UBC: Krakauer, Into Thin Air

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



If this book doesn't cure you of wanting to climb Mt. Everest, nothing will.

I say that not only because the book is the story of the disaster that befell climbing parties on Everest in 1996, resulting in the deaths of three guides and two clients, but because Krakauer's vivid description of the experience of climbing Everest makes it clear that it is miserable, grueling, and agonizingly painful--and that's if nothing goes wrong.

Krakauer writes about the tragedy very movingly. His technique is nothing new--the bifurcation between past!Krakauer, who doesn't have any suspicions of what's coming, and present!Krakauer, who can see all the mistakes and warning signs and, like someone in a nightmare, wants nothing more than to be able to yell at past!Krakauer, pay attention HERE! But of course he can't. His foreshadowing--and maybe this is what makes it work--is not characterological. He talks about his friends Andy Harris and Doug Hansen without pointing toward their deaths. Although Rob Hall and Scott Fischer's characters bleed into the situation because they were the expedition leaders, the decision makers, but Krakauer makes it very clear that you can't point at any decision they made or action they took and say, this is why five people died. To a large degree, the only reason any of the disaster happened was that all of these people had made a common decision to climb Mt. Everest. People die doing that because it's an extremely dangerous thing to do.

This is not to say that Krakauer doesn't think mistakes were made. He does, and he says so. But he starts with himself. His own (self-perceived) culpability is maybe the center of the book, the whole thing an exercise in Krakauer trying to figure out why he made the decision he did, especially the decisions he believe led in part to Andy Harris' death.

The book is also a meditation on why people climb Mt. Everest, from the explorers to the people who feel they have to pit themselves against the mountain to the tourists. He's never entirely explicit about it, but there's a sub-theme of the danger involved in the obsession with, not climbing Mt. Everest, but "summitting" it. Reaching the summit. The guided expeditions led by Hall and Fischer (and a whole bunch of other people) had as their goal summitting Mt. Everest, getting as many people as were willing to pay their $65,000 to the summit as safely and easily as possible. (Hall's idol Sir Edmund Hillary was contemptuous of this practice, which crushed Hall, but didn't change his mind.) Summitting is a very different enterprise than climbing Mt. Everest--in fact, as Krakauer, an avid climber himself, notes with some dismay, there's very little climbing-qua-climbing involved. One of the things Krakauer thinks went wrong was the culture, the relationship of guides and clients as opposed to the relationship of climbing partners: "Andy and I were very similar in terms of physical ability and technical expertise; had we been climbing together in a nonguided situation as equal partners, it's inconceivable to me that I would have neglected to recognize his plight. But on this expedition he had been cast in the role of invincible guide, there to look after me and the other clients; we had been specifically indoctrinated not to question our guides' judgment" (188). He acknowledges in other passages the reason for that "indoctrination," the fact that an expedition like that one cannot be a democracy, with clients arguing the guides' call, but in reading this book, I couldn't help feeling that both sides were correct: arguing on Mt. Everest is going to be pretty much synonymous with death, but there are so many things that can go wrong, so quickly, and so many of them have to do with oxygen starvation of the brain, that, yeah, Krakauer's right, the idea that guides are "invincible" is maybe just as deadly.

And Hall's boast that he could get anyone up Mt. Everest may have been, in the most Greek-tragedy-worthy style, the reason that he and Hansen were caught by the storm. Hansen had had to give up just short of the summit the year before, and Hall, having persuaded him to try again, was bound and determined that he would make it. Krakauer saw Hall talk Hansen out of turning back earlier in the day, and the last people to see Hall and Hansen alive saw Hall reaching the summit with Hansen's arm slung over his shoulder. Hall broke his own strict rules, and he and Hansen died for it.

This is a sad book and a horrifying book, a book that raises many more questions than it answers. In the end, Krakauer can't explain to his own satisfaction what happened. He can only leave this testament to the fact that it did.



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