Into Thin Air: Jon Krakauer
In Jon
Krakauer's book, “Into Thin Air,” he explains a personal account of the Mount Everest
Disaster in 1996. He has been hired by O Magazine to document an ascent of the
famed mountain. At first, he is sort of
reluctant to go because of his wife and her hard feelings, but he eventually
commits. The magazine tells him not to
climb all the way to the summit, but he insists that with his technical
climbing skills, he should climb it. He and
many other climbers were led by Rob Hall to get to the top of the summit in
1996. Little did they know, the spring
of 1996 would go down in the history books as one of the deadliest years ever
on Mount Everest. The book is about the
experiences he, and many others from his group, faced in the Spring of 1996
during one of the worst storms of the mountain’s history.
Hall is a
certified guide for any group aspiring to be on the top of the world. Hall decides to quickly speed up the acclimatization
process and hopefully guide all of the climbers to the summit of the mountain
safely. The mountain is set up with a
series of camps that the climbers stay at to help acclimatize. Hall’s plan is to stay at base camp for a
couple of weeks before continuing. After
they leave they stop at camp one. They
continue to make a series of ascensions up and down the mountain to speed up
the process of acclimatization to prevent altitude sickness. All of the clients have troubles adjusting,
but some however, are more qualified and independent than those who have to
rely heavily on the guides and the Sherpas.
The first death in the book happens when a climber from another group contracts
HAPE—a serious altitude sickness that happens to a person when they climb up in
altitude way too fast. There is then a
2:00 turn-around time that Hall instructs to all of the climbers. This means that no matter how close they are
to the summit of the mountain, they must turn around at 2:00 pm. Krakauer and a few others reach the summit
just before the time. However, some of
the other climbers reach the summit as late as 4:00 pm because the turn-around
time was not enforced. Some of those
later arrivals included Rob Hall, his guide.
Krakauer was lucky enough to just hit the tail end of a storm that hits
the top when he reaches camp four, the highest camp. Unfortunately, all of his teammates are still
at the top in the middle of one of the worst storms of the mountain’s
history. Hall eventually gets stranded
and his partner, Hansen, runs out of supplemental oxygen and cannot continue
down the mountain. Also, another group
gets stranded in the blizzard and a Sherpa rescues all but two of that
group. Hall is also killed along with a
Sherpa that was trying to rescue him.
Surprisingly, one of the climbers left for dead makes it out of the
mountain alive. Beck Whethers makes it
out, but he eventually has to receive extensive amputations and surgeries
because of the injuries he received from the extreme temperatures.
While Jon
was sent up just to document the effects of the industrialization of Everest on
the mountain, he became part of history.
He was in the middle of the most severe modern storm Everest had ever
experienced. After he got home and wrote
the article for the O, he had to
write this book. He saw terrible things
up there that one can never forget. He apologizes
for all of the frustration and anger this book might ensue to the families of
lost climbers of Everest.
