earns decent money on the corporate lecture circuit and in sponsorship. His kitchen is so well appointed that it has served as a set for the TV cook Mary Berry. “Gone running, get own breakfast, please don’t make a mess,” reads a note left out on the counter (a slab of grey marble that could sink a warship), a message from Cool to his kids, who are pinballing around the house on their school holidays.

Will people have that instinct to say, ‘I’ve got my ice axe, I’ve got my crampons on — I know what I’m doing’, or are they going to sit down in the snow and wait to die?

Cool had a more modest childhood in suburban west London. His dad, whose half-German father anglicised the surname Kühle during the war, was a scoutmaster and photographer. Cool started rock climbing seriously while studying geology at Leeds University. Not long after graduation, a fall in Wales shattered both Cool’s heels — and his dreams when doctors said he’d never walk unaided. He still hobbles and tolerates pain in his feet, which are bound with metal.

Cool spent his late 20s as a climbing bum in Sheffield, heading to the Peak District at weekends. He worked as a rope access technician, fixing roofs and spending months on top of the Millennium Dome in London (now the O2). He soon earned a reputation among British climbers. He started training to become a guide in 2001 and found work with Jagged Globe, a British company offering climbing, trekking and ski trips.

His greatest achievement came early, in 2003. His nose put out of joint when he wasn’t invited to join a British expedition to mark the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, he and two friends stole their thunder with a first ascent of the forbidding south-west ridge of Annapurna III (7,555 metres). It earned them a nomination for the Piolet d’Or — the biggest prize in the sport — and Cool an invitation to guide on Everest the next season. At the summit, he remembers feeling immediately intoxicated by Everest’s scale and remoteness. “It is just colossally big,” he says.

Cool’s clients have included the polar explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the TV presenter Ben Fogle and, most recently, Rebecca Louise, a British-born fitness entrepreneur. He feels bad about a rare error that affected Louise on summit day. Cool had forgotten to warn her about Don Cash, an American who died on his way down in 2019. “He’s still attached to the rope, sitting on this ledge looking out over the lower Khumbu icefall with his goggles on,” Cool says. “You virtually have to climb over him, and it totally spooked Rebecca on her summit day.”

About 130 people have died on the mountain in the 18 years that Cool has worked there. “I pulled a Sherpa off the fixed lines once and half his head fell off,” he goes on, without a hint of glibness. He’s not unshakeable; in 2013, he was a wreck after spending hours giving CPR to an unconscious and abandoned Taiwanese man. He died in Cool’s arms.

Why are sane people with loving families prepared to operate in such a deadly environment? Cool issues a perennial response to a perennial question: “I could get a job in London and get run over by a bus.” I say I’ve always had a job in London and don’t know anyone personally who has died under a bus. How many people does he know who have died on mountains? “Well, yes . . . I haven’t counted for a while, but it’s 40-plus friends, you’ve slightly blown the analogy there.”

He says of the trauma that is part of the job: “I’m good at putting it in the wardrobe, shutting the doors and thinking, OK, I’ll deal with that in, like, 10 years. But there are moments when I think, how is this going to play out at home? What’s it going to be like when Jazz tells the children daddy’s not coming back? Visualising that keeps me very focused.”

All the while, inner conflicts niggle like blisters. There’s also the environmental impact of flying around the world to climb up glaciers that are vanishing in some places. Cool recently became vegan but has watched wealthy clients eat New Zealand lamb and Scottish smoked salmon in increasingly well-appointed mess tents. He drives a three-litre diesel Land Rover.

All the oxygen and fixed ropes in the world will never take away the fact that you are so goddamn high

“There’s no easy answer,” Cool says, slightly stumped again. He is wise to the economic value of tourism to Nepal, not least the Sherpas whom he adores. He also loves seeing the wonder in his clients on summit day. “All the oxygen and fixed ropes in the world will never take away the fact that you are so goddamn high,” he says. “It’s still an amazing achievement.”

Ultimately, whatever the stories we tell, mountaineering is an inherently selfish pursuit. And as Cool approaches 50, he will keep doing it because he has school fees to pay, because he’s good at it — and because he can. But really he just loves it. “I absolutely adore Everest!” he says. “The day that I don’t go there, I will miss it like I probably would one of my own children.”

Willoughby shouts down from a distant loft space. He wants to know which tent to pull out for a camping trip Cool and the kids are planning tonight in a nearby field. Cool, who spends a third of the year travelling, is relishing the prospect of a night under canvas, away from the threats of frostbite, plummeting ice — and the quandaries that shadow him on the mountains he loves.

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