May 18, 1997 Fatal Attraction By ALASTAIR SCOTT Why are tourists with more money than expertise being taken up Mount Everest? More on Jon Krakauer and Everest, from The New York Times Archives PLUS: Jon Krakauer talks to Terry Gross about surviving the Everest disaster -- a RealAudio ® interview | Part 1 & Part 2 • Get RealAudio INTO THIN AIR A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster. By Jon Krakauer. Illustrated. 293 pp. New York: Villard Books. $24.95. ith enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,'' observed Rob Hall, the leader of a commercial expedition, on his eighth tour of Mount Everest. ''The trick is to get back down alive.'' The particular descent ahead of those on the ''hill'' on May 10, 1996, resulted in the greatest loss of life in the history of mountaineering on Everest. As news spread of the nine deaths (including that of Hall, who spoke to his wife in New Zealand by radiophone as he lay stranded in a snowstorm on the summit ridge), a barrage of questions resounded: What went wrong? Why was the approaching storm ignored? And, most emphatically, why are ''tourists'' with more money than expertise being taken up Everest in the first place? Jon Krakauer was one of the survivors, and in ''Into Thin Air'' he relives the storm and its aftermath, trying to answer those questions. As he sees it, essentially nothing ''went wrong,'' at least in terms of the storm, which struck with little warning. Instead, the root of the problem lies in the famous explanation George Mallory gave when asked why he wanted to climb the mountain, an explanation that still holds true, albeit with a slight amendment. People climb Mount Everest because it -- and the money -- is there. Mr. Krakauer was 42 at the time of the disastrous attempt on the highest peak in the Himalayas. Formerly an enthusiastic mountaineer but by then a slightly overweight author and journalist, he was sent by Outside magazine to write about the commercialization of Everest. He joined a fee-paying expedition led by Hall, using what Mr. Krakauer and his climber friends called ''the Yak Route,'' over the less severe Southeast Ridge. In 1985, one of the first tourists was ushered to the top. Since then, as many as 40 people have reached the summit on a single day. In the spring of 1996, no fewer than 30 expeditions were preparing to ascend the mountain. Mr. Krakauer traveled to the Everest Base Camp through a region that is now visited by 15,000 trekkers every year. In the nearby hamlet of Lobuje, ''huge stinking piles of human feces lay everywhere.'' He was astonished to find more than 300 tents at the base camp and, later, over 1,000 empty oxygen cylinders discarded at 26,000 feet on the South Col. Jon Krakauer While Mr. Krakauer recoiled from such sights, his mind was also full of other concerns: ''I wasn't sure what to make of my fellow clients. In outlook and experience they were nothing like the hard-core climbers with whom I usually went into the mountains. But they seemed like nice, decent folks.'' Among them were a ''gentlemanly lawyer'' from Michigan, a 56-year-old Australian anesthesiologist, a 47-year-old Japanese woman (who was bagging the highest peaks on each continent and would be left behind on this one) and an American postal worker who had almost conquered Everest the previous year. They had little or no mountaineering experience and had paid $65,000 each, excluding airfare and equipment costs, to be led to the summit. ''Into Thin Air'' is a step-by-step account of how a diverse group of people try to conquer a mountain whose majesty is utterly dwarfed by the hardship required to ascend it. ''The expedition . . . became an almost Calvinistic undertaking,'' Mr. Krakauer remarks, adding that he ''quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain.'' Most people who publish mountaineering books are more skillful as adventurers than they are as writers; Mr. Krakauer is an exception. The author of three previous books (''Iceland,'' ''Eiger Dreams'' and ''Into the Wild''), he has produced a narrative that is both meticulously researched and deftly constructed. Unlike the expedition, his story rushes irresistibly forward. But perhaps Mr. Krakauer's greatest achievement is his evocation of the deadly storm, his ability to re-create its effects with a lucid and terrifying intimacy. ''Into Thin Air'' is also a work of atonement. No one could have done much for those who were lost, but Mr. Krakauer still feels remorse. ''I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life,'' he confesses in his introduction. ''It hasn't, of course. Moreover, I agree that readers are often poorly served when an author writes as an act of catharsis, as I have done here. But I hoped something would be gained by spilling my soul in the calamity's immediate aftermath, in the roil and torment of the moment.'' After the tragedy, there were calls for the banning of commercial expeditions from Mount Everest. Some suggested that guide-to-client ratios should be increased to 1-to-1. Others recommended that the use of supplemental oxygen be prohibited, thus closing Everest to all but supremely fit mountaineers. Mr. Krakauer offers no definite answers, but he recognizes that for a poor country like Nepal tourism is a major source of income. The Government charges $70,000 for a climbing permit, which covers an expedition of up to seven people, with $10,000 added for each additional climber. The blunt fact remains: there is no economic incentive to reduce the traffic on Mount Everest. According to Mr. Krakauer, Rob Hall ''ran the tightest, safest operation on the mountain.'' But although Hall was ''a compulsively methodical man,'' he and his competitors knew that their success depended on the number of clients they could deliver to and from the summit, and their rivalry may have impaired their judgment. Mr. Krakauer calls the amateur climbers ''Walter Mittys with Everest dreams'' who ''need to bear in mind that when things go wrong up in the Death Zone -- and sooner or later they always do -- the strongest guides in the world may be powerless to save a client's life; indeed, as the events of 1996 demonstrated, the strongest guides in the world are sometimes powerless to save even their own lives.'' Up until May 1996, Mount Everest had been climbed some 630 times and had claimed 144 lives. Although a record 12 people died in 1996, 84 reached the summit, which actually made it ''a safer-than-average year.'' ''In fact,'' Mr. Krakauer concludes, ''the murderous outcome of 1996 was in many ways simply business as usual.'' Alastair Scott's most recent books are ''Tracks Across Alaska'' and ''Native Stranger.'' More on Jon Krakauer and Mount Everest From the Archives of The New York Times Another review of " Into Thin Air" , by Michiko Kakutani (May 6, 1997) Everest Takes Worst Toll, Refusing to Become Stylish , a news story on the 1996 Everest disaster (May 14, 1996) Up to Seven Climbers Believed Dead on Everest , a news story on the 1997 deaths on Everest (May 13, 1997) Plus: A review of "Into the Wild" (1995) Return to the Books Home Page
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