Two weeks ago, I wrote a story about the AllTrails page for Everest’s South Col route. The general gist of my piece was (a) “It’s finally official: Everest is NOT a climb! It’s a hike!” and (b) “What’s happened to Everest over the years makes me sad because my pappy taught me to idealize the mountain and now that it’s so crowded I can’t anymore,” and (c) “Oh, by the way, these reviews are all fake, but they’re very funny, and they capture an underlying truth through satire, and the small amount of pious backlash against these fake reviews ironically mimics the decline and fall of Everest as a ‘serious’ objective for ‘real’ (i.e. pious) climbers.”
I meant well when writing that story. It was supposed to be fun and lighthearted, a celebration of the Internet’s beleaguered happy side. So I was saddened to learn that Everest’s South Col route has now been scrubbed from AllTrails… which means that all those excellent reviews are gone.
I get it. Business is business. When AllTrails’s administrators realized (presumably as a result of my story) that at least 95 percent (and maybe more) of the reviews there were fake, they decided to rid the world of something happy because that happy thing diluted the authority of their real content. I imagine my colleagues at Trailforks, an Outside Inc. brand like Climbing, would have done the same thing if a bunch of fake reviews showed up on their Everest page.
Mount Everest Stage 5 on Trailforks.com
But I’ve got mixed emotions about my role in all this. On the one hand, I feel strangely satisfied. It’s not often that a writer can point to a single obvious change in the world and be like, “Behold! I think my pen did that.” (When I realized the page was gone, I turned to my wife and said, “This the first visible impact my writing has ever had!”) On the other hand, Everest’s AllTrails page existed long before I learned about it. So I feel a bit like a kid who’s just broken someone else’s toy. I’m a creator, not a destroyer, a lover, not a hater; I didn’t mean to ruin this for everyone else.*
To be clear, if I had known my story would ruin it for everyone else, I still would have published it. It was fun to write, and it’s my job. But I would also have done a lot more quoting in an attempt to preserve that which I was about to destroy. I might have included screenshots of my favorite comments, and possibly a slow-motion video of me scrolling down the page. I’d have even printed the whole thing for my records.
Instead, all that remains is this Wayback Machine archive from 2021, and my cherrypicked quotes and summarized themes, which survive in paragraphs like:
Ugbele did appreciate the cafe at the summit, as do many other reviewers, though there’s confusion about whether it’s best classified as a cafe or a tea house. There’s also disagreement in the OHV community as to whether you can park your Prius at the South Summit or whether getting there requires a vehicle with all-wheel drive. Lots of hikers agree that microspikes are helpful, and some even urge the use of poles, though a sadistic minimalist named Matthew Cote claims he “did just fine” in his Crocs and that the trail really ought to be rated “moderate to easy.”
And:
Others lament the trash on the trail, the fake bodies left lying around to scare the children, the presence of an REI, the lack of an REI, the lack of cell service, the poor air quality, and the fact that there seems (Joey Dann again) to be “a higher peak in the distance.”
Could I have done more? Should I have done more? Perhaps. But woulds and shoulds are academic. It’s too late. Thanks to my destructive pen, scores of carefully (and not-so-carefully) crafted “reviews” have been forever lost to posterity, doomed instead to molder and decay in AllTrails’s digital back end.**
So I’m here to say this: If you didn’t get to peruse the original, I’m sorry. I wish I could direct you to an easily accessible copy that captures reviews after 2021, but if one exists, I don’t know where it is. So the best I can do—and how’s this for irony—is direct you toward my initial attempt to capture the spirit of the page. Read it here.
*To be fair, I’m not 100 percent sure that my piece was solely responsible for bringing the page to AllTrails’s attention. I just stumbled across this 2023 TikTok video about the page, which references several reviews that I did not see there two weeks ago. This either means that I didn’t scroll down far enough to see them (quite possible; there were a lot of reviews); or it means that AllTrails knew about the page all along, has spent years of periodically deleting fake reviews, and has finally, emulating generations of “real” mountaineers, decided to wash its hand of the whole Everest enterprise.
**Moments like this, which remind me of the fundamental intangibility and impermanence of the digital “world” and the things we make there, only seem to reinforce my devotion toward physical media. As a reader, I exclusively consume print books because I want to have the option, years from now, to leaf through the earmarked pages and slander my own idiotic marginalia. And as a writer and editor, I find it oddly emotional whenever I see something I’ve written or edited in print. This happened a few weeks ago, when our annual print magazine, Ascent, arrived in my mailbox. There was something touching about knowing that the stories we’d bound between those covers were now objects in the world, free to stain, free to burn, but free also to surprise some historically minded climbing dweeb a century down the line.
The post Everest Is No Longer On All-Trails… Sorry About That appeared first on Climbing.
