3 Stars for Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer is a heartbreaking tale about the lives lost on Mount Everest in 1996. Krakauer was one of eight clients lead by Rob Hall, a well-known guide to climb Everest. Rob Hall did not make it back. Some of those clients did not make it back. Krakauer barely made it back. Why would anyone want to climb Mount Everest? After reading, Into Thin Air, again I asked why would anyone want to climb Mount Everest?

Krakauer states, “Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality.” 

Krakauer seems to be a romantic, though not necessarily a hopeless one. His descriptions of Everest are at times breathtaking, but not misunderstood as a Romeo/hopeless romantic with a shaky hold on reality.

“The glacier’s continual and often violent state of flux added an element of uncertainty to every ladder crossing.”

At the same time, there is an understanding of “reality”.

“But if the ice fall was strenuous and terrifying, it had a surprising allure as well. As dawn washed the darkness from the sky, the shattered glacier was revealed to be a three-dimensional landscape of phantasmal beauty.”

The descriptions and Krakauer’s obvious respect for Everest especially after the disaster in 1996 made me appreciate Into Thin Air. Krakauer’s respected guys like Rob Hall and his abilities. Hall is described as a fast learner with the ability to soak up skills and attitudes from anybody revealing a humility in the narrator to recognize the tremendous abilities of another climber, further recognizing his own short comings in that area. Despite the obvious unreliable narrator present in the memoir, Krakauer’s compassion for others and his unwillingness to ‘toot his own horn’ made me want to believe his account.

Still, Krakauer’s mind at the time of this disaster was in dire need of the oxygen only found at ground level. As pointed out in his book, high altitudes often rob the best climbers of their rational sense, and awareness of what is going on around them.

I ended up giving this book a three, not because of the writing. Krakauer is a skilled writer with the style of a journalist – I gave it a three because of the plethora of facts thrown at me on every page without transition to let me absorb, the list of names switching often from first to last names made my head spin, and last, the lack of emotion that Krakauer presented until the very end, which could be the journalist in him.

Still, even with my head trying to wrap around all the names and facts, some stayed with me as scary interesting. I didn’t know HAPE meant High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, where the lungs fill with fluid and the only cure is to descend. In the story there are several camps leading to the summit of Everest, at camp one a climber named Ngawang was lost to HAPE and that’s after he was flown off the mountain. Ngawang had a wife and three daughters. At camp one, already foreboding circled the air around the climbers, and yet they continued to ascend.

Other facts that plagued me were the amount of dead bodies all along the trail, bodies that could never be buried properly, bodies to remind you of the dangers, bodies to push you onward, in my case, downward. The other fact that remains with me is the ethical one: How do you let someone die? How can you not help your fellow man? I can’t imagine having to make a heartbreaking choice to leave a man to die in order to keep on living yourself.

I can’t imagine ever undertaking a journey like Everest that would leave me with those choices, or losing a limb due to frostbite, or worse, dying. I can’t imagine climbing Everest; however, I can recommend this book to others to climb Everest within the pages of Krakauer’s story Into Thin Air. This is the safe way. I will be using this book as a non-fiction piece in my classroom this year giving the kiddos a break from Shakespeare and Homer.