Author and Photojournalist Michael Kodas to discuss Mount Everest Climb

What: Michael Kodas, an award-winning author and photojournalist whose travels have taken him around the globe, will discuss his book, High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed. It is an account of the corruption, backstabbing and brazen neglect for human life that has gripped the culture of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak.

When: Tuesday, December 2 at 7 p.m.

Where: McCook Auditorium on the Trinity campus, 300 Summit Street, Hartford.

Background: In the fall of 2003, Kodas was invited by a Romanian defector and his Sherpa wife – who had scaled Mount Everest 15 times -- to climb with them and write about their next trip up the mountain. Their journey was called the Connecticut Everest Expedition and Kodas, who was formerly employed by The Hartford Courant, documented it. Six months later, while on Mount Everest, Kodas learned there was a “dark side” to the world’s tallest mountain, and to the couple who had invited him to join their trek.

According to Kodas, “theft was rampant, bootlegged oxygen tanks failed when mountaineers needed them most, prostitutes propositioned climbers in base camp, ropes that lives depended on were cut from the mountain or vanished before they could ever be tied into.”

In addition, his hosts turned hostile, with the man beating his wife in front of their teammates. Kodas’s life was threatened and he was forced to turn back from the summit to escape his volatile fellow climbers.

In the following two years, Kodas worked with Argentinian Fabiola Antezana, whose father was abandoned by his guide on Mount Everest and left to die, to investigate the expeditions and culture of corruption. Their research took them to London, Nepal, Tibet, Washington D.C., the Basque area of Spain and the Bolivian Andes. In 2006, Kodas returned to Mount Everest intent on “exposing the underworld that is spreading beneath it.”

Kodas’s book has drawn rave reviews. The Washington Post called High Crimes “an expose of a sport riddled with danger and corruption.” Other reviewers have described the book has compelling, fascinating, terrifying and thrilling.

“It’s a literary adventure that even people who can’t tell a crampon from a carabiner will find hard to put down,” wrote Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.

Kodas made his mark as an outdoor reporter and photographer with a series of adventure stories and investigations at The Courant, where he was a staff member for more than 20 years. His journeys have taken him from the Appalachian Trail to the Rocky Mountains, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas, just to name a few.

Kodas’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek magazine, and Backpacker Magazine. He has appeared on the CBS Evening News, National Public Radio, and the BBC.

In 1999, Kodas was part of a team of Courant journalists awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of a workplace massacre of four employees by a disgruntled employee.  His work has also been honored by The National Press Photographers Association, The Society of Professional Journalists, The New England Associated Press News Executives Association, and The Newspaper Association of America, among others.