Into Thin Air

Jon Krakauer

ISBN 0-385-49208-1

Read August 10 - September 5, 1998

Reviewed September 7, 1998

Before leaving on vacation, August 1, 1998, I spent much of a weekend going through books that I had carried around for up to three decades intending to read. Three or four shelves worth were reduced to 24 titles under strict guidelines and the rest jettisoned. The 24 were intended to take about a year (during which others would doubtless creep in, fodder for the next and future years) and could not even be begun until three titles were finished (Your Money or Your Life, Roads to Space, and First and Last Men). I took the three titles on vacation with me and did not look at any of them even once.

It was in this "reading plan" environment in an "on vacation at ease" stance that I found myself in Mary Korman's home (Michael's latest girlfriend) on August 10 and in which I picked up her copy of Into Thin Air and started thumbing through. Shortly, I had read through the first three chapters, the beginning of the story of the disasters of the 1996 climbing season on Mt. Everest. This was the season where at least half a dozen people died, including two celebrated expedition organizers and leaders, others were severely and permanently injured, and rescue efforts reached unprecedented and heroic levels. Expeditions from several countries were there, each with their own personalities. There was even a multi-million dollar I-MAX entry that, after assisting with many rescues, went on to summit to finish their own job. I can now pay $10 to spend an hour seeing the result. I had already seen something about this on PBS or the Discovery Channel or somewhere. Two routes were in use, the "standard" up from the northern high country of Nepal and the other up the northwest ridge from China.

The author, Jon Krakauer, is a fanatical climber in his own right, but would never have had the resources to join an Everest expedition except for his journalistic credentials. He already had a couple of true-story adventure books and numerous outdoors-magazine type articles to his credit. He is now a contributing editor to Outside magazine, which sponsored him on this trip. There was a developing complaint inside and outside the "climbing community" worldwide that many high profile expeditions, like those to Everest or to the seven highest peaks on the continents, of which Everest is one, had become too commercialized. People with money but perhaps without much else, climbing experience, or high altitude experience, for example, could just buy their way into a difficult and potentially dangerous challenge. This, and the way things were typically being done, was also increasing the amount of trash and debris, not to mention dead bodies, on the slopes. Krakauer was off to participate in one of the expeditions that year and to give a good account of what was really going on, ostensibly so the rest of us could form better educated opinions about commercialism, risk and pollution.

Krakauer was interested in a shot at it though he himself had no real high altitude experience. He tried to convince his wife that he would just hang around Base Camp or maybe climb one camp higher to do his research, but they both knew, such protestations notwithstanding, that given the opportunity on the spot, he would go for the summit and, of course, he did. And he was there at the top on the most disastrous day, the one that was partially and inadequately reported in the sound-bite media at the time.

I came away with two strong impressions from the book, the first sociological and the second an opinion about the sport of climbing and its many cousins, outdoor and other endeavors of adventure and/or challenge.

The first is an extension of the phenomena that I have noticed in all organizational settings, that is, all types of people are everywhere. From the expedition leaders to the participants to the Sherpas to the commentators, there are nice ones, mean ones, determined ones, careful ones, accomplished ones, inexperienced ones, extravagant ones and frugal ones. There are those who would sacrifice their own shot at the goal and risk their life to help others in trouble and there are those who would just walk past (or over) their dying comrades who they could easily have assisted. (How diverse are the moralities in the world!) In a community where every member has either paid or been paid on the order of $65,000 to be there, there are few who are indecisive or uncommitted.

From the beginning of the narrative to the end, the variety of people and approaches is astounding nearly alarming. I had thought that AMSAT, or any local church for that matter, contained a full cross section of every disturbed personality type in the world, and indeed they do. This is evident in much higher relief and clarity among these alpinists. They range from the truly humanitarian to the total narcissist, from the altruist to the egotist. The only poor folks out there are the locally hired servants. This, too, sounds familiar.

My other impression has to do with the question touched on by the book, "should this sort of sport even be allowed?" After a lot of reflection and some discussion with Viann about it, I decided that I'm American enough to think that it should be. To paraphrase Jack Kennedy, "Why cross the Atlantic? Why climb the highest mountain? We go to the moon because..... [it is there]!" People will start where they find themselves in life and face into their challenges. For many people in the world, including the Sherpas who are native to the Himalayas, their greatest desire and challenge is survival. A distant second is comfort. For many in the "developed" world, survival and comfort are taken for granted and challenge is somewhat missing, or at least optional. We develop technology, we have surplus income. Back when the assaults on Everest started in the 1920s, some of the upper classes from the remnants of the British Empire spent some of the community surplus and "sacrificed" parts (or all) of their lives in the quest. Now, people can buy a shot at the same thing, not a first, not a name that will be taught in schools, but still an incredible, perhaps insane level of personal challenge. It's not that it is worthwhile in itself, but hardly anything ever accomplishes only what it sets out to do and there is the potential for good in this sort of crazy yet focused attempt just as there is in model railroading or amateur radio or circum-global yachting or running a soup kitchen or any of the myriad other things that people drag themselves through for whatever reason.

To paraphrase Freeman Dysan, discussing the inevitable movement of people off the planet and into the solar system and ultimately beyond, people will go for a host of reasons, rarely rational and when they get there, unanticipated things will happen and there will be tragedy and progress and exhilaration and, well, everything.

A world in which people didn't try to do things like Everest or the equivalent in personal or corporate challenge would be pretty uninteresting and pretty non-human. People do what they do and the consequences, good and bad, are widespread, and that's what makes life life.

Personally, I would not have made it past filthy Lobuje or the diseases that all the westerners contracted from the open sewage in high altitude there or the cold, thin air. This book in all it's paragraph to paragraph hair-raising, true-to-life detail makes my book about walking Viannah across the Grand Canyon seem tame by comparison, but that's OK. It is good to see people responding to their own challenges and growing from the ones that they survive.

There is an indirect personal connection with this story. My colleague, Tom Meehan, pointed out that Neal Beidleman is the mechanical designer for Cosmic (our global, GPS based, climate monitoring satellite network sponsored by Taiwan and others), a Mike Exner hire based somewhere around Denver. Neal, who figures prominently in Chapter 15, the last two, reflective, pages of the book and elsewhere, was in the thick of things. I'll have to let Tom at least flip through (if not read it all himself) before returning it to Mary.