Into Thin Air
by John Krakauer, Macmillan, 1997
In March 1996 the award-winning author, journalist and mountaineer John Krakauer travelled to Nepal to climb Mount Everest. At the time he was on assignment for the US magazine Outside. He reached the summit, but his trip coincided with one of the worst mountaineering tragedies in history: Eight climbers died on 9 May 1996 during a snowstorm, on a day full of drama and controversy. A few months after the event, Krakauer published a 17 000word article for Outside, almost four times the length of one of the magazine’s normal features. But the writer still wasn’t satisfied: “Even so, I felt that it was much too abbreviated to do justice to the tragedy. The Everest climb had rocked my life to its core, and it became desperately important for me to record the events in complete detail, unconstrained by a limited number of column inches. This book is the fruit of that compulsion.” Into Thin Air became a bestselling non-fiction book. It tells the story of that ill-fated expedition in immense detail, built on thorough research and multiple interviews with most of the survivors. As Krakauer made his way down from the summit, nobody was yet aware of the impending danger. He writes:
Four hundred vertical feet above, where the summit was still washed in bright sunlight under an immaculate cobalt sky, my compadres dallied to memorialize their arrival at the apex of the planet, unfurling flags and snapping photos, using up precious ticks of the clock. None of them imagined that a horrible ordeal was drawing nigh. Nobody suspected that by the end of that long day, every minute would matter.
In an author’s note, he writes about his intentions to publish such a memoir:
My intent in the magazine piece, and to an even greater degree in this book, was to tell what happened on the mountain as accurately and honestly as possible, and to do it in a sensitive, respectful manner. I believe quite strongly that this story needed to be told. Obviously, not everyone feels this way, and I apologize to those who feel wounded by my words.
Into Thin Air is an absolute page-turner and a thorough, personal eyewitness account of the infamous mountain disaster. All in all, it’s a sombre reminder that Everest will always be a challenge to climb:
Truth be told, climbing Everest has always been an extraordinary dangerous undertaking and doubtless always will be, whether the people involved are Himalayan neophytes being guided up the peak or worldclass mountaineers climbing with their peers.