Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

Hornbein and Unsoeld arrived on the summit at 6:15 P.M., just as the sun was setting, and were forced to spend the night in the open above 28,000 feet—at the time, the highest bivouac in history. It was a cold night, but mercifully without wind. Although Unsoeld’s toes froze and would later be amputated, both men survived to tell their tale.

None of the climbs I’d done in the past, moreover, had taken me to even moderately high altitude. Truth be told, I’d never been higher than 17,200 feet—not even as high as Everest Base Camp.

As I gazed across the sky at this contrail, it occurred to me that the top of Everest was precisely the same height as the pressurized jet bearing me through the heavens. That I proposed to climb to the cruising altitude of an Airbus 300 jetliner struck me, at that moment, as preposterous, or worse. My palms felt clammy.

If someone like Pete Schoening was the equivalent of a major-league baseball star, my fellow clients and I were like a ragtag collection of pretty decent small-town softball players who’d bribed their way into the World Series.

The first body had left me badly shaken for several hours; the shock of encountering the second wore off almost immediately.

That afternoon Hall’s furrowed brow betrayed his concern. “Ngawang is in a bad way,” he said. “He has one of the worst cases of pulmonary edema I’ve ever seen. They should have flown him out yesterday morning when they had a chance. If it had been one of Scott’s clients who was this sick, instead of a Sherpa, I don’t think he would have been treated so haphazardly. By the time they get Ngawang down to Pheriche, it may be too late to save him.”

Experiments conducted in decompression chambers had by then demonstrated that a human plucked from sea level and dropped on the summit of Everest, where the air holds only a third as much oxygen, would lose consciousness within minutes and die soon thereafter.

Climbing with oxygen for the first time in my life, I took a while to get used to it. Although the benefits of using gas at this altitude—24,000 feet—were genuine, they were hard to discern immediately. As I fought to catch my breath after moving past three climbers, the mask actually gave the illusion of asphyxiating me, so I tore it from my face—only to discover breathing was even harder without it.

There were more than fifty people camped on the Col that night, huddled in shelters pitched side by side, yet an odd feeling of isolation hung in the air. The roar of the wind made it impossible to communicate from one tent to the next. In this godforsaken place, I felt disconnected from the climbers around me—emotionally, spiritually, physically—to a degree I hadn’t experienced on any previous expedition. We were a team in name only, I’d sadly come to realize. Although in a few hours we would leave camp as a group, we would ascend as individuals, linked to one another by neither rope nor any deep sense of loyalty. Each client was in it for himself or herself, pretty much. And I was no different: I sincerely hoped Doug got to the top, for instance, yet I would do everything in my power to keep pushing on if he turned around.

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.

‘Look, this is an emergency. People are dying up there. We need to be able to communicate with the survivors in Hall’s team to coordinate a rescue. Please lend your radio to Jon Krakauer.’ And Woodall said no. It was very clear what was at stake, but they wouldn’t give up their radio.”

all told, Everest killed twelve men and women in the spring of 1996, the worst single-season death toll since climbers first set foot on the peak seventy-five years ago. Of the six climbers on Hall’s expedition who reached the summit, only Mike Groom and I made it back down: four teammates with whom I’d laughed and vomited and held long, intimate conversations lost their lives. 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.