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Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster

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Overview

When Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10, 1996, he hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours and was reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion. As he turned to begin his long, dangerous descent from 29,028 feet, twenty other climbers were still pushing doggedly toward the top. No one had noticed that the sky had begun to fill with clouds. Six hours later and 3,000 feet lower, in 70-knot winds and blinding snow, Krakauer collapsed in his tent, freezing, hallucinating from exhaustion and hypoxia, but safe. The following morning, he learned that six of his fellow climbers hadn't made it back to their camp and were desperately struggling for their lives. When the storm finally passed, five of them would be dead, and the sixth so horribly frostbitten that his right hand would have to be amputated.

Into Thin Air is the definitive account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed journalist and author of the bestseller Into the Wild. On assignment for Outside Magazine to report on the growing commercialization of the mountain, Krakauer, an accomplished climber, went to the Himalayas as a client of Rob Hall, the most respected high-altitude guide in the world. A rangy, thirty-five-year-old New Zealander, Hall had summited Everest four times between 1990 and 1995 and had led thirty-nine climbers to the top. Ascending the mountain in close proximity to Hall's team was a guided expedition led by Scott Fischer, a forty-year-old American with legendary strength and drive who had climbed the peak without supplemental oxygen in 1994. But neither Hall nor Fischer survived the rogue storm that struck in May 1996.

Krakauer examines what it is about Everest that has compelled so many people -- including himself -- to throw caution to the wind, ignore the concerns of loved ones, and willingly subject themselves to such risk, hardship, and expense. Written with emotional clarity and supported by his unimpeachable reporting, Krakauer's eyewitness account of what happened on the roof of the world is a singular achievement.

Into the Wild is available on audio, read by actor Campbell Scott.

Editorial Reviews

What set out to be a magazine article on top-of-the-line tours that promise safe ascents of Mt. Everest to amateur climbers has become a gripping story of a 1996 expedition gone awry and of the ensuing disaster that killed two top guides, a sherpa and several clients. "Climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain," writes Krakauer (Into the Wild). "And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium and suffering... most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace." High-altitude climbers are an eccentric breed?Olympian idealists, dreamers, consummate sportsmen, egomaniacs and thrill-seekers. Excerpts from the writings of several of the best-known of them, including Sir Edmund Hillary, kick off Krakauer's intense reports on each leg of the ill-fated expedition. His own descriptions of the splendid landscape are exhilarating. Survival on Mt. Everest in the "Dead Zone" above 25,000 feet demands incredible self-reliance, responsible guides, supplemental oxygen and ideal weather conditions. The margin of error is nil and marketplace priorities can lead to disaster; and so Krakauer criticizes the commercialization of mountaineering. But while his reports of guides' bad judgments are disturbing, they evoke in him and in the reader more compassion than wrath, for, in the Dead Zone, experts lose their wits nearly as easily as novices. The intensity of the tragedy is haunting, and Krakauer's graphic writing drives it home: one survivor's face "was hideously swollen; splotches of deep, ink-black frostbite covered his nose and cheeks." On the sacred mountain Sagarmatha, the Nepalese name for Everest, the frozen corpses of fallen climbers spot the windswept routes; they will never be buried, but in this superb adventure tale they have found a fitting monument. Author tour. (May) -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer is the preeminent writer of narrative non-fiction. In his latest work, Where Men Win Glory, he delivers a stunning, eloquent account of a remarkable young man's haunting journey. Mr. Krakrauer's numerous bestsellers include Under the Banner of Heaven, Into the Wild, and Into Thin Air. He is editor of the Modern Library Exploration series.

Customer Reviews

  • 5 stars out of 5Riveting

    Posted October 26, 2009 by US Kiwi, Arizona

    I had heard a little about this story through the media but did not know a book had been written. This is the most incredible story of courage, tenacity and devastating loss. You will not be able to put this book down. It covers the intimate details of life and ultimately death of some amazing people. Life is about choices after all.....

  • 5 stars out of 5Everest: When it All Goes Wrong

    Posted July 24, 2009 by Michael Sheas, Arlington Heights, IL.

    This is an amazing first-hand account of the 1996 Mt. Everest Disaster that reads more like an adventure novel than non-fiction.

    John Krakauer's words are so sharp with detail and his accounts of events so vivid that I don't know how much more harrowing this could have been unless you were there.

    The author takes you trekking through Nepal's wilderness, all the while introducing you to an interesting cast of characters, full on with protagonists, antagonists, and those who just seemingly got in the way.

    This book really puts you with them on the side of the mountain, climbing through otherworldly ice-fields, feeling the power of hurricane force winds on the side of the tent, really giving you a sense of just how amazing, difficult, thrilling and ultimately unforgiving nature can be of the smallest of mistakes when attempting to reach the roof of the world.

  • 5 stars out of 5Unbelievable true story.

    Posted April 05, 2009 by JHanna, Toronto, Canada

    John Krakauer writes so well that readers can't help but feel they're right there with him on the mountain. This recount of one of the most disastrous climbs of Mt. Everest provides great insight into the sport of mountaineering. The reader is taken through the steps that climbers go through in order to prepare them to tackle the tallest mountain in the world. One really gets a sense of the science and 'luck" factors that climbers are exposed to in their desire to reach the top .

    Months are taken to prepare to climb Everest and only when conditions on the mountain are safe; are climbers able to try and attempt to make the summit. Making the summit is the ultimate goal and not every expedition ends in a successful summit experience. Clients pay tens of thousands of dollars to climb Everest so, when you run a climbing business, there's incredible pressure to make sure your clients get to the top. This push for the top was the fatal flaw in 1999.

    "Into Thin Air" is quite a fantastic first hand account of what happened, what went wrong and why so many perished. The story is also one of incredible courage strength and endurance. For those who survived it was a miracle, for those who perished, a shame.

Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

2.56 MB

Number of Pages

432

eBook ISBN

9780679462712

Awards

  • American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) Award
  • American Library Association Notable Books
  • Black-Eyed Susan Book Award
  • Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award
  • Garden State Teen Book Award
  • Los Angeles Times Book Prizes
  • National Book Critics Circle Awards
  • New York Times Editors' Choice
  • Pacific Northwest Bookseller Awards
  • Pulitzer Prize
  • School Library Journal Best Books of the Year

Excerpt from: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

In March 1996, Outside Magazine sent me to Nepal to participate in, and write about, a guided ascent of Mount Everest. I went as one of eight clients on an expedition led by a well-known guide from New Zealand named Rob Hall. On May 10 I arrived on top of the mountain, but the summit came at a terrible cost.

Among my five teammates who reached the top, four, including Hall, perished in a rogue storm that blew in without warning while we were still high on the peak. By the time I'd descended to Base Camp nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more lives would be lost before the month was out.

The expedition left me badly shaken, and the article was difficult to write. Nevertheless, five weeks after I returned from Nepal I delivered a manuscript to Outside, and it was published in the September issue of the magazine. Upon its completion I attempted to put Everest out of my mind and get on with my life, but that turned out to be impossible. Through a fog of messy emotions, I continued trying to make sense of what had happened up there, and I obsessively mulled the circumstances of my companions' deaths.

The Outside piece was as accurate as I could make it under the circumstances, but my deadline had been unforgiving, the sequence of events had been frustratingly complex, and the memories of the survivors had been badly distorted by exhaustion, oxygen depletion, and shock. At one point during my research I asked three other people to recount an incident all four of us had witnessed high on the mountain, and one of us could agree on such crucial facts as the time, what had been said, or even who had been present. Within days after the Outside article went to press, I discovered that a few of the details I'd reported were in error. Most were minor inaccuracies of the sort that inevitably creep into works of deadline journalism, but one of my blunders was in no sense minor, and it had a devastating impact on the friends and family of one of the victims.

Only slightly less disconcerting than the article's factual errors was the material that necessarily had to be omitted for lack of space. Mark Bryant, the editor of Outside, and Larry Burke, the publisher, had given me an extraordinary amount of room to tell the story: they ran the piece at 17,000 words -- four or five times as long as a typical magazine feature. Even so, I felt that it was much too abbreviated to do justice to the tragedy. The Everest climb had rocked my life to its core, and it became desperately important for me to record the events in complete detail, unconstrained by a limited number of column inches. This book is the fruit of that compulsion.

The staggering unreliability of the human mind at high altitude made the research problematic. To avoid relying excessively on my own perceptions, I interviewed most of the protagonists at great length and on multiple occasions. When possible I also corroborated details with radio logs maintained by people at Base Camp, where clear thought wasn't in such short supply. Readers familiar with the Outside article may notice discrepancies between certain details (primarily matters of time) reported in the magazine and those reported in the book; the revisions reflect new information that has come to light since publication of the magazine piece.

Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; 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. Their advice was sound, but in the end I ignored it -- mostly because what happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life.

It hasn't, of course. Moreover, I agree that readers are often poorly served when an author writes as an act of catharsis, as I have done here. 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. I wanted my account to have a raw, ruthless sort of honesty that seemed in danger of leaching away with the passage of time and the dissipation of anguish.

Some of the same people who warned me against writing hastily had also cautioned me against going to Everest in the first place. There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act -- a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.

The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.