I've slowly made my way through Jon Krakauer's works over the last year. I started with Under the Banner of Heaven while on my honeymoon in January of 2024, so it only felt fitting to finish his work the same week, a year later. I've always had an interest in personal accounts of tragic stories, if anything because I have morbid curiosity in such things. Krakauer's catalog of works scratches the itch I have in my brain for that. 

Into Thin Air was published in 1996, following Krakauer's expedition to the summit of Mount Everest. I had a general idea of why he was there in the first place --as a journalist, for a magazine that wanted to do a piece on climbing the mountain --but I had not realized he was part of the famously tragic March 1996 expedition. What I didn't realize, until after I picked up the book, was that he wasn't simply at Base Camp but actually going to the summit.  

For those who don't know, in March of 1996, several teams of climbers paid thousands of dollars to be lead up the mountain. Some of these people were experienced climbers and some weren't by any means. Krakauer falls under the "experienced" category, though he admits it had been a while since he climbed by the time he ascended Everest. It's not the ascent that proved disastrous, however, but the descent. Multiple issues arose, weather turned against them, and by the time they reached Camp 4, many of the climbers had died.

I'm not going into the full story, because that's the point of the book. 

I found the book to be very well written, if not a little chaotic at points as well as stressful. Because I have some prior knowledge about the expedition, I think knowing that something bad is going to happen to the people makes it hard to read, 29 years after. I kept thinking, "Why isn't Rob [the guide] turning them around like he said?" or "How can they do this to their bodies?" Perhaps that's the sign of a good story --true or not --if you have anxiety as you're waiting for the worst to happen.

Because it's his personal account of what happened, there are missing pieces. More importantly, even with interviews with people from the expedition, Krakauer admits that there are moments that none of them can agree on how it happened. I think he does a good job at addressing this, explaining that his account may be biased but he needed to get it out of his system. After experiencing something as traumatic as the 1996 Everest expedition, I don't blame him for wanting to get everything out on paper. 

He does not defend his actions --or lack of, perhaps. He doesn't hurt anyone intentionally with his story, nor does he hurt anyone intentionally on the expedition. But he does explain why he lacked in what happened. "...the actuality of what had happened --of what was still happening --began to sink in with paralyzing force," he explains in the book. "I was physically and emotionally wrecked after having just spent an hour scouring the South Col for Andy Harris; the search had left me convinced he was dead" (Krakauer, 305). He goes onto to explain that, by the time he had returned to camp, he was facing hypoxia effects and there was little to no supplemental oxygen. The only camp radio left had died. 

With everything working against him, it's clear that he feels survivor's guilt for everything that happened, even if it wasn't his fault. He addresses this, and explains that it was part of why he needed to write this story.

Overall, Into Thin Air is an excellent read. If you, like me, have a morbid curiosity as to why people do things like climb Everest as well as are curious about the impacts of the tragic outcomes that can come from it, this is a great book to read. One of the other guides, Anatoli Boukreev, wrote what's essentially a counterargument against Krakauer's perspective, which I will be picking up to compare the two.