Into Thin Air

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.

I’d arrived on the summit a few minutes after Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian climbing guide working for an American commercial expedition, and just ahead of Andy Harris, a guide on the New Zealand–based team to which I belonged. Although I was only slightly acquainted with Boukreev, I’d come to know and like Harris well during the preceding six weeks.

he squatted, he lost his footing on the ice and went hurtling down the Lhotse Face. Incredibly, after falling only 70 feet he plunged headfirst in a crevasse, which arrested his tumble.

To go down now, even if we could have, would be descending to a future marked by one huge question: what might have been?

(which would prolong my exposure to the intermittent fusillade of stones whizzing down the face from above, among other hazards),

Lopsang Jangbu, Fischer’s sirdar, showed up bearing a back-wrenching eighty-pound load, some thirty pounds of which consisted of a satellite telephone and its peripheral hardware: Sandy Pittman was intending to file Internet dispatches from 26,000 feet. The last of my teammates didn’t arrive until 4:30 P.M.,

I was concerned, because I’d gotten to know Doug well enough at that point to realize that he’d spent the entire previous year agonizing over the fact that he’d gotten to within three hundred feet of the summit and had to turn around. And I mean it had gnawed at him every single day. It was pretty clear that he was not going to be denied a second time. Doug was going to keep climbing toward the top as long as he was still able to breathe.”

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.

mirabile visu,

derive from the sport’s emphasis on self-reliance, on making critical decisions and dealing with the consequences, on personal responsibility. When you sign on as a client, I discovered, you are forced to give up all of that, and more.

Passivity on the part of the clients had thus been encouraged throughout our expedition. Sherpas put in the route, set up the camps, did the cooking, hauled all the loads. This conserved our energy and vastly increased our chances of getting up Everest, but I found it hugely unsatisfying.

“I don’t want to carry telephone,” Lopsang later admitted, in part because it had worked only marginally at Camp Three and it seemed even less likely to work in the colder, harsher environment of Camp Four.* “But Scott told to me, ‘If you don’t carry, I will carry.’ So I take telephone, tie on outside of my rucksack, carry to Camp Four.… This makes me very tired.”

why didn’t she simply unfasten the three-foot tether connecting her to Lopsang, which would have required nothing more than reaching up and unclipping a single carabiner?

on their last evening at Base Camp, he and some other Sherpas had celebrated the coming summit attempt by drinking a large quantity of chhang—a thick, sweet beer brewed from rice and millet. The next morning, severely hungover, he was extremely agitated; before ascending the Icefall he confided to a friend that he’d seen ghosts in the night.

Hall sent a Kiwi guide named Guy Cotter ahead with Lopsang, rather than Ang Dorje, to determine the feasibility of climbing higher—and Ang Dorje, who was the sirdar on that climb, took it as an insult. A little later, when Lopsang had climbed to the base of the Hillary Step, Hall decided to abort the summit attempt and signaled Cotter and Lopsang to turn around.

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.

Death through exhaustion is—like death through freezing—a pleasant one.

Given what unfolded over the hours that followed, the ease with which I abdicated responsibility—my utter failure to consider that Andy might have been in serious trouble—was a lapse that’s likely to haunt me for the rest of my life.

At 6:00 A.M., as they skirted a steep rock promontory called the First Step, twenty-one-year-old Eisuke Shigekawa and thirty-six-year-old Hiroshi Hanada were taken aback to see one of the Ladakhi climbers, probably Paljor, lying in the snow, horribly frostbitten but still alive after a night without shelter or oxygen, moaning unintelligibly. Not wanting to jeopardize their ascent by stopping to assist him, the Japanese team continued climbing toward the summit.

one of the Ladakhis was “apparently close to death, the other crouching in the snow. No words were passed. No water, food or oxygen exchanged hands. The Japanese moved on and 160 feet farther along they rested and changed oxygen cylinders.”

Smanla, Morup, and Paljor were left on the mountain where they had fallen, and the five climbers continued to the top of Everest, which they reached at 7:40 A.M.

let nature take its inevitable course with Beck and Yasuko, and save the group’s resources for those who could actually be helped. It was a classic act of triage.

Despite this second blow, after a few minutes the stricken man gasped violently and began breathing again. Beidleman managed to lower him to the bottom of the Lhotse Face, where a dozen of the Sherpa’s teammates met them and carried the injured man to Camp Two. At that point, says Beidleman, “Klev and I just stared at each other in disbelief. It was like, ‘What’s going on here? What have we done to make this mountain so angry?’”

Without rancor, three such groups—Todd Burleson’s Alpine Ascents International expedition, David Breashears’s IMAX expedition, and Mal Duff’s commercial expedition—immediately postponed their own summit plans in order to assist the stricken climbers.

Then Breashears offered his expedition’s supply of oxygen—fifty canisters that had been laboriously carried to 26,000 feet—to the ailing climbers and would-be rescuers on the Col. Even though this threatened to put his $5.5 million film project in jeopardy, he made the crucial gas available without hesitation.

I told his Canadian friend Marion Boyd about his grief, she explained that “Ang Dorje sees his role on this earth as keeping people safe—he and I have talked about it a lot. It’s all-important for him in terms of his religion, and preparing for the next go-around in life.

I located his tent, which had been blasted flat by the hurricane, and saw that both doors were wide open. When I peered inside, however, I was shocked to discover that Beck was still alive.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he wailed when he saw me, his features twisted into a rictus of agony and desperation. “What’s a guy have to do to get a little help around here!” He’d been screaming for help for two or three hours, but the storm had smothered his cries.

“This is the worst frostbite I’ve ever seen.” When he asked Gau if he could photograph his limbs for the medical record, the Taiwanese climber consented with a broad smile; like a soldier displaying battle wounds, he seemed almost proud of the gruesome injuries he’d sustained.

I was amazed to run into the entire crew. Although he was being assisted with a short-rope, Beck was moving under his own power. Breashears and company hustled him down the glacier at such a fast pace that in my own woeful state, I could barely keep up with them.

“My God!” Dr. Kamler exclaimed when he saw Beck’s right hand. “His frostbite is even worse than Makalu’s.”

Piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Madan Khatri Chhetri of the Nepalese army, the olive-drab B2 Squirrel helicopter—stripped of all unnecessary fuel and equipment—made two passes, but on each occasion aborted at the last moment.

Because Gau’s frostbitten feet had been thawed at Camp Two, he could no longer walk or even stand, so Breashears, Athans, and I agreed that the Taiwanese climber should be the one to go. “Sorry,” I yelled to Beck above the scream of the chopper’s turbines. “Maybe he’ll be able to make a second flight.” Beck nodded philosophically.

The magnitude of this calamity was so far beyond anything I’d ever imagined that my brain simply shorted out and went dark. Abandoning my hope of comprehending what had transpired, I shouldered my backpack and headed down into the frozen witchery of the Icefall, nervous as a cat, for one last trip through the maze of decaying seracs.

Safe now, the crushing strain of the preceding days lifted from my shoulders, I cried for my lost companions, I cried because I was grateful to be alive, I cried because I felt terrible for having survived while others had died.

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.

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.

And that holds especially true for Everest climbers: when presented with a chance to reach the planet’s highest summit, history shows, people are surprisingly quick to abandon good judgment. “Eventually,” warns Tom Hornbein, thirty-three years after his ascent of the West Ridge, “what happened on Everest this season is certain to happen again.”

Ed Viesturs, who had the starring role in the film, reached the summit at 11:00 Thursday morning, without using supplemental oxygen.* Breashears arrived twenty minutes later, followed by Araceli Segarra, Robert Schauer, and Jamling Norgay Sherpa—the son of the first ascender, Tenzing Norgay, and the ninth member of the Norgay clan to climb the peak. All told, sixteen climbers summitted that day, including the Swede who’d ridden his bike to Nepal from Stockholm, Göran Kropp, and Ang Rita Sherpa, whose ascent marked his tenth visit to the top of Everest.

Around 12:30 P.M. he passed Woodall, O’Dowd, and the three Sherpas on their way down. Ang Dorje gave Herrod a radio and described where an oxygen bottle had been stashed for him, then Herrod continued alone toward the top. He didn’t reach the summit until just after 5:00 P.M., seven hours after the others, by which time Woodall and O’Dowd were already back in their tent at the South Col.

Viesturs had previously ascended Everest in 1990 and ’91 without gas. In 1994 he climbed it a third time, with Rob Hall; on that ascent he used bottled oxygen because he was guiding the peak and thought it would be irresponsible to do so without it.