Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster

The summary

At 1:17 P.M. on May 10, 1996, Jon Krakauer stood on the summit of Mount Everest and couldn’t summon the energy to care. He hadn’t slept in fifty-seven hours, had eaten only ramen and peanut M&Ms in three days, and had two ribs separated by weeks of coughing. He fired off four photographs and turned down. Cloud was filling the valleys below, but to his oxygen-starved brain it looked like the harmless afternoon convection that rose most days. By the time he reached Base Camp, nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more died before the month ended.

The mountain had been turned into a product

By spring 1996 thirty expeditions were on Everest, at least ten of them commercial. Rob Hall charged $65,000 a head, the highest price on the mountain, and had no trouble filling his roster: between 1990 and 1995 he put thirty-nine people on top, three more ascents than were made in the twenty years after Hillary. His brochure guaranteed “to maximise the safety and success of your adventure.”

What clients gave up in exchange was every decision. Sherpas fixed the ropes, built the camps, hauled the loads; Krakauer, thirty-four years a climber, felt as though surrogates were doing it for him. One veteran American guide named the bind: “We think that people pay us to make good decisions, but what people really pay for is to get to the top.”

Everyone agreed on the rule; nobody used it

Hall had lectured his clients for a month about a hard turn-around time. “With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” he told them. “The trick is to get back down alive.” Then he never named the hour: at Base Camp he weighed 1:00 P.M. against 2:00 and left it open, planning to call it on the day.

Thirty-four climbers left the South Col that night; six reached the summit before two o’clock. Scott Fischer, leading the rival Mountain Madness team, got there at 3:40. Doug Hansen, the postal worker Hall had turned back 300 feet short the year before, arrived after four. Fischer’s third guide, Neal Beidleman, had told him he didn’t feel able to order down clients who’d paid sixty-five thousand dollars. “So Scott agreed that would be his responsibility. But for whatever reason, it didn’t happen.”

Four clients did the arithmetic themselves: Stuart Hutchison, John Taske and Lou Kasischke turned around at 11:30, Frank Fischbeck hours earlier. Krakauer calls them the few who chose right, and names the trap they escaped — to get that high you must be exceedingly driven, and if you’re too driven you die.

Small delays, stacked

The Sherpas were supposed to leave ninety minutes ahead to fix rope on the exposed ground. None did. So the merged teams stood shivering for an hour at 28,000 feet while Beidleman ran the line out himself, then another hour at the South Summit. Lopsang Jangbu, who should have been up front with that rope, instead spent five or six hours hauling the client Sandy Pittman on a three-foot tether, having already wrecked himself carrying her satellite phone to 26,000 feet, where it didn’t work. Krakauer’s verdict: “a slow accrual, compounding steadily and imperceptibly toward critical mass.”

Then hypoxia began editing the details. Asked to shut off Krakauer’s oxygen above the Hillary Step, the guide Andy Harris cranked the valve wide open and drained the tank. Hours later Harris told Hall by radio that the bottles cached at the South Summit were empty. They were full. Mike Groom heard the exchange and discovered his own radio could receive but not transmit.

What one ordinary storm did

Near dark the weather stopped being weather. Visibility dropped under twenty feet, the windchill went past a hundred below, and eleven climbers staggered around the South Col for two hours before huddling behind a boulder no bigger than a dishwasher — 1,000 feet of flat ground from the tents, fifteen minutes, had anyone known which way. Boukreev, who had descended hours ahead of his clients, went back out alone and brought three of them in one at a time. Yasuko Namba, by then the oldest woman to climb Everest, died on that ice. Beck Weathers, twice written off as dead, lay comatose more than twelve hours, then woke, reasoned that camp had to be upwind, and walked there — losing his right hand, the fingers of his left, and his nose.

Hall survived a night at 28,700 feet with no shelter and a mask iced shut. Asked how his client was doing, he said only, “Doug is gone.” Patched through to his wife in Christchurch the next evening: “I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.”

Krakauer’s own share of it

He had told his tentmate he saw Harris reach camp safely; that went to Base Camp and by satellite phone to Harris’s partner in New Zealand. Two months later, talking to the client Martin Adams, he realized the man he’d spoken to on the ice had been Adams — Harris never came down at all. He prints his critics’ angriest letters and doesn’t argue back.

He refuses the comfortable ending too. Twelve people died that season out of 398 who climbed above Base Camp — three percent, slightly below the historical rate. Cataloguing the blunders, he writes, is mostly denial: convince yourself Hall died of stupid errors you’re too clever to repeat, and you’ve made it easier to go yourself.

The bottom line

Four of Krakauer’s teammates died not because Hall’s systems were sloppy — nobody’s were better — but because at that altitude systems break down with a vengeance, leaving no margin for two hours of ordinary delay. The storm was unremarkable; had it come two hours later, likely nobody would have died. Read it to understand how careful people talk themselves past the line, or if you’ve ever been the one who couldn’t turn back.