“It felt like there were a lot of people watching our progress, like a football game,” Caldwell said. “Usually when I climb it’s just me and my partner. It’s a very solitary thing.”

“This is a whole new world,” he added.

As soon as mountaineering was considered a recreational activity, climbers began reporting their feats in one form or another. In 1336, the wandering Italian poet Petrarch wrote an account of his long walk up Mont Ventoux in France. By 1953, sponsors of expeditions wanted news quickly. On the first ascent of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, a reporter was on the expedition, eager to report success to the Crown, which wanted the update — that a subject of the British Empire had conquered the highest summit in the world — before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

By the late 1990s, satellite linkups and the Internet had reduced the interval between an event and coverage of it to virtually nothing. In 1999, on an expedition that made the first ascent of the northwest face of Pakistan’s Great Trango Tower, an unseen line was crossed. A highly visible, remote objective matched with a reported sponsorship budget of $50,000, a full camera crew and daily Web updates from the climbers on the wall (via an elaborate system involving a satellite linkup from base camp) drew the ire of the wider climbing community.

Mark Synnott, one of three climbers on the expedition, said he came away from the experience conflicted. “It was a necessary evil,” he said of all the media. But without the computers and cameras there would not have been an expedition, and without the expedition there would have been no new cutting edge route on the tower. “The idea is pretty cool if it can be done the right way,” Synnott said.