Since Into Thin Air came out in 1997 publishers have flocked to release books about mountaineering disasters. I started to feel that books like Into Thin Air encouraged the attacks by portraying commercial climbing in a negative light, and arming people who didn’t know any better with enough knowledge to make them feel entitled to criticise.
I became a fan of commercial mountaineering it gave me many wonderful experiences that I wouldn’t otherwise have had, and I began to defend it staunchly against the attacks of alpinists and would-be alpinists who held guided climbers in contempt. I understood their motivations, and I learned that with enough experience amateurs could climb a mountain like Everest in relative safety. I took up mountaineering myself, always with commercial expeditions, and I began to sympathise with the victims. In the years that followed I read some of the alternative accounts of the 1996 Everest tragedy such as Anatoli Boukreev’s The Climb and Beck Weathers’ Left for Dead, and began to feel that Krakauer may have judged too harshly.
Had anyone told me that a few years later I myself would be paying to join a commercial expedition to climb Everest in much the same way I would have phoned the emergency services and asked them to bring round a straitjacket. I was staggered by the many examples of climbers ignoring their struggling team mates and saving themselves, and I shook my head at the catalogue of senseless blunders that heightened the tragedy. I believed the world’s highest mountain should remain a pristine wilderness reserved for only the very best, and I had little sympathy for the presumptuous victims who pushed on to the summit long after they should have turned around, and lacked the resources or experience to get themselves down when they became caught up in a storm. Like many people who read the book soon after its publication I had always assumed Everest climbers were some of the most hardcore athletes on earth, and I had no idea relatively inexperienced people could pay to be guided up.
Back in those days I was a humble hill walker with only a passing interest in mountaineering and Krakauer’s autobiographical tale of a former alpinist who joins a commercial expedition to climb Everest on a reporting assignment and becomes caught up in the biggest disaster in Everest history struck a chord with me that sounded like a cat strangling itself in the strings of a violin. When I first read Jon Krakauer’s seminal disaster porn classic Into Thin Air 15 years ago it was a bit of an eye-opener.
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