Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer

When I was a child I read about the early attempts to climb Mount Everest, and thought it was a major downer that George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine never returned. It was the first time it really came home to me that people sometimes don't come back. Over the years Everest has claimed about 145 lives. Twelve died during the 1996 climbing season alone.

Krakauer tells his story with a simple directness that brings home the the underbelly of climbing. I've read about the mental fogginess and physical weakness that affects climbers, but it's much worse than that. Climbers don't just climb the mountain. They have make several trips progressively further up the mountain to acclimatize their body to the decreasing atmospheric pressure and oxygen content. These trips are necessary to prevent High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, which means the lungs fill with fluid, but they take a physical and mental toll on the climbers.

All the food, liquids, fuel, and oxygen have to be brought to successively higher camps to support the push for the summit. I hadn't thought about what was done with all the discarded oxygen cylinders, the other garbage, let alone bodily wastes. Krakauer's discussion of these topics starkly illustrate the difficulties involved in just staying alive.

But there's more to the book than logistics. The climbers struggle to summit, and deal with the problems of too many people at choke points. Messages were misunderstood, climbers wasted precious time waiting for others to climb up or down, and climbers got lost as a storm blew in. Although much of the book is told from Krakauer's point of view, he fills in what he didn't see by interviewing other climbers later. None the less, there are some difficulties in reconciling events.

In an astonishing story of human will overcoming adversity, Beck Weathers had lost his sight, and had to spend an evening huddled with a small group of people. They had all run out of supplementary oxygen, and were exposed to a wind-chill temperature of 100 below, without any shelter. They were only 300 horizontal yards from safety. The storm broke at midnight, and a few of the group managed to get back to the tents for help. Only one person was able to go back to find the others, and he had to make two trips to find them. He brought in most of the others, but left Beck and another climber for dead.

The next morning they found Beck, right mitten off, head crusted with ice, mumbling incoherently. After consulting with other climbers, they decided that trying to rescue him would endanger their own lives. Late that afternoon another crew climbed up with more oxygen. Shortly after that, Beck walked into camp, bare right hand outstretched. They could hardly detect a carotid pulse when the doctor started working on him. Beck's tent was flattened during the storm that night, with both tent doors ripped open. The wind tore the two sleeping bags from his body. His swollen arms and frozen hands prevented him from covering himself up again.

Krakauer was preparing to leave, and found Beck in this condition. Krakauer helped get him sheltered from the wind again and injected him with dexamethasone. Another team went to help Beck, and found that far from dying, he could actually stand and walk. Beck and another climber were flown out by helicopter for further medical treatment. He ended up having his right arm amputated halfway below the elbow. As well, all the fingers and thumb on his left hand were amputated. His nose was amputated and rebuilt with tissue from other parts of his body.

To be honest, Beck shouldn't have been on the mountain at all because he couldn't see properly in the thin air. His survival is an incredible story; one that I found much more interesting than krakauer's. I'd very much like to read the accounts of other people that survived this disastrous climbing season to get other views of what happened. The IMAX film doesn't really cover it.

I enjoyed it, but I was sure glad I was sitting in a warm house in front of a fire. This is not the book to take on your cross country ski trip. Into Thin Air was bought in a used book store.

Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer. Anchor Books, Doubleday. 1997
ISDN 0-385-49208-1