Mount Everest Morality: Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer

Written by:Chris Mitchell.

Mount Everest has been front page news several times recently - first with the arrival of amputee climber Mark Inglis at the summit of the world’s highest mountain; the subsequent revelation that Inglis’ party had discovered British climber David Sharp in a state of near-death below the summit but had not attempted to bring him back down the mountain and instead continued to the summit (which drew condemnation from Sir Edmund Hillary); and the miraculous survival of Lincoln Hall. who was left for dead in Everest’s Death Zone at 8700 metres, spent the night in the open, and still managed to return unaided to the Advanced Base Camp - only to discover his friend Sue Fear had died on her climb on Manaslu. another Nepalese mountain.

There are ever increasing amounts of people climbing Mount Everest - 294 have conquered the mountain so far this year already. The great majority go on commercial expeditions that take individuals with very little climbing experience, especially at altitude - the result, predictably, is that there are a lot of deaths on Mount Everest too.

Coincidentally, I re-read Into Thin Air last week, Jon Krakauer’s book about the 1996 Mount Everest climbing tragedy where eight climbers died in one day on the mountain. Krakauer, a writer for American travel magazine Outside and an accomplished climber himself, was on assignment and a member of one of the commecial expeditions caught in the snowstorm that came in while the mountaineers were in the Death Zone - the area above 26,000 feet where the temperatures are super subzero and the air almost devoid of oxygen.

Into Thin Air is a brilliant book: as a work of journalism, a history of Everest, an explanation of the psyche of mountaineers that leads them to attempt such a frankly insane journey, and as an exorcism of Krakauer’s own sense of guilt for what he felt was his culpability in the deaths of his fellow climbers. His descriptions of his time on the mountain and the unfolding disaster are nightmarishly vivid - the complexity and danger of Everest is laid out, against which humans realise their own fragility - sometimes too late. It also spells out the fundamental ambiguity of morality in the Death Zone - there are numerous anecdotes of less than stellar behaviour on the part of climbers when at a height that can kill them at any moment.

Krakauer originally wrote Into Thin Air as an article for Outside magazine - what should have been an assessment of the impact of commercial climbing on Everest turned into the autopsy of a disaster in which 8 people died. Into Thin Air the book was written within the following year, after Krakauer had analysed the correspondence from the huge backlash his article provoked and corroborated his own version of the timeline of events with others more closely.

You can still read the original article online in the Outside Archives and also the voluminous correspondence it provoked.

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Posted on May 30th, 2006.

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