Into Thin Air
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster is a non-fiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It details the author's 1996 ascent on Mount Everest, which turned catastrophic when eight climbers were killed on one day by a 'rogue storm'. The author's expedition was led by the famed guide Rob Hall and there were other groups trying to summit on the same day, including one led by Scott Fischer, whose guiding agency, Mountain Madness, was perceived as a competitor to Rob Hall's agency, Adventure Consultants.
In the book, Krakauer writes about the events leading up to his eventual decision to partake in an Everest expedition, despite having given up mountain climbing long ago. Initially, Krakauer, being a journalist for adventure magazine Outside, stated that his intentions to climb Everest are purely professional. However, he later confesses that this was "bullcrap" and that his true intentions to climb Everest lie in the reawakening of his desire to climb mountains like the alpinist heroes of his childhood. From there, the book chronologically moves between events that take place on the mountain and the unfolding tragedy which takes place during the push to the summit. In the book, Krakauer alleges that essential safety methods adopted over the years by experienced guides on Everest are sometimes compromised by the competition between rival guiding agencies to get their clients (some who have little or no mountaineering experience) to the summit.
One of the most dramatic stories in the book is the experience of Beck Weathers. He was left for dead and later in an amazing fashion awoke and stumbled into camp severely frostbitten. His survival and rescue from the mountain is legendary.
This book became a bestseller. It also incited a controversy in the mountaineering community for its criticism of Anatoli Boukreev, an experienced mountaineer who served as one of Fischer's guides. He chose not to climb without using supplementary oxygen and later descended to Camp IV before Fischer's clients. He was later instrumental in rescuing the survivors from the South Col. In 1997, partly in response to the criticism Boukreev perceived against him in Into Thin Air he supplied his personal notes and logbook of the events to author G. Weston DeWalt, and the two of them authored The Climb, chronicling Boukreevs account of the disaster. Beck Weathers also wrote a book about the disaster titled Left For Dead.
A 1997 TV movie named Into Thin Air: Deaths on Everest starred Peter Horton as Scott Fischer and Christopher McDonald as Jon Krakauer. It followed Krakauer as he chronicled the expedition. The movie, however, is extremely dramatized and chronicles events that never happened on the mountain [citation needed]. The event was factually covered in the 1998 IMAX movie Everest, which was coincidentally being filmed in May 1996. The film crew interrupted their shoot to aid the distressed climbers.
See also
- 1996 Everest Disaster
- Green Boots - One of the Indian casualities of the 1996 Everest disaster.
External links
- Article by Jon Krakauer published in Outside Magazine
- Interview with Peter Horton on the TV Movie
- Into Thin Air: Death on Everest at IMDb
- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1109650 Radio interview with Jon Krakauer, May 1996.
