Stepping ‘Into Thin Air’

As writer Jon Krakauer stepped into the thin Everest air, breathing bottled gas through his claustrophobia-inducing oxygen mask, it took him four deep breaths to move one foot forward. Deprived of sleep for 56 hours, he felt drugged, disengaged – the sensation of being underwater. Beyond 25,000 feet or the Death Zone, larger-than-average lungs are an advantage because acclimatization here is impossible, the lungs can only hold 25 percent of the oxygen breathed. Exhausted, Krakauer had to remind himself that he had to be aware; a single blunder would cost him his life.

The events in Krakauer’s book, Into Thin Air, are written with brutal honesty. His unforgiving recollection of the May 10, 1996 disaster justified my paranoia of high-above-ground exploits. It’s a paradox that my most treasured tome is about high altitudes, as I detest going near high places, even just approaching mall railings makes my heart flutter. Climbers, I discovered, are not immune to this fear. As the author rode his plane from the US to India, he felt his dream was absurd; the plane’s ascent of 29,000 feet to the sky was the same height he would climb to conquer Everest.

In 1996, in attempting the highest point on Earth, one out of four climbers died. Krakauer’s best chance to summit the mountain was in New Zealand’s Rob Hall, a veteran Himalayan guide. At that time, Hall’s company – Adventure Consultants – had successfully put more clients on top of Mt. Everest than any other organization. This was a voyage where ordinary mortals couldn’t offer physical or financial commitment: To be guided on the roof of the world, each of Hall’s eight clients paid more than $65,000. Of Krakauer’s five teammates who reached the top, only one made it back alive. Hall, the expedition leader, was among those who perished when a violent snowstorm engulfed the mountain.

Krakauer wrote, "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 oxygen is so sparse on Mt. Everest that ascending the mountain without compressed gas was first thought to be impossible, but Reinhold Messner accomplished the feat in 1978 and again in 1980. Since then, 60 men and women have reached the summit without gas, but six of them never made it back alive.

Mt. Apo, the highest point in the Philippines, is 9,692 ft., while the Everest base camp is 17,600 ft. Here, the oxygen level is half of the oxygen at sea level. Hall’s plan was to get his clients from base camp and travel three trips upwards, ascending succeeding camps every 2,000 feet. Krakauer describes the acclimatization task as a gargantuan construction project; he believed he might as well be on an expedition to the moon.

Among Krakauer’s Adventure Consultant teammates, he liked the affable Doug Hansen best. Hansen in 1995 nearly reached the summit before being forced back after reaching unstable snow at 330 feet near the peak. "The summit looked soooo close," he says. "Believe me; there hasn’t been a day that I haven’t thought about it."

To repeat his climb, Hansen took construction jobs by day and labored as a postal worker at night, but even on a substantial discount, he still fell short in resources. To help fund his ascent, he enlisted the aid of students at Sunrise Elementary School – by selling T-shirts. He later carried a flag with the school’s symbol to the summit, but during his descent the mountain claimed his life.

The tension increases as other climbers are introduced, like Hall’s rival commercial expedition led by Scott Fischer. Fischer is a persistent climber, it’s a miracle he’s still alive after his previous accidents. As a novice instructor he fell, unroped from 70 feet into a crevasse of the Dinywood Glacier. While rock climbing Yosemite he fell from 80 feet. The most notorious was when he raced two ice climbers in Utah’s Bridal Veil Falls, lost his grip and fell a hundred feet, stabbing his calf with a tubular ice tool which made "a hole that was big enough to stick a pencil through." The witnesses were shocked after seeing him drop: then stand up and walk away.

My favorite character was a client of the American Mountain Madness Team, the Himalayan legend, 68-year-old mountaineer Pete Schoening. Schoening is famous for his heroic act, the Belay. In 1953, an eight-man expedition in K2, the world’s second highest mountain, was trapped in a fierce blizzard when a fellow alpinist, Art Gilkey, was affected by an altitude-induced blood clot. Schoening had to swiftly lower him down Abruzzi Ridge as the storm raged.

At 25,000 feet, another climber, George Bell, slipped and pulled four others with him. Wrapping the rope around his shoulders and ice ax, Schoening managed to single-handedly hold on to Gilkey and arrest the slide of the five falling climbers without being pulled off the mountain himself.

Both Hall’s team and Mountain Madness teams’ destiny would be intertwined with other groups unqualified to scale the mountain and would betray set agreements.

In 1995, a Taiwanese team infamous for their failed attempt of Mt. McKinley initiated a costly and hazardous helicopter rescue by Park and Wildlife volunteers. Now this same team, slow to ascend, used what Krakauer described as strange clothing and equipment. One climber, unfamiliar with the use of crampons (a grid of spikes attached to the sole of each shoe for traction on ice) staggered occasionally. When reaching a deep crevasse that was bridged by two ladders weakly held together, their team in a potentially fatal act marched through the frail structure in close formation. Later at Camp IV, a member would squat to relieve his bowels while wearing the smooth lined soles of his boots. He slipped and fell headfirst. Abandoning their dying comrade, the Taiwanese team would later hog the lines causing human traffic.

The South African Team was led by Ian Woodall, a Brit who funneled money from misinformed sponsors by pretending to include other South Africans in his ascent. He claimed he was an elite soldier and an experienced climber. It was later discovered he had limited climbing experience and worked not as a soldier, but a pay clerk. After using the Sunday Times money, he threatened to kill the reporters the paper sent. Even President Nelson Mandela intervened but failed. South African climber Edmund February said, "He (Ian) took the dream of an entire nation and utilized them for his own selfish purposes."

This is non-fiction’s finest hour, a story of climbers bound by their goal, ignoring the reality of death. It is foolish to conclude that by studying the mistakes of this expedition to avoid repeating them will guarantee success; the mountain has killed many elite climbers. Nature as a determined obstacle is an unstoppable force. At the Death Zone, Everest is littered with corpses.

As I traveled home to Pampanga, peering through the bus’ window and looking at Mt. Arayat’s visage, I visualized Hall’s lone, frozen remains overlooking the expanse of a snow swept Nepal. In his final solitary moments, his meticulous plans having failed, the alpinist was most likely paralyzed by ice crystals forming in his tissues. Frostbite is a slow, painless killer. Reinhold Messner wrote, "Death through exhaustion – is like death through freezing – a pleasant one."