The Toddfather

Everest Profile

The most imposing figure on Everest has been told to stay home. But don't count Henry Todd out yet.

By Bruce Barcott

HENRY BARCLAY TODD—Scotsman, ex-con, entrepreneur—is in the business of solving problems. Want to climb Mount Everest but don't have the Benjamins? Henry can solve that. Need oxygen tanks on the cheap? Henry's your man. What's the weather forecast for 27,000 feet? Check with Henry. Need to share a tent at Camp II? Henry!

Fifty-six-year-old Todd is the proprietor of Himalayan Guides, an Edinburgh-based expedition service that specializes in the highly affordable summit trip. If you want to climb Everest with legends like Ed Viesturs and Pete Athans, you'll pony up at least $50,000 to a guide service like Adventure Consultants (Guy Cotter's Wanaka, New Zealand–based outfit) or Alpine Ascents International (Todd Burleson's Seattle operation). But if you can haul your own carcass up the Hillary Step and are willing to subsist on rice and lentil soup, you can ride on Henry's ticket for the low, low price of $29,000. "Adventure Consultants and Alpine Ascents are like the Cadillacs of Everest," says John Leonard, a 26-year-old Mount Rainier wilderness ranger who made his first attempt on Everestwith Todd last spring. "Henry's the vintage Chevy Astrovan. You've got a whole bunch of people, and the ride's a little bumpy, but if you hold on you'll get there."

Todd offers climbers what the Bahamas offers the cruise-ship industry: a flag of convenience. Everest permits aren't as hard to obtain as they were ten years ago, but they still aren't cheap—$70,000 for a party of one to seven climbers. Submitting the application alone involves a teeth-grinding trip through Nepalese bureaucracy, but Todd knows the system well. After securing a permit for Everest, Lhotse, or Cho Oyu, he'll simply put out the word on the mountaineering grapevine and wait for the e-mails to roll in. Todd and his virtual corporation—Himalayan Guides has no physical offices, only an answering machine and an e-mail address—hop from mountain to mountain but rarely want for customers; his trips often fill within days of their announcement.

How does Henry do it? Low overhead (no rent), low labor costs (no guides), excellent international contacts, and volume, volume, volume. Last year 23 climbers were listed on Todd's Everest and Lhotse permits: 14 with the Himalayan Guides expedition in several small independent teams, and nine with Jagged Globe, a Sheffield, England–based guide service that arranged to sublet Todd's permit. He also subsidizes his expeditions with various entrepreneurial activities. For example, for $500 your party can receive a season's worth of weather reports e-mailed every two days from Todd's contact at the Meteorological Office, the UK's national weather service. For an additional, negotiable fee, he'll rent you oxygen tanks, masks, and regulators. How much, exactly? "There's no simple answer to that," Todd says. "But it's half as much as you'd pay for shiny new cylinders. And it's absolutely identical oxygen."

A hearty extrovert with a rugged six-foot-three frame, an impish smile, an impressive scowl, and a plummy accent, Todd conducts business with a combination of charm and toughness. (How tough depends on who you talk to.) In the Everest scene he's referred to as "the mayor of Base Camp," or "the governor." A Canadian climbing magazine once called him "the Toddfather." He can be delightful one moment and stormy the next. "He's an awesome guy, and he's a horrible guy, depending on who he wants to be," says Patrick Kenny, a Utah ski patroller who summited on Henry Todd's permit last year. Todd's admirers speak of his excellent rapport with Sherpas, years of Himalayan experience, and organizational prowess. "He's a big, tough mountaineer who's been very effective at running expeditions for quite a long time," says Steve Bell, the managing director for Jagged Globe. But not everyone's a fan. "I'm fine with Henry now," says another Everest expeditioner, who requested anonymity, "but there were years where it had crossed my mind to throw him in a hole."

In the annals of the Toddfather, 2000 was a year during which the Scotsman may have occasionally wanted to throw himself into a hole. In May, he had a dustup with one of his own clients, American reporter Finn-Olaf Jones—an encounter that, according to Jones and others, left the journalist bleeding and shaken. That same month, two of Todd's clients, Mike and Kristy Woodmansee, complained that the oxygen kits they rented from him malfunctioned, scuttling their summit bid at Camp IV—tantalizingly close to the top. Then, in June, The Sunday Times of London published a story about Michael Matthews, a 22-year-old British stockbroker who summited Everest using one of Todd's oxygen setups on May 13, 1999—but disappeared on the way down. The article didn't implicate Todd in Matthews's death and stated that "nobody can ever be sure what happened," but it was the kind of publicity that would give most Everest outfitters nightmares.

The capper came in November. Finn-Olaf Jones had filed charges with the Nepalese police on May 19, two days after the incident. According to Jones's statement, on July 13th the nation's Joint Secretary of Tourism told Jones that an investigation had been conducted and that Todd would be subject to "serious penalties" as a result of the incident.In a November 6 press release that cited the Jones confrontation and an unspecified "other circumstance," Nepal's Ministry of Tourism noted that it had in the past "warned Henry B. Todd several times to follow...norms and conditions"—and banned him from the whole damn country until the spring of 2002.

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