Last May, Jon Krakauer chased big questions and lifelong dreams up the 29,028 vertical feet of Mt. Everest, over icy crevasses big enough to swallow him whole, past the frozen bodies of felled climbers from years past.
Where once only the climbing elite could stand atop the world’s highest peak, better technology and bigger bucks lately had opened Everest to commercial traffic. Krakauer got in line.
An experienced climber and a writer for Outside magazine, he wanted to chronicle the mountain’s growing commercialization and the attendant problems. He also had a personal agenda. Climbing Everest would fulfill a dream sparked in childhood when a family friend reached the peak.
But today, a year after he stood on the “roof of the world” gazing down at China, Tibet and Nepal, the questions about commercialization have become a faint backdrop to the drumbeat of Krakauer’s inquisition into his own behavior.
He walked down Mt. Everest on May 10, 1996, a survivor of the most deadly day of climbing in the mountain’s history. A storm that whipped up gale-force winds and triple-digit windchills killed eight other climbers who were on the mountain with him. A ninth victim of that storm died later, and three more people perished on the slope later that month. It was the single most deadly season in Everest history.
Krakauer wrote an award-winning magazine article about the disaster, and followed it with a best-selling book, “Into Thin Air” (Villard). A recent appearance in Chicago drew 800 people to his slide show. Hundreds more were turned away. The response means that the one-time climbing bum no longer has to live on a few thousand dollars a year. But the same expedition that has given him fame and fortune has also seared his psyche.
Staring out of a 19th floor window during a recent trip to Chicago, Krakauer mulled the issues he has been wrestling with since the Everest disaster. He has to ponder them publicly almost daily in the more than two dozen cities he is visiting on his book tour, and in countless interviews and call-in shows. Each time he raises questions — always questions. Answers elude him.
“What is the point of life?” he asks. “What is important? Why did I live and they die? What can I possibly do to pay for that sin?”
He has started to “pay for that sin” by donating some profits from his book to an organization working in the Himalayan mountains with the Sherpas, the Asian climbers who tote the loads of Western customers up Mt. Everest. That gesture has offered him little relief.
“The questions I wrestle with are the big questions — they’re not about how do I handle my new-found wealth and celebrity, as troublesome as that is,” he said. “The thing that gives me pause is, I lived and others died and I didn’t do what should have been done.”
He acted, in other words, like the out-for-himself paying client he was, and not like the we’re-in-this-together climber he had always been. When he saw some of the expedition team in trouble, he figured the leaders were in charge and could handle the problems. He kept walking, painfully, slowly, down the mountain and back to camp, where he crawled into his tent. They never followed.
“I didn’t wait for my teammates,” said Krakauer. “An unforgivable lapse.”
Krakauer has been mountaineering since his childhood in Corvallis, Ore. Later, he moved to Boulder, Colo., the unofficial climbing capital of the United States, where he lived to scale mountains. It was altitude with an attitude, the insular and intense climbing culture that steeped him in the “brotherhood of the rope.”
“Climbing is an intimate thing,” Krakauer said. “You tie in with somebody and their life is in your hands and your life is in their hands.”
Money changes the game
But Everest was different. There was no brotherhood of the rope. In the beginning, there wasn’t even friendship. The other climbers were strangers whose common denominator was cash, the tens of thousands of dollars needed to pay for a spot on a commercial climb.
What was this cash culture doing to the climbing culture? What were these commercial expeditions, which once put 30 people on the summit in a single day, doing to the environment and the indigenous communities that live around the Himalayan mountains? What perils did these treks pose to people with more money than mountaineering ability?
These were the kinds of questions Krakauer wanted to explore as a journalist, and his book does probe them. “Into Thin Air” exposes the growing commercialization of adventure travel in Third World countries, of which an Everest climb is the pinnacle, and all of the messy questions that it entails. Krakauer opposes regulating commercial Everest expeditions and thinks that adding technology — such as oxygen tanks — to stops along the trek would be the wrong solution.
“The point of climbing is self-reliance, taking responsibility for your own actions and dealing with the consequences,” he said.
“To look for a government, especially a Third World government like Nepal, to step in and set up regulations . . .” Krakauer’s voice trails off and he shakes his head. “It’s not Nepal’s problem that rich Westerners are killing themselves on Everest.”
Ultimately, however, the book does not attempt to succeed as a work of investigative reporting.
“If it achieves anything,” he said, “that’s because it raises the big questions.”
“Big questions” about life and death, challenge and risk, that American society prefers to address as advertising slogans for soda pop and sports shoes.
“Most Americans think there’s something immoral about risk-taking. It’s OK to go bungee jumping, but if the bungee cord ever breaks, people are shocked — shocked — that that happens and they want to sue.”
It’s not all pretty pictures
But death shadows the greatest challenges, a fact Krakauer recognized intellectually before climbing Everest, and came to know more intimately after the disaster.
“A challenge in which you’re going to succeed, that’s not a challenge at all,” he said.
The reaction from those who made it off the mountain with Krakauer, and to the relatives of those who died, has been mixed. Some have found the book cathartic and helpful. Others “hate my guts,” Krakauer said, and accuse him of profiting from tragedy and of tarnishing the dead with accounts of mistakes and misjudgments.
Accusations from relatives give him sleepless nights. But in the end, he said, he thinks the book was an appropriate reaction to the tragedy. “A lot of what I did was wrong, but I don’t think writing this book was wrong.”
Krakauer promotes his book by narrating a slide show. People gasp at his stunning pictures and laugh at the jokes he makes early in the talk. But when the storm clouds begin appearing in his pretty pictures, and the tone of his talk darkens, Krakauer wonders whether his audience really understands how remorseful he feels.
“When the chips were down and it was expedient to be a client, I was a client,” he said. “People don’t understand that. But it is a huge deal to me.”
Krakauer hopes one day to return to Everest base camp, well below the summit, in a memorial gesture. Though he still climbs — he went to Antarctica several months ago for the kind of technical climbing he favors — he said he will never again attempt to stand on the roof of the world.
“There is no uplifting moral,” Krakauer said. “The whole thing is a huge mistake. I regret I ever went.”
