Review: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Please Note: There will be spoilers here in this review.  I don't know if I can adequately review it without putting in some spoilers.  So.  If you haven't read this book yet, and plan to in the future (and I HIGHLY recommend you do!), then I would close your browser and skip this review for now.

In 1995, freelance writer and adventure-seeker Jon Krakauer was selected by Outsider magazine to travel to the slopes of Mt. Everest, the highest mountain in the world, and write a feature article about the "consumerization" of mountain climbing, along with its effect on the world's tallest mountain.  This mission would require Krakauer to leave his home and travel to "Base Camp", the lowest of the camps on Everest, and observe guides and their "clients", the wealthy men and women who were paying dearly ($26,000  per head) to be helped up to the summit.  Outsider magazine, sensing a story among the hype of the wealthy elite to climb Everest (even the ones who were grossly unsuited for it, except for the small detail that they had the cash to blow), asked Krakauer to report on it.

Krakauer, a mountaineer himself who had dreamed of Everest since childhood, asked if the magazine would pay for him to "take the story to the top", so to speak, and climb the mountain to the summit, following the paths of his guide, famous Everest mountaineer Rob Hall, and the other "clients" who would be summitting from all over the world.  Outsider accepted his proposal, and Krakauer set out with a team of climbers (guides, professional mountaineers, rookie mountaineers who were paying out the nose to be guided up Everest, and the Sherpas who were employed to help) to spend six months acclimatizing and summitting Mt. Everest, in early spring of 1996.  The "final summitting" happened on May 10th, 1996.

What happened in the twenty-four hours in which these men and women summitted Mt. Everest has become famous as one of the greatest tragedies to ever happen in mountain-climbing history.  A hurricane-force storm came upon them, and through a series of incidents that, taken separately, would have not been much cause for alarm, together caused an unspeakable tragedy that haunts some of them to this day.  Eight climbers died in a single day on the mountain, fifteen in all in the month of May, 1996.  Those who survived were left stunned and reeling, wondering how such a thing could have happened.

Into Thin Air is a large expansion on the article that Krakauer wrote (read it here; I did before I read the book), was largely published, as he explains, in an attempt to get some closure on what had happened.  Krakauer wrote his original article when he still did not have all the facts about what had happened to people he had considered teammates and friends, and he apologizes for the gaps and errors in the original article.  Attempting to set the record straight, he gives a blow-by-blow account of what happened in the weeks leading up to the disaster, and the great tragedy of May 10-11, 1996.  His feelings of guilt (however justified or misplaced is left up to the reader to decide) are difficult to read at times.  I could tell as I read that he was writing while still dealing with an incredible sense of futility and guilt regarding the accident, when as a "client" and not a guide, it was not technically his responsibility to be out saving lives.  However, Krakauer illustrates that he possesses a sense of morality and obligation to his fellow man that some other mountaineers (such as those who left climber David Sharp to die on Everest ten years later) seem to desperately lack.

I finished Into Thin Air with a sense of hopelessness that I had not expected.  Krakauer's original mission in writing the article for Outsider was to create commentary on the booming business of experienced guides charging wealthy clients (most of whom had almost zero experience and no business whatsoever climbing the highest mountains on earth) to literally drag them up to the summit.  Krakauer argues that the use of bottled oxygen (without which, only the most experienced climbers could manage to summit) creates a "security blanket" for those who are not experienced enough to go without it, and keeps them flocking to and paying guides to bring them up to the top.  Without experienced people to lead them, and without the use of bottled oxygen, Krakauer argues, those who have no business being on Everest would more than likely get discouraged and quit the climb far before they reached the so-called "death zone" (altitudes higher than 8,000 meters where it is impossible to sustain life for long periods of time).  But with the high marketability of Everest and its location between two of the poorer nations of the world, Krakauer reports sadly, it is unlikely that either of these rules will be implemented any time soon.  Until that time, any rookie climber (and indeed, some of the more experienced ones) will still remain in danger every time they attempt to conquer Everest.

I put this book on my poll on The Nest Book Club, asking which of five books I should read next, and it was the clear winner.  I would like to thank those fine ladies for recommending it to me, as well as my father for loaning me his copy with the assurance that "It is one of the best books that (he has) ever read."  It is an amazing, although horrifying at times, tome, really driving home the point that human failing and mortality is nothing versus the elements of this world.

Rating: *****

EDIT: After three days of being unable to get this book out of my head, I have changed my original rating of four-and-a-half stars to five stars.  This was not a decision lightly made (I'm not in the habit of giving out five-star reviews), but I think it is only fair to Krakauer and to his book that I give the rating I feel it more than deserves.  Phenomenal.