Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Everest Disaster

by Jon Krakauer

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.

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world. José Ortega y Gasset

Why did veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, ushering a gaggle of relatively inexperienced amateurs—each of whom had paid as much as $65,000 to be taken safely up Everest—into an apparent death trap?

the forty-seven-year-old Namba was forty minutes away from becoming the oldest woman to climb Everest and the second Japanese woman to reach the highest point on each continent, the so-called Seven Summits.

in 1985, when Dick Bass—a wealthy fifty-five-year-old Texan with limited climbing experience—was ushered to the top of Everest by an extraordinary young climber named David Breashears, an event that was accompanied by a blizzard of uncritical media attention.

In the words of Michael Kennedy, the editor of Climbing magazine, “To be invited on an Everest expedition was an honor earned only after you served a long apprenticeship on lower peaks, and to actually reach the summit elevated a climber to the upper firmament of mountaineering stardom.”

Bass’s ascent changed all that. In bagging Everest, he became the first person to climb all of the Seven Summits,* a feat that brought him worldwide renown, spurred a swarm of other weekend climbers to follow in his guided bootprints, and rudely pulled Everest into the postmodern era.

As an avid student of mountaineering history, I knew that Everest had killed more than 130 people since the British first visited the mountain in 1921—approximately one death for every four climbers who’d reached the summit—and that many of those who died had been far stronger and possessed vastly more high-altitude experience than I.

Andy’s palpable hunger for climbing, his unalloyed enthusiasm for the mountains, made me wistful for the period in my own life when climbing was the most important thing imaginable, when I charted the course of my existence in terms of mountains I’d ascended and those I hoped one day to ascend.

So, you have a thirst for adventure! Perhaps you dream of visiting seven continents or standing on top of a tall mountain. Most of us never dare act on our dreams and scarcely venture to share them or admit to great inner yearnings.

By 1996 Hall was charging $65,000 a head to guide clients to the top of the world. By any measure this is a lot of money—it equals the mortgage on my Seattle home—and the quoted price did not include airfare to Nepal or personal equipment. No company’s fee was higher—indeed, some of his competitors charged a third as much.

Mike Groom, the expedition’s third guide. A thirty-three-year-old Australian with carrot-colored hair and the lean build of a marathon runner, Groom was a Brisbane plumber who worked as a guide only occasionally.

But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad. . . . Everest has attracted its share of men like these. Their mountaineering experience varied from none at all to very slight—certainly none of them had the kind of experience which would make an ascent of Everest a reasonable goal. Three things they all had in common: faith in themselves, great determination, and endurance. Walt Unsworth Everest

But despite the Sherpas’ laughter (to say nothing of their own notoriously libertine habits), they fundamentally disapproved of sex between unmarried couples on the divine flanks of Sagarmatha. Whenever the weather would turn nasty, one or another Sherpa was apt to point up at the clouds boiling heavenward and earnestly declare, “Somebody has been sauce-making. Make bad luck. Now storm is coming.”

The goddess Chomolungma, they claimed, doesn’t tolerate “jiggy jiggy”—anything unclean—on her sacred mountain.

Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I’d been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace.

less virtuous, motives came into play, as well: minor celebrity, career advancement, ego massage, ordinary bragging rights, filthy lucre.

My first impression of Beck had not been favorable: a back-slapping Dallas pathologist

And what I initially took to be arrogance was looking more and more like exuberance.

Lou Kasischke, the lawyer from Bloomfield Hills; in Yasuko Namba, the quiet Japanese woman who ate noodles every morning for breakfast; and in John Taske, the fifty-six-year-old anesthesiologist from Brisbane who took up climbing after retiring from the army.

“I discovered that I couldn’t really speak to civilians,” he continued. “My marriage fell apart. All I could see was this long dark tunnel closing in, ending in infirmity, old age, and death. Then I started to climb, and the sport provided most of what had been missing for me in civvy street—the challenge, the camaraderie, the sense of mission.”

Camp Four squatted on a patch of barren ground surrounded by more than a thousand discarded oxygen canisters.* If there is a more desolate, inhospitable habitation anywhere on the planet, I hope never to see it.

Depending on each person’s acclimatization and physiological makeup, we would still be able to function above the South Col—but not well, and not for long. We would instantly become more vulnerable to HAPE, HACE, hypothermia, impaired judgment, and frostbite. The risk of dying would skyrocket.

Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well.

This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.

then asked Andy to return the favor by turning off my regulator in order to conserve my gas until the Step cleared. He mistakenly opened the valve instead of closing it, however, and ten minutes later all my oxygen was gone.

In fact, the only people to reach the summit before 2:00 P.M. were Boukreev, Harris, Beidleman, Adams, Schoening, and me; if Fischer and Hall had been true to their pre-arranged rules, everyone else would have turned back before the top.

Sandy Pittman appeared over the final rise about 2:10, slightly ahead of Charlotte Fox, Lopsang Jangbu, Tim Madsen, and Lene Gammelgaard.

Rob Hall, Mike Groom, and Yasuko Namba reached the summit around this time, too, and Hall radioed Helen Wilton at Base Camp to give her the good news.

But Doug Hansen wasn’t just below the summit at that point, as Hall believed, nor was Fischer. It would in fact be 3:40 before Fischer reached the top, and Hansen wouldn’t get there until after 4:00 P.M.

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale. Robert Falcon Scott, in “Message to the Public,” penned just prior to his death in Antarctica on March 29, 1912, from Scott’s Last Expedition

Hall’s obligatory turn-around time had come and gone a full two hours earlier. Given the guide’s conservative, exceedingly methodical nature, many of his colleagues have expressed puzzlement at this uncharacteristic lapse of judgment.

Exactly one year earlier, Hall had turned Hansen around on the South Summit at 2:30 P.M., and to be denied so close to the top was a crushing disappointment to Hansen.

In any case, Hall did not turn Hansen around at 2:00 P.M.—or, for that matter, at 4:00, when he met his client just below the top. Instead, according to Lopsang, Hall placed Hansen’s arm around his neck and assisted the weary client up the final forty feet to the summit. They stayed only a minute or two, then turned to begin the long descent.

At 5:30, as Lopsang left the South Summit to resume his descent, he turned to see Harris—who must have been severely debilitated, if his condition when I’d seen him on the South Summit two hours earlier was any indication—plodding slowly up the summit ridge to assist Hall and Hansen. It was an act of heroism that would cost Harris his life.

Lopsang left Fischer and Gau on a ledge 1,200 feet above the South Col and fought his way down through the storm.

Around midnight, nevertheless, he made it to safety. “I go to Anatoli tent,” reported Lopsang. “I tell to Anatoli, ‘Please, you go up, Scott is very sick, he cannot walk. Then I go to my tent, just fall asleep, sleep like dead person.”

A little later, Mackenzie asked Rob how Hansen was doing. “Doug,” Hall replied, “is gone.” That was all he said, and it was the last mention he ever made of Hansen. On May 23, when David Breashears and Ed Viesturs reached the summit, they would find no sign of Hansen’s body; they did, however, find an ice ax planted about fifty vertical feet above the South Summit, along a very exposed section of ridge where the fixed ropes came to an end. It’s quite possible that Hall and/or Harris managed to get Hansen down the ropes to this point, only to have him lose his footing and fall 7,000 feet down the sheer Southwest Face, leaving his ice ax jammed into the ridge where he slipped. But this, too, is merely conjecture.

the fact that another ice ax found on the South Summit was positively identified as Andy’s, we can be reasonably sure he was at the South Summit with Hall on the night of May 10. Beyond that, however, virtually nothing is known about how the young guide met his end.

Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality.”

At 4:35 P.M., Burleson was standing outside the tents when he noticed someone walking slowly toward camp with a peculiar, stiff-kneed gait. “Hey, Pete,” he called to Athans. “Check this out. Somebody’s coming into camp.” The person’s bare right hand, naked to the frigid wind and grotesquely frostbitten, was outstretched in a kind of odd, frozen salute. Whoever it was reminded Athans of a mummy in a low-budget horror film. As the mummy lurched into camp, Burleson realized that it was none other than Beck Weathers, somehow risen from the dead.

At 3:00 P.M., as I was drinking a cup of tea, six Sherpas hustled a dazed-looking Makalu Gau into the tent and the doctors sprang into action.

I’d always known that climbing mountains was a high-risk pursuit. I accepted that danger was an essential component of the game—without it, climbing would be little different from a hundred other trifling diversions. It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.

My actions—or failure to act—played a direct role in the death of Andy Harris. And while Yasuko Namba lay dying on the South Col, I was a mere 350 yards away, huddled inside a tent, oblivious to her struggle, concerned only with my own safety. The stain this has left on my psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a few months of grief and guilt-ridden self-reproach.

Klev said that he, too, felt awful about the loss of so many lives, but unlike me, he had no “survivor’s guilt.” He explained, “Out on the Col that night, I used up everything I had trying to save myself and the people with me. By the time we made it back to the tents I had absolutely nothing left. I’d frostbitten one cornea and was practically blind. I was hypothermic, delirious, and shivering uncontrollably. It was terrible losing Yasuko, but I’ve made peace with myself over it, because I know in my heart that there was nothing more I could have done to save her. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. It was a bad storm. In the condition you were in at the time, what could you have possibly done for her?” Perhaps nothing, I concurred. But in contrast to Schoening, I’ll never be sure. And the enviable peace of which he speaks eludes me.

Certainly time had as much to do with the tragedy as the weather, and ignoring the clock can’t be passed off as an act of God. Delays at the fixed lines were foreseeable and eminently preventable. Predetermined turn-around times were egregiously ignored.

Extending the turn-around times may have been influenced to some degree by the rivalry between Fischer and Hall. Fischer had never guided Everest before 1996. From a business standpoint, there was tremendous pressure on him to be successful. He was exceedingly motivated to get clients to the summit, especially a celebrity client like Sandy Hill Pittman. Likewise, having failed to get anybody to the top in 1995, it would have been bad for Hall’s business if he failed again in 1996—especially if Fischer succeeded.

It can’t be stressed strongly enough, moreover, that Hall, Fischer, and the rest of us were forced to make such critical decisions while severely impaired with hypoxia. In pondering how this disaster could have occurred, it is imperative to remember that lucid thought is all but impossible at 29,000 feet.

Four of my teammates died not so much because Rob Hall’s systems were faulty—indeed, nobody’s were better—but because on Everest it is the nature of systems to break down with a vengeance.

This is an activity that idealizes risk-taking; the sport’s most celebrated figures have always been those who stick their necks out the farthest and manage to get away with it.