- Krakauer, Jon.
Into Thin Air.
New York: Anchor Books, [1997] 1999.
ISBN 0-385-49478-5.
-
It's amazing how much pain and suffering some people will endure in
order to have a perfectly awful time. In 1996, the author joined a
guided expedition to climb Mount Everest, on assignment by
Outside magazine to report on the growing
commercialisation of Everest, with guides taking numerous people, many
inexperienced in alpinism, up the mountain every season. On May 10th,
1996, he reached the summit where, exhausted and debilitated by
hypoxia and other effects of extreme altitude (although using
supplementary oxygen), he found “I just couldn't summon the
energy to care” (p. 7). This feeling of
“whatever” while standing on the roof of the world was,
nonetheless, the high point of the experience which quickly turned
into a tragic disaster. While the climbers were descending from
the summit to their highest camp, a storm, not particularly violent by
Everest standards, reduced visibility to near zero and delayed
progress until many climbers had exhausted their supplies of bottled oxygen.
Of the six members of the expedition Krakauer joined who reached the
summit, four died on the mountain, including the experienced leader of
the team. In all, eight people died as a result of that storm,
including the leader of another expedition which reached the summit
that day.
Before joining the Everest expedition, the author had had
extensive technical climbing experience but had never
climbed as high as the Base Camp on Mount Everest: 17,600
feet. Most of the clients of his and other expeditions had
far less mountaineering experience than the author. The
wisdom of encouraging people with limited qualifications but
large bank balances to undertake a potentially deadly adventure
underlies much of the narrative: we encounter a New York socialite
having a Sherpa haul a satellite telephone up the mountain to
stay in touch from the highest camp. The supposed bond between
climbers jointly confronting the hazards of a mountain at high
altitude is called into question on several occasions: a Japanese
expedition ascending from the Tibetan side via the Northeast Ridge
passed three disabled climbers from an Indian
expedition and continued on to the summit without offering to share
food, oxygen, or water, nor to attempt a rescue: all of the
Indians died on the mountain.
This is a disturbing account of adventure at the very edge of
personal endurance, and the difficult life-and-death choices
people make under such circumstances. A 1999 postscript in this
paperback edition is a rebuttal to the alternative presentation
of events in The Climb, which
I have not read.
November 2007 