Jon Krakauer is a student of extreme behaviors and those who engage in them, and he happened to be on Mt. Everest during the notorious May 10-11, 1996, disaster. A series of seemingly minor mishaps, oversights, and questionable decisions kept climbers moving up the mountain hours later than any reasonable turnaround time. At 29,000 feet, that would have been bad enough given cold, hypoxia, and a finite supply of supplemental oxygen, but an unexpected storm that moved in from the south turned a problematic climb into a catastrophe. Several people died, including two widely regarded expedition leaders. Krakauer was one of the stronger climbers that day; he spent only a few minutes on the summit and was on his way to camp when the storm struck. His account of the disaster is gripping, painful, and angry. Krakauer is not shy about offering up criticism of expedition leaders and some fellow climbers, and he discusses his own feelings of guilt as to one guide who died on the mountain. I know nothing about mountain climbing, and I couldn't put this book down.

ETA--I was so fascinated by the book that I looked up dang near everything I could find online about the disaster. I'm not the only one; PBS Frontline ran a special just last month about some of the survivors. Krakauer's book angered a few other participants from his climb; however, their criticisms go to peripheral matters (did guide Anatoli Boudreev behave responsibly in descending before his clients? Was one of the sherpas too busy attending to a Manhattan socialite to perform his other duties properly? Did Krakauer himself collapse while descending the mountain? Could Krakauer have left his tent on the South Col and helped Boudreev's heroic rescue effort on the night of May 10?) and not to the major issues raised in the book. There appears to be broad agreement that Rob Hall and Scott Fischer allowed other concerns, personal and commercial, to take precedence over getting their clients down off the mountain safely. Also, Fischer's judgment may have been seriously impaired by a high-altitude ailment. Moreover, the number of deaths on Everest suggests that there are plenty of people climbing the mountain who have no business being there in the first place.

Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes are littered with corpses.

Why climb Everest? I have continuously been asking myself that very question as I’ve read through Jon Krakauer’s account of the fateful and calamitous 1996 expedition. In 1924, the first attempt by British climber George Mallory and his companion was made and Mallory’s remark to a reporter was - “Because it is there.” Neither man was ever seen again. The summit of the world’s tallest mountain wasn’t reached successfully until 1953 when New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his Nepalese sherpa, Tenzing Norgay became the first as part of a British expedition.

Jon Krakauer, an experienced mountaineer made his own discovery during his time on Everest:
I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain.
This desire to accomplish such a feat is not the same as an adrenaline junkie who gets a thrill from bungee jumping or skydiving. Climbers are met with some serious life-threatening obstacles. For this reason, I found the other category of person who wanted to climb Everest to be quite bizarre. Those people with mediocre mountaineering skills who have enough money seek the attention and the bragging rights to say they did it.

But what I’m not sure about is whether every one who makes the ascent understands the risks they are taking. This is not an inexpensive pursuit and those that attempt it know that they may not make it all the way to the top for various reasons and have to turn around. Almost getting there isn’t good enough for most people who make this choice. It’s all or nothing.

I learned quite a bit about the hazards of mountaineering. High-altitude climbing can cause life-threatening disorders the higher up you go, such as hypoxia. Clients who pay upwards of $65,000 for the experience, expect the professional guides to help acclimatize them to the altitudes and this takes time and should be done correctly. Because of the large number of people who attempt the climb, it’s become a commodity to be bought and sold. There are traffic jams of climbers on the ascent and descent making risks of running out of oxygen a real problem, something Krakauer experienced first hand on his descent after reaching the summit.

Krakauer’s personal account of the events of those 2 days in May, 1996 put you inside his mind and allow you to see what he witnessed and experienced. He is able to piece together the events during the storm when people begin to die from talking to those who survived. Because he wrote this so soon (less than a year) after returning home, the events were still very fresh and his survivor’s guilt still apparent. His descriptions of his experiences are done so that a non-climber, such as myself, can easily understand and envision what he was going through. But why did 5 people actually lose their lives? Krakauer attempts to answer that question and provide a few theories including a traffic jam due to multiple expeditions all trying to reach the top at the same time when the weather proved promising. Poor decisions were made (not sticking to the plan) and the sheer fact that these decisions were being made under extremely harsh weather conditions and under the highest possible levels of bodily exhaustion which leads to mental duress. Aside from the fact that a bit of ego and obsessive desire will prompt one to keep going and finish the goal.

I’d always known that climbing mountains was a high-risk pursuit. I accepted that danger was an essential component of the game—without it, climbing would be little different from a hundred other trifling diversions. It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believe, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.

Jon Krakauer standing on the summit of Mt. Everest.

"Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice out of my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared down into the vastness of Tibet".

You have heard the saying, "truth is stranger than fiction". In this case truth is more frightening, more compelling than fiction. This is the first hand account of the 1996 tragedy on Mt. Everest that claimed the lives of 12 mountaineers, many of them highly skilled and well trained professional guides. It is told by Jon Krakauer, a journalist and accomplished mountaineer in his own right. The fact that he lived to tell the story is amazing in itself. How and why it happened, who, if anybody, was to blame is a matter of debate and interpertation. The fact is, Mt. Everest is a deadly place, especially in the upper region known as the death zone, where the air is thin and brutally cold, made worse by the force of the jet stream winds. If you are caught in this region in an unexpected storm, as this group was, then your chances of getting back down, of surviving, become problematic at best. This is a story of human accomplishment, bravery, suffering, and determination. This is adventure of the highest order because it isn't fiction, this really happened.

This book suddenly became very relevant - no less than TEN climbers have died this week (18-25 May 2019) on Everest. The reason for this horrible turn of events is given as inexperienced guides leading inexperienced climbers combined with the usual weather restrictions leading to these ghastly insane queueing situations :



Yes, that's the top of the highest mountain in the world.

Anyway, original review follows :

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TEENAGE HAIR-KISSING BOOK DEFACERS

This is the most defaced book I ever read. It must have been used in a school at one point. Up to page 69 there are two different people highlighting passages in pink and green but then in the margins, suddenly there is this:

Katie is Eric’s fave, to bad for him, he is silly, I hope he’s a good kisser

And then on page 77, which otherwise would be blank:

This is the most boring book I have ever read, I swear if anyone read this book by choice they are the biggest idiot in the world
Jason is such a dork
Jonathan has been a fag lately
I HATE THIS BOOK
It will be funny when you ask Jason if he kisses our/your hair. Ask is he kisses your hair, then if he kisses anyone elses hair
Always Spicy

On page 88, in a different hand, we read

Eric Conner, Feb 24 2000 he asked me out

And on page 107:

Troy is hot! (but I never said that!)

And her friend writes:

We should go to the movies, you, me, Troy & Eric coz they’re friends & Troy’s hot, so you could have “fun”

Okay, I will spare you the rest. There’s a poignant contrast between this dreamy teen hair-kissing and the terror-stricken narrative that Jon Krakauer patiently lays down here. It’s clear that the teenagers just didn’t connect to the story, and in some ways I can see why. In an attempt to be scrupulously correct, JK almost turns the events which killed eight people on Everest on 10-11 May 1996 into a stolid police report.

THE GULF OF COMPREHENSION BETWEEN MOUNTAINEERS AND NORMAL PEOPLE

Mountaineers voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way, spend loads of money on their own obsessive self-centred dreams and then expect to be congratulated by the rest of us for their feats. Lugging your mortal flesh into very high altitudes is madness.

There was no forgetting that we were more than three miles above sea level. Walking left me wheezing for several minutes. If I sat up too quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. The deep rasping cough I’d developed worsened by the day. Sleep became elusive. Most nights I’d wake up three or four times gasping for breath, feeling like I was suffocating. Cuts and scrapes refused to heal. My appetite vanished… my arms and legs gradually began to wither to sticklike proportions.

This was at 16,200 feet. The summit of Everest is 29,000 feet. The further you go up, the more likely you are to get HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema), where you froth blood, lapse into a coma and die) or HACE (High altitude cerebral edema), where you become deranged, lapse into a coma and die. Krakauer is also keen to deny that mountaineers are adrenalin junkies. We lubbers may imagine that when they get to the summit they experience some great euphoria. Not at all, he says. Getting up a mountain is grinding your way through great pain in the knowledge that getting back down from the summit is more dangerous than getting up to it. Mountaineering does not sound like a healthy outdoor pursuit to me.

THE MOUNTAINEERING CLASS SYSTEM

Climbing the big mountains like Everest is very dangerous, but it’s popular. A lot of ridiculous rich white people want to do it. So they join guided expeditions. On an Everest expedition there are three classes of people.

The guides – these are the white expert mountaineers who organise everything and guarantee client safety

The clients – these are the rich white people who have nothing better to do. We know they are rich because it costs an arm and a leg to be a member of an Everest expedition

The Sherpas – these are the Nepalese guys who do the actual manual labour of lugging all the rich white people’s food and essentials from base camp to camp 2 to camp 3 to camp 4 and back again along with making sure the white people don’t kill themselves in the fifty different ways available to them.

Sherpas put in the route, set up the camps, did the cooking, hauled all the loads. This conserved our energy and vastly increased our chances of getting up Everest.

This enforced client passivity earns these guided expeditions great contempt in other more radical mountaineering circles. That’s not really climbing a mountain at all, they say. These rich clients have no mountaineering skills themselves. It’s like herding rich white sheep. And some of the haughty sneerers also say that using oxygen tanks is cheating too. They say that you can only say you’ve climbed Everest if you do it without Sherpas and without oxygen. And guess what, some of these hard core guys have gone right ahead and climbed Everest without Sherpas and without oxygen, and when they got to the top they looked down on everyone else, you can bet your life.

THE TURN ROUND TIME

Into Thin Air is sometimes flawed by not explaining important concepts clearly enough for us non-climbers. One crucial concept was the TURN ROUND TIME. This was a big part of why eight people died and it took me a while to work out why. On the day your team is going to reach the summit the guide will announce a turn round time, usually 2 pm. This means that wherever the client is, they must turn round and begin descending at that time, even if they haven’t reached the summit yet. They might be only 30 minutes away but they must turn round and start descending. How ultimately frustrating!

There were several companies guiding clients to the summit on 10 May 1996 and one of them was new and very keen to get all of its clients to the summit. So keen that they allowed some stragglers to continue to the summit up to 4pm that day. According to JK, this contributed to some clients getting swallowed up in the sudden blizzard that hit the summit in the afternoon. No one saw it coming.

But there was a whole tangle of wrong decisions that day, including some made by JK himself. It’s a complicated picture, but to complicate it further, at least one other book has been published slagging off the conclusions and accusations made by JK in this book.

So, a self-inflicted confused disaster, many of the details of which are disputed. At the end of it all I was more convinced than ever that I will never, ever understand the motivations of many of my fellow human beings

“[T]he sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses…”
-tJon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

On June 8, 1924, the first great challenger to Mount Everest, George Leigh Mallory – along with partner Andrew Irvine – made a fateful attempt to summit the tallest mountain in the world. Expedition member Noel Odell, who was following in support, watched their progress from the safety of camp. In a “sudden clearing of the atmosphere,” Odell reported, Mallory and Irvine appeared as two “tiny black spot[s],” moving toward a “great rock step.” He saw them only for a moment before the clouds came in, obscuring Mallory’s blind march into legend. Neither Mallory or Irvine returned.

In the years since, Everest has not grown more forgiving. If you happen to reach the summit, you are at the approximate cruising altitude of a commercial jet liner. The air is so thin that you are literally dying. That, combined with moody weather changes and the typical challenges of mountaineering, makes for a dangerous, deadly environment. Everest is so unforgiving that the bodies of her would-be conquerors – such as the ill-fortuned “Green Boots” – often remain on her slopes for years, becoming macabre landmarks.

Despite this frightful reputation, the toll of May 10-11, 1996 manages to stand out. Five people – including two experienced guides – lost their lives after ignoring their own turnaround times and getting caught in a sudden storm. The cluster of deaths would have made news by itself. It just so happened, however, that one of the surviving climbers was Jon Krakauer, an adventurer and journalist on assignment for Outside magazine.

Krakauer eventually wrote an article about his experiences, though it was a far cry from the report on Everest’s commercialization that he had originally intended. Ultimately, he returned to his article and reshaped it into a book, Into Thin Air. In the years since its publication, Into Thin Air has come to be recognized as a classic of outdoor writing, despite the counter-publications written by other participants, disagreeing with every single one of Krakauer’s words.

Leaving aside the controversies – which swirl around the disaster like the spindrift off the peak of Everest – Into Thin Air is deserving of its lofty reputation.

Unlike a lot of first-person memoirs churned out in the wake of disaster or trauma, Into Thin Air is the product of a man with a gift for writing. Krakauer may have thought of himself as a climber who got into journalism, but he is a natural storyteller, and his prose wonderfully evokes the beauties and terrors of the mountainside. In terms of conjuring place, of putting you there with the climbers – whether that is the squalor of a filthy lodge in Lobuje, the vertiginous seracs of the Icefall, or the top of the world itself – Krakauer succeeds at describing the indescribable.

At less than three-hundred pages, Into Thin Air is compact and briskly paced. Krakauer indulges a brief – and fascinating – history of mountaineering on Everest, before recounting his experiences as a member of Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants expedition.

Most of the time, Krakauer stays within his own experiences. He tells you what he saw, what he heard, and his impressions of the other climbers (owing to the fact that he wrote this with the wounds still raw and weeping, he is extremely careful in his presentations). The only time Krakauer leaves the first-person perspective is to piece together what happened to those who died while he was not present (Krakauer was one of the first to summit Everest on May 10, 1996, and made it back to camp before the dying started in earnest).

Typically, I am wary of memoirs, since they are usually a vehicle for self-promotion or self-defense. Krakauer struggles a bit with being both journalist and participant, of both reporting the action and being part of it. For the most part, though, he strikes a good balance. He points out instances where bad decisions were made – Hall’s failure to abide by his turnaround time, for instance – but he does not reach a verdict or even issue an indictment. Indeed, Krakauer reserves his harshest words for himself, and a hypoxia-induced mistake he made that contributed to the death of one of the climbers.

To the extent that Krakauer provides a theory of the disaster, he attributes it to the crowds, with multiple expeditions trying to reach the summit during the same good-weather window. This led to traffic jams that turned the fixed ropes up the mountain into a Himalayan version of a Costco checkout line during a pandemic. One of the most gripping, anxious scenes in the book is Krakauer’s descent, as he has to wait for a slow-moving group to ascend the Hillary Step while his bottled oxygen runs out.

There is a saying that the first guy through the door always gets hit. Because Into Thin Air came out so quickly, and grew so popular, it immediately became a target for those who felt slighted or disrespected in Krakauer’s telling. For instance, the famed mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev felt compelled to pen – with a cowriter – his own account of the catastrophe, after Krakauer tepidly chided Boukreev for attempting to summit without supplemental oxygen while acting as a guide. (Krakauer also thoroughly describes Boukreev’s near-superhuman attempts to save the lives of climbers caught in the storm, so it’s not like he had a vendetta).

With the passage of so much time, I have absolutely zero interest in parsing all the different accounts, of trying to keep track of the directions all the fingers are pointing. I don’t believe it serves much of a purpose. This isn’t like a plane crash or a train accident, where reverse-engineering the calamity might save other lives in the future. You can’t make Everest safer because it is Everest. When you get near the top, you are subject to hypoxia, which hits everyone differently, and can strike down even the most veteran climber. It’s tough to blame anyone for an error in judgment when they can’t breathe, when they can’t think, when they are dying.

To say this event was a tragedy requires some modification. If this was a tragedy, it was of the high-tax bracket, entirely-avoidable variety. To make a supported climb on Everest requires a chunk of change that is quite a bit higher than the median income in the United States. Dying on Everest – unless you are a Sherpa – is a privilege few can afford.

To not only risk your life, but to pay handsomely for the opportunity, is partly an ego trip. Yet it is impossible not to stand a bit in awe of those who make the attempt. As Krakauer points out, the summit becomes an obsession for many, one that cannot simply be explained away as a premeditated lunge for the best cocktail party story ever. There is something mysterious in a person who insists on trudging past the deadline, who – like Mallory in 1924 – refuses to simply turn on their heels and return home, and instead keeps reaching for the apex, as time and breath wind down to nothing. There is a cost to Everest that Krakauer aptly shows cannot be translated into hard currency. There is a knowledge that – as a member of Mallory’s expedition later wrote – “the price of life is death, and that, so long as the payment be promptly made, it matters little to the individual when the payment is made.”

If climbing Mt. Everest is on your bucket list, you might reconsider after reading this book. The author does a wonderful job of describing his harrowing experience.

Interesting book, didn’t know a lot the accident before reading it (only have heard of it vaguely). I honestly don’t get the thrill of climbing such peaks especially since the fatalities aren’t few. Or at least the extra danger climbers might put themselves through. But hey, don’t worry they’ll pay someone to carry all of their junk! Rtc.

Mi-a plǎcut foarte mult! Am descoperit o lume despre care nu ştiam prea multe, alpinismul de mare altitudine.

Mai 1996, un dezastru are loc pe "acoperişul lumii”.
O ascensiune ghidatǎ pe Vf. Everest se termină fatal din cauza unei furtuni nimicitoare + a unor decizii iraționale.
12 persone îşi pierd viața şi multe întrebǎri rǎmân fǎrǎ rǎspuns…

Autorul a fǎcut parte din expediția condusǎ de ghidul Rob Hall, un renumit alpinist. Fusese trimis acolo în calitate de jurnalist, urmând sǎ scrie un articol pentru revista Outside. Articolul stǎ la baza acestei captivante cǎrți.
Jon Krakauer este unul din supravietuitori şi ne povesteşte întreaga experiențǎ.

RELEASE THE KRAKAUER!!!!

seriously, it is time to just raze everest and be done with it already. i mean, it's big and impressive but it is just taking up all this room and killing people so why do we even need it anymore?? can't we just get over it? really, i think it has reached its peak and is all downhill from here.

shameless punning aside.

so this started out as an article that KRAKAUER was asked to write for outside magazine about the commercialization of everest. it should embarrass us that something that costs 75,000 dollars to even attempt even has the potential to become "commercialized." (for example - i just balked at shelling out $7.17 for the sandwich i am eating. and like everest, it is kind of crappy) how misplaced is our spending? for fifty bucks a toe, i will chop yours right off and you can pretend you climbed everest and had a gay old time. everyone wins! but there are purists who think that there was golden age of everest and everything since then has just been compromised and now everest is a trash heap full of inconvenient dead bodies and empty oxygen bottles and really just anyone can climb everest so it isn't even a challenge anymore...

THAT IS THE KIND OF ATTITUDE THAT EVEREST WILL FUCKING KILL YOU FOR HAVING!!!

do not climb everest - it is a trap!!



when i was making this year's thanksgiving meal, i decided to have a little fun and incorporate things i learned from everest into the prep. because i had soooo many brussels sprouts to prepare, as well as parsnips, carrots, beets, sweet and regular potatoes, turnips, onions, cauliflower, etc. it was a lot of peeling. and i tried to see how many i could peel while holding my breath, and what that did to my motor skills. all i learned is that i really like to breathe and any activity in which i cannot breathe is not for me. by the end, i was weeping, "KRAKAUER wouldn't give up!! he would chop allllll the brussels sprouts!!!"

but from everything i have read of everest (note: two books) it is THE WORST. all of the reaching of the summit which should be time for celebration is always so anticlimactic. you can't stay up there very long because humans need to breathe and all; there is no fireplace and hot cocoa like at the top of the viennese alps, and then there is the small matter of DESCENDING!! all that bullshit and putting-up-with for ten seconds of "experience"?? i gave all that up in high school, thank you very much.

oh shit - i have class now. i will "review" more later...

okay, so i went to class. i learned some stuff. and i don't have much more to say about this. it is not as action-packed as peak, and a lot of it reads like KRAKAUER working through his personal demons and dealing with his culpability, but it is still interesting. i still think everest is unnecessary - it is like a hot fourteen year old - who needs that kind of temptation, right? oh, and also, this:



seriously. everest: who needs it?

come to my blog!

El 10 de Mayo de 1996 parecía el mejor día para alcanzar la cumbre de la montaña más alta del planeta, o eso pensaban los miembros de las expediciones que llevaban preparándose durante semanas. Una tormenta repentina, sin embargo, aisló a varios montañistas resultando en doce muertes.

Esta historia me ha dejado un poso enorme y me ha tenido absorbida y casi obsesionada con el tema.
Sin ser aficionada al montañismo cualquier persona puede llegar a sentir de una forma idealizada y utópica el magnetismo que puede suponer pensar en alcanzar la cima del Everest. Siendo racional, el principal motivo por el que quería leer esta crónica era otro: qué puede llevar a una persona conocedora de los riesgos que conlleva subir al Everest, a aceptar poner su cuerpo al límite.

Krakauer, que pertenecía a una de las expediciones, fue enviado como periodista para cronificar qué suponía alcanzar la cima de la montaña, aunque el reportaje resultó ser otro muy distinto al que esperaba... En este libro intenta explorar al detalle qué pudo ir mal, analizando de forma sistemática los pasos que se siguieron para intentar encontrar la cadena de posibles malas decisiones que sumadas a la mala suerte del temporal acabó en tragedia.
El libro transpira el shock que esa experiencia causó en el autor, la agonía y la culpabilidad de haber sobrevivido, la duda de si podría haber hecho algo más por salvar a sus compañeros, en unas condiciones extremísimas dónde ni cuerpo ni mente pueden funcionar como deberían.
El horror de ver las decisiones durísimas que tuvieron que tomarse en esas críticas horas (como dejar compañeros en la ladera vivos pero dándolos como causas perdidas para poder salvarse a uno mismo) es algo que sigue acompañando a los que sobrevivieron aquél día.

Le he dado la máxima puntuación por la experiencia que he vivido leyendo la crónica, pero soy muy consciente de que el punto de vista de Krakauer es PERSONAL y SUBJETIVO. Muchas de las personas que se mencionan fallecieron ese trágico día y es por lo tanto imposible aclarar algunas de las controversias que al largo de los años han surgido a raíz del punto de vista del autor.

Re-read June 2016

I have a suspicion that Krakauer might be a bit of a jerk in real life, and I will admit I sometimes wonder why many of his books have a strong me bit. Yet, he is an immensely talented writer. He took some heat for this book. I should note that I read the earlier addition, the paperback version of the book that came out in about year after the events, so the later afterword is not present. In this version at least, Krakauer doesn't seem too harsh about the socialite, noting that despite her attitude her fellow climbers, in particular man who he respects, respected her. Does she look like a saint? No, but I wouldn't call it a hatch job. He isn't particularly nice about describing some of his fellow climbers' skills, yet I think this is a human failing. He is as harsh about himself. And one does get the feeling that he blames himself. At the very least, the book is a good starting point for a discussion involving clients and climbers and whether that should even be an option for mountains like this one.

I got this book intending to give it to my brother, then I started it. I couldn't put it down.

Added 12/19/12 - Engrossing. Krakauer took some heat (too put it mildly) for his article. Also deals with the question of reporter and subject. Krakauer blames himself as much as anyone, so it does feel like a brutally honest book.

Though I understand that this might have some flaws, as it is told from one mans perspective, I thought this was harrowing, fascinating and well written, and I don't know how it could've been done any better.