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As if summiting Mount Everest didn't already sound like a positively dreadful way to spend a couple of months (and $60,000), journalist Michael Kodas' new book, "High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed" (Hyperion, $24.95), scrubs the final patina of charm off the trek. Hypoxia, hypothermia, frostbite, overflowing camp latrines, snow blindness, migraines and the constant threat of death by freezing, falling or being pulverized by ice is enough to keep sane people at home. Now add to that list the litany of human pitfalls Kodas describes: megalomaniacal guides, bootlegged bottled oxygen that fails at fatal altitudes, equipment theft that is anything but petty at 29,000 feet.

A Hartford Courant reporter and photographer since 1987, Kodas braids his reportage around two separate treks during the 2004 climbing season. The first is a Connecticut expedition he joined and covered for the Courant; it imploded over issues of safety, money, power and teammates, who Kodas writes "behaved more like mobsters than mountaineers."

While that trek devolved into fiasco, another, on the other side of the mountain, bore tragedy: A 69-year-old doctor named Nils Antezana followed a boastful, inexperienced, glory-drunk guide named Gustavo Lisi to the summit. When Antezana struggled on their descent, Lisi and his Sherpas allegedly left him tucked in a cave, essentially dooming him to freeze to death. According to Kodas' reporting, Lisi announced his summiting on his personal Web site, before notifying anyone of Antezana's fate.

Grim as that was, it's hard to define that episode as isolated; but Kodas maintains Everest brings out the best as well as the worst in those who scale it each spring. ESPNOutdoors.com caught Kodas on his cell phone in Boulder, Colo., between skiing and book-tour engagements, to discuss the lows of the world's highest point.

When you set out on the work that became the book, which of the shenanigans going on around Everest surprised you most?

Anybody that's followed it or who's into mountaineering knows that there's problems on Everest. I was really shocked by the extent. For anybody, particularly who goes to the north side of Everest, there's this eye-opening moment when you arrive at base camp for the first time. First, you arrive in trucks, rather than walking there, and that has allowed a thing that really looks like a mining town to build up. The first thing you encounter are these 60, 70 — the last time I was there, I counted 84 — Chinese and Tibetan tents set up. They're all there to market something to climbers, be it food, or boots or bunks.

Then if you hang out there long enough — and it doesn't even take that long now — you end up getting propositioned by a prostitute or a pimp. Right then I realized this is unlike any mountaineering camp I've ever seen: These are activities I never would have dreamed were going on in what was supposed to be a remote mountaineering camp. The amount of commerce going on, the amount of money changing hands, and the amount of material being sold, it was nothing I'd seen in a wilderness setting before.

It seems like a simple and old formula: You've got people, money and time, all in the same place. What ends up emerging is something that you compare several times to the Wild West.

You've got a situation where people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in an absolutely lawless environment. And it draws the cast of characters and the range of behaviors you would imagine.

Is there a solution to that? Has there been any push for regulation, or any kind of civil structure to that?

There's a little bit. What's occurring this year is, on the Chinese side, the Chinese government has instituted a couple of changes. One is that they're not allowing so many different nationalities on each permit, which deals with these trekking companies that offer these discount trips to Everest. You just sign up — you can be one person or you can be 10 people — and they just put you on a permit wherever you fit in. So they would end up with these expeditions with five and six different nationalities on them, they all didn't speak the same language or have the same goals, and that kind of expedition is ripe for conflict.

That should improve things. The other thing they did is to require people to apply for their permits early. Actually, all the permit applications were supposed to be in a few weeks ago. In the past, you could show up on the day you wanted to start climbing and if you had the cash in-hand they'd give you a permit or put you on a team. I think they think that's going to clean things up. The concern with that is they're only doing that because of the [Olympic] torch climb this year. They want to impose a certain amount of order for their own endeavor and put a bright face on the mountain, and that it's just going to go back to the old style of business after this.

I think, personally, from the all various guides and climbers that I spoke to about it, I think it's unrealistic to see much regulation out of either the governments of China or Nepal. We've certainly seen how much China is willing to regulate products they sell the West, whether that be a climb on Everest or toothpaste and mouthwash or pet food. They are loath to impose any kind of standards that might restrict their own economic development. And Nepal is the poorest country in South Asia. It's barely holding itself together and fending off civil war, so it really doesn't have the resources to try to come up with some mechanism to police Western mountaineers who want to misbehave in the Himlayas.

The biggest thing in the end for both countries is they want the dollars that they get from the tourists that come to the mountains. Especially in Nepal, mountaineering in particular is such an important part of their economic situation that I don't think they're going to turn away money to make the mountain safer.

It's funny you mention the limited number of nationalities on one permit, because an expedition like your first one would have had as much chaos with that regulation. Was that turmoil a factor of the personalities involved, or was it something about the mountain and the glamour and the attention that Everest brings?

I think the latter is to some degree true. There are going to be personality issues; expeditions do blow up, not just on Everest. It's a stressful situation, and you're with people for weeks and months on end, and you're in a remote place. Hey, not everybody's going to get along in that situation, and personality differences can really get magnified.

But there's also — and this is the case with several climbers on the mountain — that there are people that go to Everest, and to other mountains but particularly to Everest, that are less interested in the athletic endeavor than they are in being in a place where brute force and ruthlessness trumps everything else, and there's no social mooring or societal mechanisms like police or military to reign in somebody who really wants to go and make the rules by means of personal force. I think some people are drawn to that.

And I don't think they're all necessarily bad guys on Everest. Last night, one of the climbers who's friends with him mentioned Russell Brice as a complicated character in my book. Henry Todd is another classic example: Here's a guy who runs a number of business endeavors on Everest that would be absolutely actionable elsewhere in the world. But he can go and do this on Everest, in this kind of mining town atmosphere, and he can run his business endeavors in the way he sees fit.

I do think it draws that kind of person, and it also draws ... they talk about summit fever, but there's also this lust for glory that comes with climbing Everest. Part of that is, and I don't really mention it this way in the book, though I kept meaning to, but part of it is we have turned Mount Everest into this celebrity.

And people want to be associated with a celebrity mountain. It's the only mountain that people around the world know: If you mention at a cocktail party pretty much on any continent that you're a climber, the only mountain that they're going to ask you, is if you've climbed Everest. It has turned into the Paris Hilton of the adventure sport world. Everybody wants to be somehow associated with this party.

It occurred to me that there are almost no reasons to climb Everest, primarily among the people portrayed in the book, that aren't at some level selfish. That applies even to the people who claim to be there for environmental reasons, who are basically getting a first-class trip, as you put it, to the roof of the world. Whereas they could easily invest in much easier ways to retrieve, say, old oxygen bottles, they'd rather pay for themselves to do it themselves.

I think that's quite true. This is funny, because there's a guide in the book a few times, Wally Berg, who I talked to at length about this. He organizes a number of charity climbs, and has a whole branch of his guiding business that organizes charity climbs. But he's very open when he talks about it. He said, "I kind of wish these people would just go climbing for the sake of climbing, and admit that it's inherently a selfish endeavor."

You're looking for personal fulfillment. People are looking for ways to put a more humanitarian or generous mask on what by definition is a selfish sport. Precisely with the charity climbs, there's simply, in my mind, there's no charity that's being done on Everest where you couldn't be doing better for the charity if you were just raising the money and giving it to them. The number of people who have attempted to climb Everest for all these various diseases, to raise awareness, as if going up to a place where virtually nobody else goes and waving a banner is somehow raising awareness for the disease ... or raising 60 or 70 thousand dollars and using that to climb Mount Everest — and maybe giving what's left over to the charity is as useful as raising that money and just giving it away to whatever, to cancer research or the Arthritis Foundation — or what have you.

Similarly you describe an oddball parade of people who want to be the first "blank" to do it: the first Norwegian women, the first Polish person, the second Mexican without bottled oxygen. Somebody can say, "I'm doing this for my countrymen." Well, sort of. In a way. Everybody's rooting for you, but that's about elevating yourself, when you get down to it.

It absolutely is. The whole first thing is really strange to me because the first was [Sir Edmund] Hillary, and until someone manages to prove that [George] Mallory got there before him, which I think is highly unlikely: The rest of this is really kind of vanity. Trying to find a way to make yourself stand out from the thousands of people who are doing this.

What struck me was the sheer increase in numbers. It seemed like the disaster in 1996 might calm people a bit, but there was a doubling and tripling almost from year to year in people going up.

It actually has been an increase every year since '96, so the idea that that would be a cautionary tale, or that it would make people who are not experienced or particularly skilled mountaineers think twice about Everest, the opposite proved to be true: They have gotten more less-experienced climbers every year.

You've seen a well over fivefold increase in traffic. We had just under a hundred the year of the '96 disaster, and I would guess, it's just a bet, but I bet that they hit 600 this year. So you're looking at a sixfold increase in traffic in just 12 years. I knew that there were more people going, but I never dreamed the increase in traffic would be that great and that consistent.

Isn't there then a paradox? You have a mountain that's viewed, perhaps by people not fully in the know, as the gold standard of mountains. And yet each year, more and more people diminish that by putting themselves at risk and dying in all sorts of horrible ways. And with the aid of money and oxygen, they turning Everest into something attainable by people who have no business being there.

I think that's absolutely true. The majority of people who climb Everest now are not seasoned mountaineers. Or, really, by most mountaineers' measure, and I'm not meaning this to be an insult, they're not really mountaineers at all. If you were to take the average person that's on Everest right now and ask them, "What's your next Himalayan climb?" or "What's the next big peak you're going after?", unless they've got plans to do the Seven Summits, which are the highest peaks on all seven continents, they don't have a hit list or a plan. It's very depressing. And the people it's most depressing to are climbers.