Diana N. (dancingnomad3) reviewed on 9/6/2008 + 2 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

Into Thin Air is "a personal account of the Mt. Everest disaster" by Jon Krakauer (author of Into The Wild.) When I first saw the title and subtitle, I figured the climbers get blown off the mountain by a storm. Actually, it's about the challenges of climbing at high altitudes where the air is considerably thinner. About two-thirds of the book details the climb up Everest before the disaster. Even in best of conditions, it sounded like a pretty harrowing ordeal.

Standing roughly 29,000 feet, Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth. Climbing it requires extraordinary skill, strength, and physiology. Many people have died climbing it. The higher you go up a mountain, the more climbers are prone to various forms of altitude sickness. Even if you do not get altitude sickness, with less oxygen to your brain, a person's mental and phsyical capacity is reduced accordingly, making one susceptable to poor judgment, cold, and injuries.

Acclimatization is an important process while climbing at high altitudes. While ascenting, climbers should rest periodically to get used to the thinning air. In the case of Everest, there are four camps above the Base Camp (17,600 ft). The acclimatization process on Everest consists of multiple climbs to each of those camps and back, each time ascending to the higher camp. Even then, staying an extended period of time above a certain height without oxygen will kill your brain cells. When making the actual summit attempt, perhaps couple of nights are spent at the lower camps while only one night is spent at the higher camps. On summit day, a climber will typically leave Camp Four just past midnight, with hopes of making it to summit by 1 or 2 pm at latest, giving them enough time for the decent back to camp before dark. That's a very long day of climbing - 15 hours or more - under the most difficult of conditions. Perhaps even after some sleepless nights in the camps below.

Imagine the challenges of climbing Everest, and then add to that a hurricane like blizzard. Some of the climbers get stuck in it on their descent from the summit. Some make it, some don't. From the very beginning, Krakauer does a great job of describing the various climbers who get involved in the disaster. It was interesting to read about the individuals' background, differences, and their performance on the mountain. In the end, it was not necessarily the strongest who survive. Sometimes luck or fate play a roll. Most times though, it's human factor. A simple mistake can lead to huge disasters, or a heroic deed saves lives.

Perhaps the one character who surprised me the most is of one who was left for dead - twice! This person was presumed dead and left overnight in a storm with no shelter in sub-freezing temperatures. Somehow the next day he regained enough strength and lucidity to find his way back to Camp Four. After other climbers helped him get comfortable, they yet again figured he would die and left him unattended during another stormy night where he suffered some more. Despite serious injuries from frostbite, he survived.


Climbing Everest crossed my mind only once several years ago when a friend told me about his desire to climb to the Everest Base Camp. By the sound of it, the Base Camp is fairly attainable (as long as you can cough up the expensive fees) so I thought... hmm. Few seconds later though, I figured I'd probably die and hadn't given it a second thought since. However, next time I'm in the mountains snowboarding and feeling cold, or struggling up some difficult hike, I hope I will remember the adversity faced by the climbers described in the book and gain strength from it.

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