Everest '96: Trapped in the Death Zone | Big Business | 5
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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Against the Odds early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Against the Odds. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top of Mount Everest in 1953. Over the next 40 years, an average of about a dozen people a year followed in their footsteps.

But that changed in the early 1990s, when veteran climbers began leading amateur clients up the tallest mountain on Earth for a hefty fee. Since then, traffic on Everest has soared, and more people climbing Everest means more people die depending on the year.

which in turn has raised alarms about the risk involved in bringing so many novices to the top of the world. But despite the dangers, Everest continues to draw more people to its majestic heights. Nearly 7,000 climbers have now reached its summit. Journalist Will Cockrell is the author of Everest Inc., The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World.

His book chronicles the history of the Everest guiding industry, from the early Western-led companies to the Nepali-owned ventures that currently dominate the field. It's a story of triumph, death, and dreams. Will Cockrell, welcome to Against the Odds. Hey, thank you. Thank you for having me.

You're a self-described amateur climber, and you've written about Everest for many publications over the years, including Outside Magazine. Why did you want to write this book? I had been reporting on adventure in the broad sense, and specifically about Everest and

and some of the climbs and the tragedies for 20-odd years as a journalist. Because it was something that I was interested in myself because I was a climber, it was a world that I understood and knew well, and so I was able to easily write about that world with some nuance. Now, Everest was an odd one because I had to look at a lot of headlines in the more mainstream press...

that really, really zeroed in on all these negative things about climbing Everest throughout the years. People started looking at Everest through the lens of mountaineering and climbing, and that's why it's gotten such bad press over the decades. It's because it's, you know, these people aren't real climbers. So that led me to that question of, well, then who are they? And I suppose that I had a hunch the entire time

Just from the nuances, I did understand that the reporting and the story and what we knew wasn't quite right. And I wasn't quite sure where it was going to take me. I just kind of had this hunch that it was going to add up to something, all the stories. And sure enough, they've added up to this. It's a pretty strong counter-narrative to everything we think we know. ♪

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Well, the Everest Base Camp trek, which is an incredibly popular thing to do for travelers and people visiting Nepal, that's different from climbing the mountain. But you have to do this 10 to 12 day trek just to get yourself to base camp. You land in Lukla. It's about 9,000 feet. And I remember stepping off the helicopter with like this

strange feeling of being hyper observant. I had all the things I knew and had heard and thought in the back of my mind. And then as a journalist, I was stepping into this world saying, all right, erase everything, you know, try to see this through fresh eyes and you hike for a few hours to the next village. And these villages are all attractive. There's like stone buildings and small guest houses where you can usually, you know,

have coffee and tea and a meal. And the Sherpa people are just so smart and welcoming. They're always up for conversation. And as you get higher up, you hit the town called Namche Bazaar, which would be sort of the capital of the Khumbu Valley. This would resemble almost like a hillside town in Italy, right? It's all stone buildings. It's very pretty.

built onto the slopes. Then you move beyond Nam Chang, get higher and higher. And the villages do become a little less appointed the higher up you get. Everything has to come in, you know, by yak or plane or helicopter. And so you finally reach the last one, Gorak Shep. And then from there, it's only about a three-hour hike to Everest Base Camp, to the Khumbu Glacier.

What did the glacier look like? Glaciers that size are funny. They really just look like a pile of rocks. And that's because the glacier itself, which is moving very slowly, is basically chewing through and churning up rock all the time. And so when you look down, you kind of think you're just looking at a river of rock. But you can spot the ice through it.

What did the actual camp look like and what struck you most about it? Base camp in particular has this awful reputation as being dirty, overrun, overcrowded, and I guess antithetic to what climbing is about, right? You have these now huge base camp tents, which are giant domes with

baristas and coffee machines and good Wi-Fi. And something that I was very kind of tuned into is the vibe, I guess is the best way to put it. The feelings and behavior between Nepali Sherpa owners of companies and Western owners, because there had been some tension in the last 10 years. And so there was a big question mark. How dysfunctional has this place become?

And I found the opposite of that expectation. I found base camp to be extremely well organized. If you're a mountaineer, your definition of base camp is a couple small dome tents in a remote valley near water that's just this beautiful, lonely setting.

And when you go to this base camp, it's obviously the opposite of that. And so those people can't help but feel like it's been ruined. But really, it's just developed into the highest village before you start climbing the mountain. There's a well-established guiding industry on Everest today, but that wasn't always the case. Before the industry became an industry, who was climbing Everest? It was the climbers' mountain. It was a mountaineer's mountain.

Mountaineers around the world had their eye on it ever since Mallory and some of those really early explorers kind of clocked it as the highest mountain in the world. And it was really treated as a climbing challenge. It was all the elite climbers over the years until 1953 when that huge British expedition happened.

finally got it, even though there was not a Brit that actually got to the summit. It was Edmund Hillary, who was from New Zealand, and Tenzing Norgay, who was Sherpa, of course. And after that happened, then you had each of the countries wanting to go for their own personal ascent. And then that slowly morphed into wanting to meet the mountain sort of on its own terms as what if we remove the luxury of supplemental oxygen?

And so all of a sudden you had the most elite climbers in the world attempting to do some unbelievable things, you know, a winter ascent, no oxygen ascent, and all these things did happen. And it was kind of mind boggling what people did start to do up at the 29,000 feet era. But yeah, these were all very elite climbers. I want to talk about someone you describe in the book, and that's Dick Bass. He had a big impact on the modern guiding industry. Tell us about him.

Dick Bass. I wish I could have met him. He was this big personality. He came from oil money. He was an oil heir. Later went on to buy or found a snowbird ski resort in Utah. He loved the mountains. I mean, absolutely loved the mountains. He talked endlessly about what they did for him, right? Like what it felt for him to be in the mountains and be up high and feel that

And he got it in his head that he wanted to do something that was rarely talked about at the time, the seven summits, the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents. And no one had done it before.

and of course to do the seven summits everest stands in your way of completing them right the tallest in asia and so up until then people went to climb everest to climb everest and dick decided that he was going to climb everest because he wanted to finish the seven summits so there was a different way of looking at it all of a sudden in other words he didn't want to become a climber he just needed help to climb that one single mountain

He found that in kind of a younger mentor, David Brashears, who was one of the best Himalayan climbers of the time.

And Dick had tried it, I think, at least three times. And then it was in 1985 that he and David Brashears did it. And a lot of people look back on that and say, well, that was the first guided ascent of Everest. And it wasn't by any means. Number one, David Brashears was not a guide, nor did he ever become a mountain guide. There was no explicit agreement between them. David wasn't paid.

I came to this point and said, well, if he wasn't the first person guided up, then why does he matter? And I kind of landed on my own take on that with he made an appearance on The Tonight Show about two weeks after he summited Mount Everest. And so Johnny Carson has him on as the first person to climb the seven summits. But also specifically, he just wanted to talk about Mount Everest and say, wow, what was that like?

And Dick Bass was very well known for making jokes about himself. He would say things like, the only time I ever exercise is running through airports. The only time I ever climb is when I climb out of bed. You know, he made these jokes as a way of highlighting his inexperience. And he was projecting this notion that climbing Mount Everest is much more about tenacity than it is technical skill. That, in my opinion, was

It was a very important moment in Everest history because it changed Everest. Dick Bass changed Everest with how he projected his experience. Bass sounds like he was quite athletic, but he wasn't a professional climber. So what did it take for him to summit Everest and then get back down? Well, he had David by his side the entire time. There really couldn't be a better person to be your backup than David Brashears. I mean, he was...

a monster at altitude he was just a cool-headed smart athletic you know he was very young at the time and he had a lot of confidence in dick bass but the problem was that the descent is very very often the kick in the teeth because it's usually where your adrenaline wears off and i've heard that

A lot more can go wrong on the descent than the ascent. And sure enough, it got pretty bad. Bass had made a couple mistakes. He turned his oxygen up once instead of down. So he had exhausted his own canister and David Brashears had to give him his canister. And Dick Bass was at some points basically flat out at the place where he was like, I think this is it. Like, I think I need to stay here. David pushed him. If David was not there, I have no doubt that Dick Bass would have died on Everest.

So by the late 1980s, the spark had happened. In our series, we learn about two of the pioneers of the Everest guiding industry, Rob Hall and Scott Fisher. Can you tell us a bit more about the early companies and their leaders? What was their primary motivation? Well, I think this is another misconception about where the guiding industry came from or how it came about.

Scott Fisher and Rob Hall were both mountain guides by profession. That means they were going up and down the same mountains all the time with client climbers. They dedicated themselves to getting all the certifications and, you know, going through the whole thing because guiding is

amateurs or less experienced people up a mountain and experiencing that transformational moment or whatever it is that climbing mountains can give you was a high for them. Both of them absolutely fit that mold. And I think that there was a moment when about a half dozen people in the world, all mountain guides, they got this like dream that perhaps Mount Everest could be guided.

It was not a money-making dream. It just is a mountain guide. If it's cool to watch an amateur summit Mont Blanc, imagine what it must be like to see them do Everest. You've spoken with many Everest guides. In your opinion, what qualities does a guide on Everest need to have? OCD. Not literally, but I know a lot of them do. Organization and sort of being able to think five steps ahead.

So the way I describe mountain guides on Everest specifically, I said that guides need to have the leadership skills of a military general, the stamina, strength, and agility of an Olympic athlete, the patience of a preschool teacher, and the cool head of a bomb squad technician.

Yeah. These people are very remarkable people, in my opinion. And they're going up Everest over and over. And it's just so weird when you live in this world where there are some humans contemplating the question of whether they could even do it once. I'm one of those people, by the way. I have no idea if I could climb Mount Everest. And then there's people that just do it every year. Like Iron Man. What were some of the things these early companies had to figure out?

Well, the logistics in Nepal, of course, you know, getting up the Khumbu Valley, staying healthy. The expedition was between six, eight, maybe even 10 weeks long.

So there was all about how do you keep, you know, a group of less experienced people healthy. It's easy to get sick up there, the dry air, the altitude. And then, of course, by then they had begun to protect the route. And that's a climbing term. And it just means that they were setting up anchors all the way and attaching ropes to them so that you're more or less attached to a rope the entire time you're climbing Mount Everest.

The weather was another huge one. They got really good at predicting the weather. Although I want to make the note that up until 1996, they still didn't have the modern technology in weather reporting. And that's a huge part of, you know, what led to what happened in 1996. You interviewed many Sherpa people as part of your research.

As those early companies were forming, where did Sherpas fit into the picture? I guess early on, it was a carryover from the climbing expeditions. As happens with climbers all over the world, it's not uncommon for the local population to be sort of brought into the climbing in the sense that you hire them as porters to carry things, to do some of the base camp duties like cook.

And this was always a fairly symbiotic relationship in that it was money for the locals. And it was so easy for generations and generations, a father, a son, an uncle, everybody could go work for the climbing industry. What happened was when Westerners begin to sort of use the local population, there are these colonial undertones.

Because no doubt the local population is doing a lot of these hard jobs for so much less money than they would have to pay a Westerner. In the beginning, it was a wonderful boon for the Khumbu Valley, except that slowly the Sherpas, especially the more talented and eager ones, were going higher and higher up the mountain. And then soon they were going to the top with clients.

A lot of people describe this early time as taking advantage of the Sherpas, and we don't have to pay them anything. This idea floating out there that the Sherpas had no choice but to do this work to feed their families, that kind of hung over base camp every year. And if a Sherpa died, was killed on the mountain, a head of household, it was devastating to these Sherpa families who were already in economic peril.

The misconception is that the Westerners that own these companies were okay with that. And they weren't. And I would say, you know, not just the Westerners, but there were a group of very like conscientious and thoughtful people within the industry that began to figure out how to change that.

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Now, there are a handful of routes up to the summit of Everest, but the majority of climbers, including the ones from the 96 expeditions, take the South Call route. Can you describe it for us? A call just describes like a saddle or a low point on a ridge. And so the South Call describes the very last point at which you sleep, if they can call it that. It's, you know, above 8,000 meters or 26,000 feet or something before you go for the summit. It's Camp 4. It's the final stop.

But the journey begins with the Khumbu Icefall, which is tricky because there has been an awful lot of carnage in the icefall. It's basically a river of ice, if you can imagine, going down 2,000 feet, kind of like a waterfall would. The glacier is being broken up. And you have to kind of climb these seracs and fins and blocks that are as big as a school bus. And there's really no way to know which one is ready to fall or move.

And so there's a series of ladders and ropes that show you the route through this maze. And a maze is probably the best description because you can never really see the entire route while you're in it. You're sort of just always looking at blocks of ice around you. So you're crossing crevasses and whatnot. And that's the first thing you do. That's the first step leaving base camp is the Khumbu Icefall.

And then you kind of top out at Camp 1. Camp 1, though, is not really used as a camp very often. There's a bunch of tents and some supplies, et cetera, because it's kind of like a depot in case they need it. And you continue on to Camp 2, which is 21,000, and it sits in what's called the Western Kume.

And this is basically when you're just looking up at like an amphitheater of 8,000 and 7,000 meter peaks. You have Everest, you have Lhotse, and then Nupce beyond that. That's where you're sort of probably start to think that your climb is getting real because it's straight up from there.

And I want to point out that the way these expeditions work, the reason they're six to eight weeks long is you're doing rotations. You're essentially acclimatizing. And a lot of the Sherpa climbers are moving supplies and setting anchors and doing this whatnot up and down the mountain. So you spend the eight weeks going up and back to base camp as a way of getting your body ready for a summit attempt.

But on the actual summit push in which you've given yourself, say, four to five days, you go from base camp, you move up to camp two in the Western Kume, and then you go up what's called the Lhotse Face, which is a very steep slope with a rope on it that you just kind of kick stairs into it to climb it. And you end up on a sort of interim camp, camp three, which is kind of notched into the steep hillside.

And you sleep probably on oxygen at this point. And then they continue on from Camp 3 to the South Cull, what we talked about, which is this giant flat area, kind of a notch between Lhotse and Everest. Really expansive, but scary. Scary in the sense that you're now in the death zone and you're not really supposed to be at Camp 4. You're just kind of there to do what's necessary to go for the summit.

You're there to maybe sleep, to maybe eat without vomiting, to melt as much snow as you can to make water. And then typically at about one in the morning or so, it's time to go for the summit. You know, and they put their headlamps on at night or at this time of night, you can often see from base camp with a telescope, you can see the little lines of headlamps that

And then you start up for the summit and there's all these like famous landmarks, the balcony, the Hillary step. And then after the South summit, then you get to the summit. That was a really great depiction of, of everything. I was picturing it in my mind and it just, I wonder how many people turned around at the kombu ice fall. And I mean, I'd be like, yeah, I'm going to head back now. Right. I often wonder the same thing. I kind of think maybe because you don't have time to think about it. That's the first thing you do.

So I think maybe fewer people drop out. Our series follows the Everest tragedy of May 11th, 1996, when eight people died after being caught in a blizzard. It's a well-known story that's been told in many books and movies.

What do you think it is about that disaster that makes it so legendary? It has everything. How things unfolded, the emotion, the people who tragically died, and the circumstances. It's just a riveting account or look into human nature, right, in these extreme conditions. So it's a mountaineering tragedy, which are always kind of interesting, exciting to read. But then it's coupled with a lot of heart-wrenching emotion. Mm-hmm.

Now, the problem is, in my opinion, the problem is that it has everything. And what I mean by that is that the emotion and the heart-wrenching decisions that got made and the characters involved, it can kind of be anything to anyone. And I think that's what people have done over the years. Let's talk about John Krakauer's book Into Thin Air. You say it's brilliant, but you also have a critique of it. Can you tell us what that is?

First of all, I think John Krakauer is, he's not only an incredible journalist and writer. I mean, he's one of the best. Not a lot of people know he is such a good climber. He climbs with some of the best climbers in the world and has done some incredibly impressive ascents himself. He was sent by Outside Magazine to report on the growing guiding industry on Mount Everest. That's it. This event happened to him.

So it's very strange to really criticize anything he's done because, you know, once you've had that experience, it's sort of your right to just like dump out whatever experience you had. And that's what he did with Into Thin Air. And it was very emotional, but it became the book of record about that event. And you just so happen to have had probably one of the more purest, righteous climbers in the world wrote that book.

And I don't think John did this on purpose, but the place where us as readers, the general public, I think, went down the wrong road was allowing John at base camp when he was building the profiles of his characters, when he was talking about each person and who they were and why they were there. He was reporting as a journalist, but no doubt everyone can see that he was also sizing up who belongs there and who doesn't.

And in his depiction of Sandy Pittman, for example, which a lot of people feel was totally unfair. And after talking to Sandy myself, after looking into everything, I agree that it was unfair.

But again, if you're John, seeing this kind of eccentric sort of socialite personality into getting media attention. But Sandy's a great person and incredibly strong. But he had decided that that personality that I just described should not be on Everest. Again, I don't think it was John's fault. I don't think it was his intention either. But it kicked off a tradition of judging who belongs there and who doesn't.

Krakauer's book certainly highlighted the dangers and risks involved in climbing Everest. What effect did the book have on guided travel to Everest? Did it deter people at all? No, quite the contrary. Some of the guide company owners saw it coming. You know, I do cite in Everest Inc. this sort of moment when some of them were like, oh my gosh, business is about to go through the roof.

And really it has to do with one of the main reasons that people were coming to Everest, the risk involved. It's hard to find someone like this, but this is a former mountain guide,

on Everest on the 8,000 meter peaks in the Himalaya in the 90s and later became a clinical psychologist, Heather McDonald, brilliant woman. She's so fun to talk to and smart. She said there are three main types of Everest client from her perspective. And it's one, people looking to awaken something they feel is dead or dying inside them.

Two, people looking to discharge something usually traumatic from any point in their life, right? Could have been childhood, could have been recent, could be something like a divorce, right? And then people who are looking to just reorganize their life a little. They need like a new experience or perspective to sort of kickstart a new chapter for whatever reason. Being close to danger or risk is part of what helps you through one of those three things, right?

One of the people you interviewed for your book was David Brashears, who we touched on earlier and who passed away earlier this year. How did David portray climbing Everest? And how did he view people who wanted to climb the mountain? I can't overstate how important David was to this project. He was my first call.

He had been there since the beginning of guided climbing, but he was not a guide nor a client. So he had this interesting front row seat to the growing industry and was very close friends with all the people involved because he was going to Everest every year for different things, projects as a cameraman. He was compelled to climb it from different routes. That was the other reason why David was so important to me is he loved Mount Everest.

He also was a purist climber himself, you know, kind of the Krakauer mold, but in a different sense that he didn't have that judgment. This book was certainly going to turn into sort of a tribute to David because he's in it so much. You know, he was the director of the IMAX film, which was filming that same year, 1996. David's view of Everest was, I want to show everyone how beautiful this mountain is, how amazing this experience is, how transformational.

That was not common among like purist climbers to be doing that.

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So capable, even more so than their Western counterparts physically. And the one thing they were lacking was the training. You just simply need, you know, the mountain guide training, the first aid, the complicated rope systems. It's mostly a guiding certificate is mostly held for when things go wrong, not right.

And so the Western companies kind of took it upon themselves to begin to train the Sherpas. And so the training started happening and to the point that the Sherpas started being proactive in this area. One Sherpa sort of forged ahead trying to get what's called IFMGA certification, which is basically the gold international standard for guiding across the world.

and was able to set up a track that other Nepalis could follow and even move the system so that there's a Nepal IFMGA so that they don't have to go to France to get it, for example. Conrad Anker, maybe our best living alpinist here in the States, he set up something called the Kumbu Climbing School, the KCC, in one of the villages. And again, this is dedicated to training. So Sherpa from any village can kind of roll up there and say, I want to start taking ice climbing classes.

Typically, this would be so they can have a career in guiding. And then one other thing I want to point out too, which is probably something that maybe didn't hit me until I was in the Khumbu Valley, which is the fact that the older Sherpas, they began to make the kind of money that changed their lives. That generation of Sherpa was able to send their children to school in Kathmandu and even further abroad.

So all of a sudden, you had an enormous amount of the Sherpa population coming back to Nepal or back to the valley. They were pilots. They were engineers. They had a really high level of education and accomplishment. The young Sherpa of this generation began to think really big. I mean, they not only wanted to become certified mountain guides, but all of a sudden, they're like, well, wait a minute. Why don't I just be the owner of the company?

Nepalese guiding companies have slowly been forming since around 2010, like Asian Trekking and Seven Summit Treks.

How have these homegrown companies changed the industry? Asian Trekking was one of the first, and they never really became as big as the others. You could almost look at Asian Trekking as part of the older generation, the legacy companies in some ways. However, the owners, the son, Dawa Steven is his name, played a huge role in showing other Sherpas that this was possible.

So now all of a sudden you have these younger ones forming these companies. The Nepali government obviously cuts them a lot of breaks in terms of permits and fees for climbing the mountain because it's keeping the money within the country and they want to see these businesses grow. Seven Summit Treks is currently, I'd say, the biggest company on Mount Everest. They're the ones taking up the biggest number of clients.

I think where we're at now, I don't know the exact number, but it's something like 80, 85% of the companies operating on Everest are Nepali or Sherpa owned now. And 15% or so are the Western companies. The people, the Sherpas, the Nepalis coming into the industry now, they love the mountaineering industry and the pride you can imagine for them.

Let's not forget, like, how much pride Nepal takes in the fact that Mount Everest sits in their country. There's an enormous amount of pride now for their ownership of this industry. I want to get back to the bad press we've been seeing. From the May 11th, 1996 disaster to the more recent photos of traffic jams on the mountain, Everest has developed a reputation for being a sort of crowded playground for the rich. What do you make of this perception?

i think these are the headlines being pumped up a little playground kind of implies that people are there and don't take it seriously which is certainly not at all true that would be the extreme exception not the rule

It is certainly something that people with money have access to. Although the interesting trend is that the numbers of people seeking a guided expedition on Everest these days is actually fewer Westerners and more people from countries with emerging middle classes like China, India, Malaysia. And that's because the expeditions are less expensive.

Last year, 2023, was the deadliest year on Everest with 18 deaths. Is there anything we can say about the 2024 season? We're basically near the end or at the end of the climbing season. There are so far eight fatalities from the spring season in Nepal. Only three of the eight were operating within the guiding infrastructure. It's really hard because every single death on Everest is

It's easy to forget that they were, you know, a brother, a father, a mother. It's sort of like every single one has this immense ripple effect with that family. But at the same time, we need to recognize death is a part of mountaineering. It's part of why people get into mountaineering. And even though the guiding companies would say, look, our goal is zero deaths, that's never going to happen.

Considering the increasing number of people on the mountain and all the many dangers and risks involved in climbing it, do you think Everest will continue to be as popular as ever?

I do. I can't imagine a world where the tallest mountain in the world doesn't resonate with so many people, right? Something to work toward or to go do to work something out. I think that's going to be appealing to an awful lot of people and more and more as we go forward. Will Cockrell, thank you so much for talking with me today on Against the Odds. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

On our next episode, magazine writer Kyle Dickman is out for a family hike when he's bitten by a rattlesnake. Kyle knows he's now in a race against time to find help. If you like Against the Odds, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. ♪

This is the fifth and final episode of our series, Everest 96, Trapped in the Death Zone. Thanks so much to our guest, journalist Will Cockrell. His book is called Everest Inc., The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World. ♪

I'm your host, Cassie DePeckel. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker. Our senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Coordinating producer is Desi Blaylock. Series produced by Alita Rozanski. Managing producer is Matt Gant. Senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr. Senior producer is Rachel Matlow.

Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Stephanie Jens, Marshall Louis, and Erin O'Flaherty. For Wondery. My name is Georgia King, and I am thrilled to be the host of And Away We Go, a brand new travel podcast on Wondery+, where we'll be whisked away on immersive adventures all around the world. Where we go, what we do, what we eat, drink, and listen to will all be up to my very special guest.

We've got Ben Schwartz taking us on a whirlwind trip around Disneyland. We'll eat a bowl of life-changing pasta with Jimmy O. Yang in Tuscany, Italy. And how do you feel about a spot of sugaring off with Emily Hampshire in Montreal? And away we go, we'll immerse you

in some of the wonders of the world. We're going to be seeing some yellows and vibrant oranges. And the shoes clicking against the cobblestone. If you're looking to get somebody in the mood, have a look at the Chicago skyline. You can listen to And Away We Go exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Georgia, do you know what joy sounds like? I think I'm hearing it right now.