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Praise for Jon Krakauer’s INTO THIN AIR

“A book that offers readers the emotional immediacy of a survivor’s testament as well as the precision, detail, and quest for accuracy of a great piece of journalism.… It is impossible to read this book unmoved.”

—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

“Brilliant, haunting.… This is an angry book, made even more so by the fact that hardly anyone seems to have learned a thing from the tragedy.”

—SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

“Every bit as absorbing and unnerving as his bestseller, Into the Wild.”

—THE NEW YORK TIMES

“A searing book.” —OUTSIDE

“Krakauer is an extremely gifted storyteller as well as a relentlessly honest and even-handed journalist, the story is riveting and wonderfully complex in its own right, and Krakauer makes one excellent decision after another about how to tell it.… To call the book an adventure saga seems not to recognize that it is also a deeply thoughtful and finely wrought philosophical examination of the self.”

—ELLE

“Krakauer introduces the many players until they feel familiar, then leads the reader with them up the mountain and into the so- called ‘Death Zone’ above 25,000 feet.”

—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

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“Time collapses as, minute-by-minute, Krakauer rivetingly and movingly chronicles what ensued, much of which is near agony to read.… A brilliantly told story.”

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

“[Krakauer] proves as sure-footed in prose as he was on the mountain … quietly building the suspense as we follow the ill- fated expedition through its preparation and shakedown forays, and then delivering a lucid, blow-by-blow account of the cataclysmic storm and the death and agony following in its wake.”

—THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

“Into Thin Air reads like a fine novel—the main characters breathe their way through a plot so commanding, the book is hard to put down.”

—AMAZON REVIEWS

“Make room on your shelf for mountaineering classics.… Krakauer’s grip on your emotions will leave you gasping for breath.”

—LOS ANGELES TIMES

“[A] riveting account of events leading to the death of guides Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, assistant Andy Harris and two clients.”

—BOSTON HERALD

“[A] gripping analysis of the tragedy.” —THE TENNESSEAN

“Into Thin Air is the … intense, taut, driving account of what happened. It is an engrossing book, difficult for the reader to put down … superbly reported.”

—ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS

“Astounding … honest … eloquent.… Through objective and thorough research and in sparkling prose, Krakauer tells a story that arouses fury, disgust, admiration and tears.”

—THE TIMES-PICAYUNE (NEW ORLEANS)

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“Meticulously researched and exceptionally well-written, Into Thin Air avoids the hype and easy condemnation that have infested other accounts. The book offers instead vivid details told matter- of-factly, almost quietly. The result is a deeply moving narrative that honors the courage of the people on the mountain while raising profound and possibly unanswerable questions about human behavior in a crisis.”

—NASHVILLE BOOK PAGE

“Jon Krakauer offers fresh insights into the tragedy in his superb Into Thin Air, in which he adroitly sifts through the misunderstandings, miscalculations and misguided zeal that led his fellow climbers to their doom. His new book is, on every level, a worthy successor to his outstanding Into the Wild.”

—THE PLAIN DEALER

“A taut, harrowing narrative of the most lethal season in Everest’s history … Krakauer offers a disturbing look at how technology, publicity, and commercialism have changed mountaineering.”

—WISCONSIN STATE-JOURNAL

“Just as he did in his previous book, the acclaimed Into the Wild, Krakauer employs exhaustive reporting, attention to detail, and a crisp, unpretentious writing style to shape the story.”

—HARTFORD COURANT

“The intensity of the tragedy is haunting, and Krakauer’s graphic writing drives it home.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“[Krakauer] has produced a narrative that is both meticulously researched and deftly constructed.… His story rushes irresistibly forward.”

—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“Though it comes from the genre named for what it isn’t (nonfiction), this has the feel of literature: Krakauer is Ishmael, the narrator who lives to tell the story but is forever trapped within it.… Krakauer’s reporting is steady but ferocious. The clink

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of ice in a glass, a poem of winter snow, will never sound the same.”

—MIRABELLA

“Every once in a while a work of nonfiction comes along that’s as good as anything a novelist could make up … Into Thin Air fits the bill.”

—FORBES

“Deeply upsetting, genuinely nightmarish.… Krakauer writes indelibly.… He’s brilliant.… His story contains what must be one of the essences of hell: the unceasing potential for things to become worse than you fear.”

—SALON

“Into Thin Air is a remarkable work of reportage and self- examination.… And no book on the 1996 disaster is likely to consider so honestly the mistakes that killed his colleagues.”

—NEWSDAY

“Jon Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer. His account of an ascent of Mount Everest has led to a general reevaluation of climbing and of the commercialization of what was once a romantic, solitary sport, while his account of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, who died of starvation after challenging the Alaskan wilderness, delves even more deeply and disturbingly into the fascination of nature and the devastating effects of its lure on a young and curious mind.”

—ACADEMY AWARD IN LITERATURE CITIATION FROM THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS

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ALSO BY JON KRAKAUER

Iceland Eiger Dreams Into the Wild

Under the Banner of Heaven

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JON KRAKAUER INTO THIN AIR

Jon Krakauer is the author of Eiger Dreams, Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven, and Where Men Win Glory, and is the editor of the Modern Library Exploration series.

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Anchor Books Mass-Market Edition, August 2009

Copyright © 1997 by Jon Krakauer Map copyright © 1997 by Anita Karl

Postscript copyright © 1999 by Jon Krakauer

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada

by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Villard Books in 1997. The Anchor Books

edition is published by arrangement with Villard Books.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work were originally published in Outside.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Krakauer, Jon.

Into thin air: a personal account of the Mount Everest Disaster/Jon Krakauer.—1st Anchor Books ed.

p. cm. Originally published: New York: Villard, c1997.

1. Mountaineering accidents—Everest, Mount (China and Nepal). 2. Mount Everest Expedition (1996). 3. Krakauer, Jon. I. Title.

[GV199.44.E85K725 1998] 796.52′2′092—dc21 97-42880

eISBN: 978-0-679-46271-2

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1_r5

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http://www.anchorbooks.com
For Linda;

and in memory of Andy Harris, Doug Hansen, Rob Hall, Yasuko Namba, Scott Fischer, Ngawang

Topche Sherpa, Chen Yu-Nan, Bruce Herrod, Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, and Anatoli Boukreev

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Contents

Cover Other Books by This Author About the Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Map Introduction

Chapter One - Everest Summit: May 10, 1996 • 29,028 Feet Chapter Two - Dehra Dun, India: 1852 • 2,234 Feet Chapter Three - Over Northern India: March 29, 1996 • 30,000 Feet Chapter Four - Phakding: March 31, 1996 • 9,186 Feet Chapter Five - Lobuje: April 8, 1996 • 16,200 Feet Chapter Six - Everest Base Camp: April 12, 1996 • 17,600 Feet Chapter Seven - Camp One: April 13, 1996 • 19,500 Feet Chapter Eight - Camp One: April 16, 1996 • 19,500 Feet Chapter Nine - Camp Two: April 28, 1996 • 21,300 Feet Chapter Ten - Lhotse Face: April 29, 1996 • 23,400 Feet Chapter Eleven - Base Camp: May 6, 1996 • 17,600 Feet Chapter Twelve - Camp Three: May 9, 1996 • 24,000 Feet Chapter Thirteen - Southeast Ridge: May 10, 1996 • 27,600 Feet Chapter Fourteen - Summit: 1:12 P.M., May 10, 1996 • 29,028 Feet Chapter Fifteen - Summit: 1:25 P.M., May 10, 1996 • 29,028 Feet Chapter Sixteen - South Col: 6:00 A.M., May 11, 1996 • 26,000 Feet Chapter Seventeen - Summit: 3:40 P.M., May 10, 1996 • 29,028 Feet

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Chapter Eighteen - Northeast Ridge: May 10, 1996 • 28,550 Feet Chapter Nineteen - South Col: 7:30 A.M., May 11, 1996 • 26,000 Feet Chapter Twenty - The Geneva Spür: 9:45 A.M., May 12, 1996 • 25,900 Feet Chapter Twenty-One - Everest Base Camp: May 13, 1996 • 17,600 Feet

Epilogue - Seattle: November 29, 1996 • 270 Feet Author’s Note Postscript Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments

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Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being

staged in the civilised world.

—José Ortega y Gasset

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INTRODUCTION

In March 1996, Outside magazine sent me to Nepal to participate in, and write about, a guided ascent of Mount Everest. I went as one of eight clients on an expedition led by a well-known guide from New Zealand named Rob Hall. On May 10 I arrived on top of the mountain, but the summit came at a terrible cost.

Among my five teammates who reached the top, four, including Hall, perished in a rogue storm that blew in without warning while we were still high on the peak. By the time I’d descended to Base Camp nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more lives would be lost before the month was out.

The expedition left me badly shaken, and the article was difficult to write. Nevertheless, five weeks after I returned from Nepal I delivered a manuscript to Outside, and it was published in the September issue of the magazine. Upon its completion I attempted to put Everest out of my mind and get on with my life, but that turned out to be impossible. Through a fog of messy emotions, I continued trying to make sense of what had happened up there, and I obsessively mulled the circumstances of my companions’ deaths.

The Outside piece was as accurate as I could make it under the circumstances, but my deadline had been unforgiving, the sequence of events had been frustratingly complex, and the memories of the survivors had been badly distorted by exhaustion, oxygen depletion, and shock. At one point during my research I asked three other people to recount an incident all four of us had witnessed high on the mountain, and none of us could agree on such crucial facts as the time, what had been said, or even who had been present. Within days after the Outside article went to press, I discovered that a few of the details I’d reported were in error. Most were minor inaccuracies of the sort that inevitably creep into works of deadline journalism, but one of my blunders was in no sense