Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

Journalists inevitably asked Fischer about the risks associated with the kind of climbing he did and wondered how he reconciled it with being a husband and father. Fischer answered that he now took far fewer chances than he had during his reckless youth—that he had become a much more careful, more conservative climber. Shortly before leaving for Everest in 1996, he told Seattle writer Bruce Barcott, “I believe 100 percent I’m coming back.… My wife believes 100 percent I’m coming back. She isn’t concerned about me at all when I’m guiding because I’m gonna make all the right choices. When accidents happen, I think it’s always human error. So that’s what I want to eliminate. I’ve had lots of climbing accidents in my youth. You come up with lots of reasons, but ultimately it’s human error.” Fischer’s assurances notwithstanding, his peripatetic alpine career was rough on his family. He was crazy about his kids, and when he was in Seattle he was an unusually attentive father, but climbing regularly took him away from home for months at a time. He’d been absent for seven of his son’s nine birthdays. In fact, say some of his friends, by the time he departed for Everest in 1996, Fischer’s marriage had been badly strained.