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into thin air A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF THE MOUNT EVEREST DISASTER 
| go to excerpt | "Into Thin Air"
+ + + + + + + + Reviewed by Morris Dye in his new book about last year's well-publicized climbing disaster
on Mount Everest, writer and accomplished alpinist Jon Krakauer concedes
that he was much too close to the events of May 10, 1996, to offer a
wholly objective account. The reason: Krakauer himself narrowly escaped
death that day when a sudden storm on the upper mountain claimed the
lives of eight climbers, half of them members of the author's own
commercially guided summit team.
Krakauer had traveled to Nepal in March 1996 on assignment for
Outside magazine to report on the boom in high-priced guide services
offering relatively inexperienced climbers a chance to stand atop the
world's highest peak. The article that appeared six months later in the
September issue of Outside told a horrifying tale of bad luck and bad
judgment, exacerbated by the peculiar dynamics of client-guide relations
in the fiercely competitive business of high-altitude guiding. In one
particularly heart-wrenching passage, Krakauer described a conversation
between guide Rob Hall and his wife, Jan Arnold, at home in New Zealand.
Hall, the leader of Krakauer's summit team, was alone on the South
Summit, slowly freezing to death, when radio operators patched
transmissions from Hall's hand-held radio through a satellite link to
Christchurch. "I love you," he said to her. "Sleep well, my sweetheart.
Please don't worry too much." Those were the last words of a man who
died trying to save a handful of amateur climbers who had paid him
$65,000 a head to be escorted to the summit and back again.
Still haunted by the experience and troubled by some painful factual
errors that appeared in the Outside article (which was honored recently
with a National Magazine Award), Krakauer set out to correct his
mistakes and expand the article into a book, conducting further
interviews with the survivors and grappling with his own
altitude-impaired recollections. "The Everest climb had rocked my life
to its core," he writes, "and it became desperately important for me to
record the events in complete detail."
The resulting narrative, shipped to bookstores just one year after
its author returned from Nepal, feels somehow incomplete, despite
meticulous research and a self-conscious struggle for objectivity. The
rough authenticity of the narrative is powerful, to be sure, but "Into
Thin Air" ultimately lacks the insight and persuasiveness of Krakauer's
previous book, "Into the Wild," the deeply engaging and
thought-provoking tale of a young adventurer who died in the Alaskan
wilderness while pursuing a dream similar in many respects to the dream
that draws climbers to Everest.
Reading "Into Thin Air" is like witnessing a bad traffic accident in
slow motion: All the gory details are visible, but it's difficult to
make sense of the carnage. "Several authors and editors I respect
counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did," Krakauer
acknowledges in the introduction. "They urged me to wait two or three
years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to
gain some crucial perspective. But I hoped something would be gained by
spilling my soul in the calamity's immediate aftermath, in the roil and
torment of the moment." True enough, but I'm already looking forward to
the book Krakauer will write once he has gained the "crucial
perspective" that will allow him to apply the extraordinary sensibility
of "Into the Wild" to his own brush with death on Everest. | e x c e r p t | Base Camp, May 6, 1996, 17,600 Feet BY JON KRAKAUER | We left Base Camp at 4:30 a.m. on May 6 to commence our summit bid. The top of Everest, two vertical miles above, seemed so impossibly distant that I tried to limit my thoughts to Camp Two, our destination for the day. By the time the first sunlight struck the glacier I was at 20,000 feet, in the maw of the Western Cwm (1), grateful that the Icefall was below me and that I would have to go through it only one more time, on the final trip down. I had been plagued by heat in the Cwm every time I'd traveled through it, and this trip was no exception. Climbing with Andy Harris at the front of the group, I continually stuffed snow under my hat and moved as fast as my legs and lungs would propel me, hoping to reach the shade of the tents before succumbing to the solar radiation. As the morning dragged on and the sun beat down, my head began to pound. My tongue swelled so much that it was difficult to breathe through my mouth, and I noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to think clearly. Andy and I dragged into Camp Two at 10:30 a.m. After I guzzled two liters of Gatorade my equilibrium returned. "It feels good to at last be on our way to the summit, yeah?" Andy inquired. He'd been laid low with various intestinal ailments for most of the expedition and was finally getting his strength back. A gifted tutor blessed with astonishing patience, he'd usually been assigned to watch over the slower clients at the back of the herd and was thrilled when Rob had turned him loose this morning to go out on point. As the junior guide on Hall's team, and the only one who'd never been on Everest, Andy was eager to prove himself to his seasoned colleagues. "I think we're actually gonna knock this big bastard off," he confided in me with a huge smile, staring up at the summit. Later that day, Göran Kropp, the twenty-nine-year-old Swedish soloist, passed Camp Two on his way down to Base Camp, looking utterly worked. On October 16, 1995, he had left Stockholm on a custom-built bicycle loaded with 240 pounds of gear, intending to travel round-trip from sea level in Sweden to the top of Everest entirely under his own power, without Sherpa support or bottled oxygen. It was an exceedingly ambitious goal, but Kropp had the credentials to pull it off: he'd been on six previous Himalayan expeditions and had made solo ascents of Broad Peak, Cho Oyu, and K2. During the 8,000-mile bike ride to Kathmandu, he was robbed by Romanian schoolchildren and assaulted by a crowd in Pakistan. In Iran, an irate motorcyclist broke a baseball bat over Kropp's (fortunately) helmeted head. He'd nevertheless arrived intact at the foot of Everest in early April with a film crew in tow, and immediately began making acclimatization trips up the lower mountain. Then, on Wednesday, May 1, he'd departed Base Camp for the top. Kropp reached his high camp at 26,000 feet on the South Col on Thursday afternoon and left for the top the following morning just after midnight. Everybody at Base Camp stayed close by their radios throughout the day, anxiously awaiting word of his progress. Helen Wilton hung a sign in our mess tent that read, "Go, Göran, Go!" For the first time in months almost no wind blasted the summit, but the snow on the upper mountain was thigh deep, making for slow, exhausting progress. Kropp bulled his way relentlessly upward through the drifts, however, and by two o'clock Thursday afternoon he'd reached 28,700 feet, just below the South Summit. But even though the top was no more than sixty minutes above, he decided to turn around, believing that he would be too tired to descend safely if he climbed any higher. "To turn around that close to the summit ...," Hall mused with a shake of his head on May 6 as Kropp plodded past Camp Two on his way down the mountain. "That showed incredibly good judgment on young Göran's part. I'm impressed -- considerably more impressed, actually, than if he'd continued climbing and made the top." Over the previous month, Rob had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turn-around time on our summit day -- in our case it would probably be 1:00 p.m., or 2:00 at the very latest -- and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top. "With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill," Hall observed. "The trick is to get back down alive." Hall's easygoing facade masked an intense desire to succeed -- which he defined in the fairly simple terms of getting as many clients as possible to the summit. To ensure success, he paid meticulous attention to detail: the health of the Sherpas, the efficiency of the solar-powered electrical system, the sharpness of his clients' crampons. Hall loved being a guide, and it pained him that some celebrated climbers -- including but not limited to Sir Edmund Hillary -- didn't appreciate how difficult guiding was, or give the profession the respect he felt it deserved. + + + + + +
Rob decreed that Tuesday, May 7, would be a rest day, so we got up late and sat around Camp Two, buzzing with nervous anticipation over the imminent summit assault. I fiddled with my crampons and some other gear, then tried to read a Carl Hiaasen paperback but was so focused on the climb that I kept scanning the same sentences over and over without the words registering. Eventually I put the book down, snapped a few photos of Doug posing with a flag the Kent schoolkids had asked him to carry up the peak, and pumped him for detailed information about the difficulties of the summit pyramid, which he remembered well from the year before. "By the time we get to the top," he frowned, "I guarantee that you're gonna be one hurtin' hombre." Doug was hell-bent on joining the summit push, even though his throat was still bothering him and his strength seemed to be at a low ebb. As he put it, "I've put too much of myself into this mountain to quit now, without giving it everything I've got." Late that afternoon Fischer walked through our camp with a clenched jaw, moving uncharacteristically slowly toward his own tents. He usually managed to maintain a relentlessly upbeat attitude; one of his favorite utterances was, "If you're bumming out, you're not gonna get to the top, so as long as we're up here we might as well make a point of grooving." At the moment, however, Scott did not appear to be grooving in the slightest; instead he looked anxious and extremely tired. Because he'd encouraged his clients to move up and down the mountain independently during the acclimatization period, he ended up having to make a number of hurried, unplanned excursions between Base Camp and the upper camps when several clients experienced problems and needed to be escorted down. He'd already made special trips to assist Tim Madsen, Peter Schoening, and Dale Kruse. And now, on what should have been a badly needed day and a half of rest, Fischer had just been forced to make a hasty round-trip from Camp Two to Base Camp and back to help his good friend Kruse after he came down with what appeared to be a relapse of HACE. Fischer had arrived at Camp Two around noon the previous day, just after Andy and me, having climbed from Base Camp well ahead of his clients; he'd directed guide Anatoli Boukreev to bring up the rear, stay close to the group, and keep an eye on everybody. But Boukreev ignored Fischer's instructions: instead of climbing with the team, he slept late, took a shower, and departed Base Camp some five hours behind the last of the clients. Thus, when Kruse collapsed at 20,000 feet with a splitting headache, Boukreev was nowhere in the vicinity, compelling Fischer and Beidleman to rush down from Camp Two to handle the emergency as soon as word of Kruse's condition arrived via climbers coming up the Western Cwm. Not long after Fischer reached Kruse and began the troublesome descent to Base Camp, they encountered Boukreev at the top of the Icefall, ascending alone, and Fischer harshly reprimanded the guide for shirking his responsibilities. 'Yeah," Kruse remembers, "Scott laid into Toli pretty good. He wanted to know why he was so far behind everybody -- why he wasn't climbing with the team." According to Kruse and other clients of Fischer's, tension between Fischer and Boukreev had been building throughout the expedition. Fischer paid Boukreev $25,000 -- an unusually generous fee for guiding Everest (most other guides on the mountain were paid $10,000 to $15,000; skilled climbing Sherpas received only $1,400 to $2,500), and Boukreev's performance hadn't been meeting his expectations. "Toli was very strong and a very good technical climber," Kruse explains, "but he had poor social skills. He didn't watch out for other people. He just wasn't a team player. Earlier, I'd told Scott that I didn't want to have to climb with Toli high on the mountain, because I doubted that I'd be able to count on him when it really mattered." The underlying problem was that Boukreev's notion of his responsibilities differed substantially from Fischer's. As a Russian, Boukreev came from a tough, proud, hardscrabble climbing culture that did not believe in coddling the weak. In Eastern Europe guides were trained to act more like Sherpas -- hauling loads, fixing ropes, establishing the route -- and less like caretakers. Tall and blond, with handsome Slavic features, Boukreev was one of the most accomplished high-altitude climbers in the world, with twenty years of experience in the Himalaya, including two ascents of Everest without supplemental oxygen. And in the course of his distinguished career he'd formulated a number of unorthodox, very strongly held opinions about how the mountain should be ascended. He was quite outspoken in his belief that it was a mistake for guides to pamper their clients. "If client cannot climb Everest without big help from guide," Boukreev told me, "this client should not be on Everest. Otherwise there can be big problems up high." But Boukreev's refusal or inability to play the role of a conventional guide in the Western tradition exasperated Fischer. It also forced him and Beidleman to shoulder a disproportionate share of the caretaker duties for their group, and by the first week in May the effort had taken an unmistakable toll on Fischer's health. After arriving in Base Camp with the ailing Kruse on the evening of May 6, Fischer made two satellite phone calls to Seattle in which he complained bitterly to his business partner, Karen Dickinson, and to his publicist, Jane Bromet, (2) about Boukreev's intransigence. Neither woman imagined that these would be the last conversations they would ever have with Fischer.
Jon Krakauer, author of three books, including "Into the Wild," is a contributing editor of Outside magazine. He and his wife live in Seattle.
1 The Western Cwm, pronounced koom, was named by George Leigh Mallory, who first saw it during the initial Everest expedition of 1921 from the Lho La, a high pass on the border between Nepal and Tibet. Cwm is a Welsh term for valley or cirque.
2 Bromet had left Base Camp in mid-April and returned to Seattle, whence she continued to file Internet dispatches about Fischer's expedition for Outside Online; she relied on regular phone updates from Fischer as the primary source for her reports.
Copyright © 1997 by Jon Krakauer. + + + + + + + + + + + + A review of this book by Charles Taylor can be found in Salon's Sneak Peeks. Select + + + + + + + + + + + + |
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