Reflecting on 'Into Thin Air'

Climbing Everest is the ultimate ambition of so many. It pushes you to your physical and mental limits. If you summit you’ll literally be on top of the world. Yet, these accomplishments always come with some sacrifice and what happens when things go wrong? What happens when a dream becomes a nightmare? 

‘Into Thin Air’ is Jon Krakauer’s personal account of a 1996 commercial Everest expedition hit by a blizzard. In the disaster eight climbers lost their lives. 

This book is incredibly well written and paced. I found myself racing through it, soaking in each fact, feeling and story telling tangent. There is emotion woven in the pages, Krakauer’s personal experience is what shapes the account. This is not a rehashing of events; it’s personal. Those who died were people Krakauer spoke to, spent time with and befriended. 

There is an ever building tension in the writing. We know from the start the fate of the expedition and we read as they slowly make their way up a mountain we know they’ll never come down. Even in the early pages I found myself thinking how much I wouldn’t want to climb Everest. I was uncomfortable about situations before they’d even reached base camp. 

Speaking of tension, in some reviews I noticed readers complaining of dramatisation of the writing. Some even seemed to imply that Krakauer's experiences were being relayed to fit a narrative style of fiction. I think this is an unfair judgement. From a writer’s perspective, often tension building plots in fiction are literally mirrored off of a narrative arc; one that looks a lot like a mountain. If someone is recounting climbing a mountain the tension will build in much the same way, especially if the tragedy occurs at the summit. 

Something else I noticed in reviews was a lot of criticism towards the real people and the choices that were made. I feel these criticisms were all made with the gift of hindsight, something Krakauer also has an awareness of in his writing. He notices his mistakes, those of others too, but they are often only visible when looking back. There are criticisms of the commercialisation and pressures put on Sherpas, the lack of experience of climbers, the recklessness that the media can encourage and what people will do for glory. I do want to clarify it would never be my place as a reader to assign blame when a book  revolves around a tragedy where real people lost their lives and never made it home to their families.

It would be far too easy to point out their mistakes and judge their behaviour when I have never stepped foot on that mountain. People went there to complete ambitions with the best intention. As a quote from a relative in the book states; “no one went there to die.” 

Maybe it was recklessness, human error or just awful luck. The reality is it happened, reaching for those explanations doesn’t change anything. I felt this was communicated in Krakauer's writing. In the aftermath I felt he wrote with some desperation, some search for answers, some way of understanding his own decisions. Looking back at the cacophony of events, the good and the bad, does offer some insight on what can be changed in order for those events to never happen again. Only the book came out in 1997 and those climbers were certainly not the last to have never made it home. 

This book revolves around a personal experience of Everest but at its core I think it is more than this. It’s about people, passion and the power nature holds that must be respected.