Guide Adrian Ballinger on How Expedition Travel Changed the World

It'd be easy to say that Adrian Ballinger was not supposed to be a mountain climber. He was supposed to become a doctor—he had the chops. And was on the path. But with so many moments of serendipity in the story of how he came to a high-altitude career, it begins to seem inevitable—the neighbor-climber in the Massachusetts town his family moved to from the UK who let him tag along to the crag, the Georgetown University outdoor program leader who introduced him to guiding. In the end, he became one of the world's most renowned mountaineers and his guiding company, Alpenglow Expeditions, is now celebrating 20 years of taking people to the world's highest peaks.

Starting a guiding company is no easy thing. Ballinger's years working under the tutelage of Chris Warner (the college program leader) at Earth Treks taught him how to run trips, but a lapsed acceptance letter to Georgetown School of Medicine wouldn't do much to bring in clients. So he went to a different sort of grad school and spent three and a half years getting certified by the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations.

Still, attaining the highest degree in mountain climbing didn't guarantee success. When Ballinger began to imagine Alpenglow Expeditions in 2004, permits to guide on US public lands were all owned by companies that had been around for decades. Without domestic programs to function as feeders into the big international trips, it'd be difficult to get people to sign up.

But Ballinger pushed on, convinced that he'd find a niche with an approach focusing on small teams and real skill development. He guided nearly every trip for the first five years, taking business calls from mountainsides on an $8-per-minute satellite phone. He developed Rapid Ascent, a pre-acclimatization practice that reduces the length of expeditions and improves the odds of success. In 2015, Alpenglow finally broke the permit monopoly in Tahoe and set up a local program.

From Alpenglow Expeditions' two-decade vantage point, Ballinger has a good view of how things have changed in the Himalayas, Alps, and Andes. He sees how expedition tourism has affected the world's most remote towns and how smartphones have changed mountain storytelling. It's easy to look back and long for how things used to be, but during a recent conversation with Ballinger it was clear that, while he's happy to tell stories from his many high-altitude exploits, he remains resolute in his optimism about what's ahead.

What role has documentation and photography played in Alpenglow's 20+ year history?

Storytelling, capturing expeditions, experiences and then trying to share them has always been a part of our sport, from the 1920s expeditions on Everest where local Sherpas would run out messages to be telegrammed back to the newspapers so people could follow along as close to real time as possible on these attempts. Very few people are ever going to be able to or choose to spend the amount of money and time and risk necessary to go to the tallest mountains in the world, and I think storytelling can bring some of that inspiration and lesson learning back to people who won't ever go.

When I was young, it was magazine articles six months after you came home from the expedition and maybe a slideshow tour, right? That was really what we were doing in the '90s and early 2000s. And then that's developed to social media and this much more instant form. When I ended up doing my Everest without oxygen ascent, we Snapchatted the two expeditions, Corey Richards and me, and no one knew what Snapchat was yet. I loved the pure rawness of it. We were just talking to the camera, but it actually showed people what the expedition was like, it took all the romance out of the experience and showed what it truly was.

How have sponsorships and expedition funding changed over the past decades?

There is more money now in climbing. I think it was very hard in the '90s to be a sponsored climber that could actually own a house, raise a family and go on big expeditions. That's still really hard, but there are dozens of those people, maybe hundreds that are now able to actually support a family, make a career on climbing. I mean, climbing is in the Olympics now, there's been massive mainstream films made about climbing—those things have brought in the audience, which then brings more money into it. So in some ways, it's becoming easier, but there is also so much more competition for those funds. I think it's harder to get noticed in some ways.

Another big change is back in the day, teams on mountains used to be super, super tight. When I started, they were national teams. So if you wanted to go to Mount Everest, you all had to be from the same country and your country's alpine club applied for the permit for you. If there was a sponsor it was usually one sponsor; a North Face or someone would come in with all the money or a random sponsor like a Sony would come in or even an Outside Magazine.

Now there's a lot more hustle behind it. A national team never happens, there's no national support. And then even the company support, it's very rare for one brand to say they're going to put in $400,000 for five athletes to go and do this trip. We all hustle a lot more and mix your clothing brand with your boot brand with your sunglasses brand with your whiskey brand with your cooler brand and hopefully with a tech partner and once you cobble it all together, you hopefully have enough money to make the expedition go.

How has Alpenglow's approach changed over time in regards to working in and with the local communities where you operate trips?

I've now been climbing internationally since 1993 or 1994 so 30 years in these places. Pre-internet and all that. There was very little opportunity for local climbers in a lot of these developing countries to build thriving businesses or to be noticed for their talents as climbers. From the beginning we knew the importance of real partnerships and friendships with people I climbed with in foreign countries, and tried to share as many opportunities as I could through bringing money through bringing clients through telling stories about my local partners.

Over the past 20 years, what's changed is those local partners being able to really professionalize and tell their own stories. And what that's led to is really fantastic local guide companies. It's led to the IFMGA now expanding to most of the developing countries I work in, so Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Nepal, they're all now IFMGA countries. Local guides can go through the same training at a lower cost because the input costs are less in those countries and get the exact same certification that I have or a badass Chamonix guide has, and that's opened up so many opportunities.

We've all seen the stories about how a place like Everest Base Camp has changed and grown. Have you witnessed other places change over the years?

The Khumbu Valley, the Everest Valley, is maybe the easiest place to see and talk about that. These changes are complicated, right? There are challenges and negatives to some of that growth, whether it's common sense stuff like how to have clean water, how to not cut down all the trees for firewood, how to deal with sewage and human waste so these places can stay clean and habitable. Those are all challenges that that growth has had.

I think we need to be very careful as visitors from the outside looking in. Some people are like, 'Oh, it was so much better before, we've ruined the culture.' When I talk to my friends who live in these places, they want the development and the opportunities that have come with that development. The vast majority of the Sherpa that I've been working with since the early 2000s, their kids did not go on to be yak herders or Sherpa. They went on to go to university to go to private schools in Kathmandu, and then universities outside of Nepal and have gone on to be business owners, software engineers, dentists. Those opportunities came from tourism and from climbing.

These are real challenges and they're having pretty deep effects on the culture of the place changing and making it harder to maintain the Sherpa culture that I saw 25 years ago. But if I ask the people who are having those opportunities, they feel really proud of them and blessed by them. And so I think the positives of mountain tourism for the most part have really outweighed the challenges. That doesn't mean that I don't think we need to keep a really close eye on those challenges and have those conversations, especially around environmentalism and trash and preserving these sacred places that people want to come to.

This year was Alpenglow's first season back on Everest since the pandemic. How was it to be back? Has the feeling over there changed?

I had 12 seasons on the mountain before COVID happened and shut down the north side of the mountain. I chose not to go back to the south side of the mountain because of some of the challenges. The dark side of some of the growth that we were just talking about has made the south side, I think, untenable to safely guide in a style I'm proud of. And that meant four years off because China didn't reopen for tourism for four years. It was kind of like fresh eyes going back there. I was able to see change that happened over four years in Tibet. We were able to rethink a few things in our program and make some adjustments to how we guide and all of those were real positives.

Because of how difficult it was to get permits in Tibet this year, we ended up being the only team in the middle of May on the north side of the mountain, the only people for hundreds of miles. I have seen the queues and the inexperience and the challenges that represent guiding the world's tallest mountain, and all of a sudden I had the mountain like it probably was back in the '80s when only one national team per side was allowed. It was magical. And we all summited; 23 people including our guides and clients on the summit, all on the same day, all alone. That will never happen for me again, and it never happened before. All the magic was there.

So despite how many people gripe about how things have changed, there's still great moments to be had in the present.

Even if you take Everest, I think there's 23 different climbing routes on Mount Everest. And one will be busy and have traffic jams each year. So for all the, whatever we want to call them—real climbers, passionate climbers, people who dedicate a lot of their life to this sport—there are hundreds of square miles of mountain with not a soul on them. And is it more difficult? Is it more challenging? Is the outcome less guaranteed than going up the normal route with the fixed ropes and all the rest? Of course it is. But isn't that the essence of climbing, especially if you've poured many years of your life into it? There are probably 25 mountains in the Himalaya each spring that have teams on them and 6000 mountains with no teams.

What base camp habit has endured through your career?

My total passion of having high quality coffee in every camp. In Everest, we have a $5,000 espresso machine connected to massive amounts of solar power. And then there are French presses, Aeropresses, and this handheld little espresso machine that looks like a converted bike pump at the highest camps on the mountain.

What's been a truly game-changing gear innovation in the past 30 years?

Communications have transformed the safety of climbing as satellite technology has gotten better and better. Now we can not only get voice but also data, that's enabled me to work with world class meteorologists. My top meteorologist is in Bern, Switzerland and primarily forecasts weather for major jet airline companies and now he and his team forecast weather for me and my teams.

What it's meant is that we would move into high camps high on these mountains and then storms and winds would come that we didn't expect because we had no weather forecasting. And tents would get destroyed, people would fight for their lives. And those things don't necessarily lead to massive accidents but they take huge amounts of energy away from you, which then often leads to failure. By essentially never getting caught out like that anymore we're able to conserve energy, move faster and be more successful.

What's your go-to expedition meal?

I am a snacker. So my go-to expedition meal up high is slices of prosciutto, string cheese, and some sort of potato chip or cracker.

What place in the world will you never get tired of visiting?

The Khumbu Valley of Nepal. It's one of the unique places in the world where it combines culture and towns with the craziest mountains in the world and no cars.

What was a particularly perilous moment in your climbing career?

My first attempt without supplemental oxygen in 2016 on Everest, the year I turned around, I was probably less than 200 feet from the summit, you could throw a rock up there. After a two-and-a-half-month expedition and decades of dreaming, I was truly going to die there. I had my expedition doctor and my climbing partner Corey Richards both on the radio. I got to the point where I couldn't even talk anymore, I was slurring my words and things like that. But I just remember both of their voices talking me through the things I knew inside, that I had slowed down to the point where if I kept going I would die on the way down. But I still had to come to that point myself and I don't know exactly how or when I did, but I did turn around. And based on how hard it was for me to get down and how much help I ultimately needed, I know how close I was to the line.

What about a favorite climbing memory from back in the day?

The first one that comes to mind is another personal climb, not a guiding moment. It was my first climb to Ama Dablam, which is this technical 23,000-foot mountain in the Khumbu Valley. Ama Dablam is probably my favorite mountain on the planet and my favorite trip that Alpenglow still guides every single year. For a lot of climbers it's a culmination of their climbing, it's often done after Everest because the climbing is so much more technical; it's rock climbing up to 5.8 and ice climbing up to grade four all on this big alpine face.

It was my first true hard Himalayan alpine climb back in the day when there were no fixed lines or anything like that. I guided for a month and a half in Nepal then left my clients, tagged on two weeks, and got a permit that a friend helped me get from the Nepali government. And I was there all alone in my tiny tent cooking on my little MSR stove eating dehydrated food, and this big expedition team was there of Polish climbers and they kind of took me in.

Ultimately they were in the high camp at like 21,000 feet when I made my attempt and I decided to try to climb it in a single push from lower on the mountain. And it was really difficult, I was way out there in my spectrum of risk and ability but I was also 22 and I didn't care. I got to their camp and I just remember them pulling me inside and giving me soup and hot Gatorade and then telling me I had it, I had done that much, and I could summit, and kicking me back out the door and going to the top. It was this pinnacle moment that kind of put me on the map in some ways and showed me what I was capable of. And yet everything I remember about it were these random climbers who had no vested interest in me—we didn't even speak the same language—how much they helped me. And that's just been fundamental to every mountain experience and mountain life and something I've always endeavored to do the same with.