Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

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.

Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin.

Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.