Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

This book is the fruit of that compulsion.

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.

Waugh bestowed the name Mount Everest on Peak XV, in honor of Sir George Everest, his predecessor as surveyor general. As it happened, Tibetans who lived to the north of the great mountain already had a more mellifluous name for it, Jomolungma, which translates to “goddess, mother of the world,” and Nepalis who resided to the south reportedly called the peak Deva-dhunga, “Seat of God.”† But Waugh pointedly chose to ignore these native appellations (as well as official policy encouraging the retention of local or ancient names), and Everest was the name that stuck.

Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. The incumbent hazards lent the activity a seriousness of purpose that was sorely missing from the rest of my life. I thrilled in the fresh perspective that came from tipping the ordinary plane of existence on end.

By then it had become fashionable among alpine cognoscenti to denigrate Everest as a “slag heap”—a peak lacking sufficient technical challenges or aesthetic appeal to be a worthy objective for a “serious” climber, which I desperately aspired to be. I began to look down my nose at the world’s highest mountain.

My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

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.

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.

Rob was always especially concerned about the welfare of the Sherpas who worked for him. Before our group departed Kathmandu, he had sat all of us down and given us an uncommonly stern lecture about the need to show our Sherpa staff gratitude and proper respect. “The Sherpas we’ve hired are the best in the business,” he told us. “They work incredibly hard for not very much money by Western standards. I want you all to remember we would have absolutely no chance of getting to the summit of Everest without their help. I’m going to repeat that: Without the support of our Sherpas none of us has any chance of climbing the mountain.”

I learned that between the demands of their families and their high-powered careers, few of my fellow clients had had the opportunity to go climbing more than once or twice in the previous year.

The first body had left me badly shaken for several hours; the shock of encountering the second wore off almost immediately. Few of the climbers trudging by had given either corpse more than a passing glance. It was as if there were an unspoken agreement on the mountain to pretend that these desiccated remains weren’t real—as if none of us dared to acknowledge what was at stake here.

As my sympathy for Taske, Weathers, and some of my other teammates mounted, I felt increasingly uncomfortable in my role as a journalist. I had no qualms when it came to writing frankly about Hall, Fischer, or Sandy Pittman, each of whom had been aggressively seeking media attention for years. But my fellow clients were a different matter. When they signed up with Hall’s expedition, none of them had known that a reporter would be in their midst—scribbling constantly, quietly recording their words and deeds in order to share their foibles with a potentially unsympathetic public.

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.

I was so far beyond ordinary exhaustion that I experienced a queer detachment from my body, as if I were observing my descent from a few feet overhead. I imagined that I was dressed in a green cardigan and wingtips. And although the gale was generating a windchill in excess of seventy below zero Fahrenheit, I felt strangely, disturbingly warm.

In fact, the gale of May 10, though violent, was nothing extraordinary; it was a fairly typical Everest squall. If it had hit two hours later, it’s likely that nobody would have died. Conversely, if it had arrived even one hour earlier, the storm could easily have killed eighteen or twenty climbers—me among them.

Delays at the fixed lines were foreseeable and eminently preventable. Predetermined turn-around times were egregiously ignored.

As I write these words, half a year has passed since I returned from Nepal, and on any given day during those six months, no more than two or three hours have gone by in which Everest hasn’t monopolized my thoughts. Not even in sleep is there respite: imagery from the climb and its aftermath continues to permeate my dreams.