Holy Mother, Sagarmāthā

Laura Miller: Like a lot of people, I have occasionally seen the photos of long lines of people on Everest, waiting to get to the summit, and they look like they’re in line for a ride at Disneyland. That made me think it just must be so safe there right now. And I know that it is safer now, but still, five people died up there last year. That’s the lowest rate ever, but it’s still five people!

Jon Krakauer: If the same percentage of participants at the New York Marathon died, they would stop it quick, right? There’s now a lot of people with a lot invested in the commodification of Everest. Most of the guiding companies now are owned by Sherpas, so everyone pushes back at me. But people don’t think about the potential for mass casualty incidents like the one in 2014, when this huge ice block came down and hit 26 climbers. It killed 16 of them, all of them Nepalis, and they were lucky there were only that few, that there weren’t more people in the icefall. Right now, or in a few hours at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., there will be 300 or more people in the icefall, and right now there is a huge serac hanging over the top of the icefall. They thought it would fall three weeks ago. It didn’t, so they all stopped climbing through the icefall for two weeks. But finally, there was too much financial pressure, so they opened another route to the left that’s still in danger. If, tomorrow morning, we wake up and hear that 300 people died in the icefall, I would not be one bit surprised.

I have to admit, while I can understand why the Nepalis feel like they have to risk it for their livelihoods, the clients, to me, seem nuts.

People are attracted by the danger to some degree, but they still don’t really want to die. They just think they’re too smart or too strong, that it won’t get them. When I was 23 and climbed the Devil’s Thumb, that was crazy. I literally sat down and thought, I bet there’s a 70 percent chance I’m going to survive this—60 percent, at least. And I thought, Those are pretty good odds. “Going to Everest was probably the biggest mistake of my life.”

People are attracted to risk, they’re in denial, and they like the bragging rights. If there hadn’t been a disaster in 1996, I would have thought climbing Everest was a super cool thing. I probably would have written a cautionary piece but still admitted that this was fucking fantastic. And that would not have created as much business for these guide services as the disaster did! The disaster added to the cachet of “I climbed Everest. That’s the mountain where all those people died in 1996, you know. I am badass because I climbed this mountain that killed all those people.”

Into Thin Air has been a great success but also a source of almost continual criticism for you. All the way back in 1998, when Dwight Garner wrote about complaints about how you depicted Anatoli Boukreev for Salon, you told him, “I wish it had stopped selling a half-million copies ago. I just want it all to go away.” How are you feeling about it now?

I’ve never really been able to move away from it. Every May 10, it’s still there. I had really bad PTSD, so bad that I finally got help with it and started going to group therapy with a bunch of veterans, so yeah, Everest has not ever left me. I mean, I probably still think about it every day, and I regret profoundly that I ever went to Everest. People don’t believe it, but if they knew what it’s done to me, they would believe it very easily. I’m grateful, as authors are, for this publicity tour, but it has definitely brought everything back, right to the fore.

Surely you don’t regret the book itself?

Having gone, I’m really glad I wrote the book, but going to Everest was probably the biggest mistake of my life.

In addition to the lingering effects of nearly dying on that mountain, there are also the ongoing debates about the accuracy of certain details in the book. Anyone who has ever done any reporting knows that it’s very rare, in a long piece, not to get anything wrong, but Into Thin Air has been subject to more scrutiny than most other works of reporting.

I have needed to make corrections over the years. There’s so much faulty memory from hypoxia, so there’s been a lot of errors on everybody’s part. I have the luxury because the book is still selling, my publisher is reprinting, and, in this new edition especially, I’ve been able to make corrections. I did in 1999, and I’m doing it now. But I stand by what I wrote.

What specifically do you regret about going to Everest in 1996?

I realized—certainly when I was writing it, and I think I had a sense of it when I was on the mountain—that it was like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. My presence in the experiment altered the outcome, absolutely. I mean, Rob Hall, to this day it baffles me what the fuck he was thinking. For this latest edition, I contacted Frank Fischbeck, the oldest member of the team. I’d interviewed him before, but he wasn’t very forthcoming. He was the first guy to turn around on summit day after a couple of hours, and I didn’t really grill him about that. I could add to this new edition that he told me that when he turned around and started down, then encountered Rob Hall, Rob tried to talk him into going on too. So it wasn’t just Doug Hansen.

Really?

Frank had the good sense to say, “No, this is a mistake. I’m going back down.” It’s well documented that Doug turned around, was headed down, met Rob, and they had a conversation. No one alive heard that conversation, but Doug turned around and started going back up.

I can see why Rob did that, but having done that, when he then did not turn Doug around, when he had multiple opportunities to at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., when he was supposed to, and the fact that Doug didn’t get to the summit till around 4—that is unconscionable. One of the explanations is that he was feeling competitive for his business with Scott Fischer’s guide business. All of Scott’s clients made the summit, and for Rob, at that point, it was just me and, I guess, Yasuko who had made the summit. I really think my presence writing this article for Outside affected his judgment in a terrible way.

That must be an awful feeling.

Yeah, it is. You better believe it.

Also, we haven’t even talked about Beck [Weathers]. Once I started researching this new introduction, it was supposed to be 3,000 words, but I realized, God, I could write 10,000 words. Another part of the puzzle that no one’s really realized is that Beck knew that his vision was really bad on May 9, as we were going up to high camp. He said nothing to anyone. From Camp 3, at 23,000 feet, to Camp 4, the high camp, at 26,000 feet, he simply put his feet right in the footstep of the guy in front of him, and then, the next morning, he did the same thing in the dark all the way up to 27,600 feet, the balcony. He thought that when the sun came up, his vision would get better, but it didn’t.

He encounters Rob. Rob says, “You’ve got to go down now with a Sherpa.” Beck says, “I still think it might get better as the light improves,” but it didn’t, so he promised Rob he would wait for 30 minutes. That was the single—you know, I’ve said and written that it wasn’t one mistake that caused this calamity but rather a cascade of numerous small mistakes. But the biggest of those small mistakes was probably when Rob didn’t turn Doug around and when he didn’t turn Beck around.

This is how things really compounded. Rob and Doug are on the summit at 4 p.m. Rob’s trying to get Doug down, but there’s no fixed rope on the most exposed part of the whole descent between the Hillary Step and the South Summit. So Rob summons [fellow guide] Andy Harris to bring up oxygen from the South Summit up to him above the Hillary Step. Andy had to go up to help Doug. This is the key thing. And because of that, two of our three guides are helping Doug. The third guide, Mike Groom, his job was to get Yasuko down. He was sort of the personal guide for Yasuko. So they’re descending, they get back to the balcony, and there is Beck. Mike realizes, Oh my God, this guy is blind. I’ve got to get Beck down too. He’d already sent me ahead, so he sent Yasuko too, and he told both of us, “I’ll catch up to you.”

With Beck, he realized, I have to short-rope this guy. That was exhausting and really slow, and that meant there was no guide for Yasuko, no extra oxygen for her. If Mike Groom had not had to take Beck down, I am absolutely positive he would have gotten Yasuko down in plenty of time before the storm, and that would have avoided a huge part of the tragedy.

I’m seeing that this feels as if it’s just still so immediate for you.

Oh, it is. It’s totally immediate.

I mean, there’s so many fucking ironies here. I was convinced when I wrote the book that all my friends who were guides were going to hate me because I had certainly destroyed guiding on Everest forever. Nobody would now want to climb Everest with a guide. Well, of course, it had the opposite effect. It was the best advertising the guides ever had.

That bothered me, and also, I added to all this crowding. This guilt just doesn’t go away. I can see how my presence contributed to Rob’s bad decisions. I wish there was another explanation, but I don’t see it, other than it was my presence. He’d agreed to have this journalist, and it meant a lot to his business. This was a huge deal to him. He saw this as a chance to go big, to get all these American clients.

People don’t realize the moral hazard. I’m like the naysayer and the paranoid guy who tells people, “Don’t go to Everest—it’s really dangerous.” And all these other people say, “It’s much safer,” which it is, but it’s still dangerous. There were people on Everest in ’96 who didn’t belong there, including me, and there were people much less competent than me, which was even worse. And 1,000 people are trying to climb Everest right now, half Sherpas, half clients, and I guarantee you there’s a large number of people who shouldn’t be there, who aren’t competent.

When you’re up there—even if you’re hugely competent—and someone collapses or someone who’s not competent needs help, you’re not going to be able to give it to them, because at 28,000 or 29,000 feet there’s nothing much you can do, unless you’re superhuman like Anatoli Boukreev, especially if you’re running out of oxygen. I can guarantee you, having spent 90 minutes at 28,900 feet without oxygen, I mean, my God, I really thought I was going to die. I didn’t think I was going to get down, because my brain just shut down. So you’re putting your own life in danger, and if you don’t help, and you descend and leave this person who needs help, you’re going to feel guilty for the rest of your fucking life.

I do not feel I was responsible for Yasuko Namba’s death directly, but I think I was definitely part of this formula that caused this tragedy to happen: bad luck, bad weather, bad decisions. I was part of the reason for those bad decisions, without a doubt.

When you ruminate about this, as you have for the past 30 years, has your opinion about any aspect of it changed?

Not really. I have more clarity. Beck Weathers, you know, he was this Dallas pathologist, classic Texan, loud, rich Republican, talking about the evils of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats constantly. At first I didn’t like him, but I came to really respect and like him by the time we went to the summit. I had thought Everest was just another trophy to put in his case, you know, but I’ve realized that, no: He had suffered from black depression. He got really addicted to climbing, and Everest was huge for him. He thought it would transform his life the way Chris McCandless [the subject of Krakauer’s 1996 book Into the Wild] thought going into Alaska would transform his life.

In just the last six months, I’ve really come to reexamine that, and I don’t blame him. Definitely, Beck deserves some criticism for going up on May 9 and 10 without telling anyone he was partially blind, but the real fault was that when he did tell Rob Hall early in the morning of May 10 at the balcony, 27,600 feet, Rob let Beck talk him into letting him wait there.

Beck was a client. People don’t appreciate how you are trained as a client, at least on Everest, to be passive. I got reprimanded all the time by Rob saying, “You’re not a climber, Jon. You’re a client.” Rob told us, “OK, tomorrow’s summit day. I’m the captain of the ship. My word is law.” He was looking right at me when he said that. “I will brook no dissent. I will brook no disagreement.”

Wait, was this the speech where he was being very adamant about the turnaround time?

That might have been the day before. I don’t have my notes. It probably was at base camp, you know, or some lower camp, but it’s the same lecture: We’re going to turn around at 1 or 2 p.m., “I don’t care if you’re 50 feet from the top. If it’s turnaround time, you’re turning around. I’m going to turn you around.”

This is the guy who then does nothing to turn anyone—nobody. Of all those people [in both groups], only five of us got there before 2. Everyone else should have turned around.

Aren’t there people who said that there were forecasts about the storm that started moving in once you headed back down?

There were some Brits who wrote a book saying that we knew there were forecasts for bad weather and we ignored them, and that I failed to write about that. Well, I didn’t know about it. Nobody knew about it. I guarantee you, if we had known, if Rob Hall and Scott Fischer had known about the storm, they would have simply not gone to the high camp, and if they did, they wouldn’t have gone to the summit. They just wouldn’t have done it, so I don’t believe that. There was no radio chatter, nothing. The South Africans were up there. The Taiwanese were up there. And none of those people were aware that there was a forecast for bad weather or I’m sure we would have known about it, because everyone was talking to each other.

Almost from the moment you published Into Thin Air, people were disputing your version of events. Why do you think this particular story seems to attract so much of that?

I can’t explain it. I can’t explain why people are still arguing about Into the Wild either. It’s not like writers know, when we write our books. We just write about what interests us, and if we’re lucky, other people are interested in it too.

What I’m specifically asking about is the urge to relitigate it. I’m not a climber, but I have a theory: There’s so much about the story of the 1996 Everest disaster that resembles true-crime discussions: the timelines, who was where when, the way that tiny things get studied and debated, and the desire to identify whom to blame.

I’ve never thought about that, but I think you might be right.

That’s one reason why someone like Sandy Hill Pittman became such a lightning rod, even though she was really not responsible for what happened.

I feel bad for Sandy Pittman. I don’t regret writing about her, but I clarified some things that I hope make people think she’s a little less the villain. I don’t believe she was the cause of disaster. I never have. I’ve repeatedly said I don’t. But that still comes back to bite me. She was hurt by what I said, but I think what I said was truthful.

I mean, I fact-checked it.

In a way, because she was also covering the climb, from Scott Fischer’s team, she likely had the same effect that you had on Rob’s.

Scott was glad she was there to report, using all this internet stuff, which was brand-new, from Everest. He was enthusiastic about her taking this really heavy electronics gear up to 26,000 feet, which didn’t work, and that, I think, played a major role, because Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa had to carry it. He also had to short-rope Sandy, which exhausted him, and he clearly was not himself on summit day. So, yes, Sandy was associated with that, but the fact that Lopsang did that stuff was not Sandy’s fault one bit. She was just doing what Scott wanted her to do.

Then, a few months after the Everest disaster, Vanity Fair published this just cruel piece about her being a socialite that really set the tone and opened the floodgates of criticism for her. She didn’t deserve that. She did not cause the disaster.

How have all these contested or alternate accounts affected you over the years?

First there was Boukreev, then the guys with the weather reports. There’s probably a few others—Sandy, whatever. When you’re a reporter, you can never get things absolutely perfect, but you try. It’s been hard. I thought I had a really thick skin, and I do, but with Everest, there was this dynamic where Anatoli Boukreev was heroic, but it was my duty as a journalist to point out when he wasn’t heroic and the bad decisions he made, and that really pissed people off.

What Boukreev did was heroic. He went out in the storm and brought people back from 300 yards away, but the person who got them down there, the real hero, or one of the real heroes, was Neal Beidleman, the junior guide, the youngest guy, the only one who hadn’t climbed Everest before. Scott Fischer was dying above him, and Boukreev, because he didn’t use oxygen, had no choice but to descend immediately.

People couldn’t stand the fact that Boukreev was being criticized by me, so they attacked me. His co-author, Weston DeWalt, in Boukreev’s [posthumously published] book, made hay out of it, making false statements, many false statements, in that book. At first, I just ignored them. But then the Columbia Journalism Review published a piece with a title like “Three Famous Nonfiction Books That Got It Wrong.” The writer didn’t even fact-check it, and when I asked him about it, he said, “Well you didn’t protest or make any indication that you thought this was false and needed to be corrected.” Give me a break, you’re a journalism instructor! So after that, I felt the need to correct. Then this YouTuber came along. He’d been dissing me for a year, but I didn’t know about it until someone on Instagram said, “Hey, you gotta check this out.”

My first reaction was—and everyone at my publisher was telling me—do not take the bait. But I felt like I had to. I have a young millennial climbing partner, a total digital native, and she was saying, “Jon, old people like you aren’t going to go down this rabbit hole, but I put your name into Google, clicked it, and by the second or third click, I was deep into the rabbit hole. You don’t have to do anything, but meanwhile, he’s getting millions of views, and you’re not. If you want to counteract this, you need to make your own YouTube videos.” I resisted, but eventually I did.

Yeah, this is a true-crime event without a true crime that I know of.

You can be an armchair detective about it, solving the case from your laptop. I’ve come to realize that anytime someone on the internet is closely analyzing photographs to prove something, they are full of shit. It’s happened so many times that these internet sleuths have targeted some innocent person with their ridiculous theories based on finding “clues” in photographs. It happened with the Boston Marathon bombing and those murders in Idaho. And that is the foundation of the YouTuber’s theories as well.

It’s true that he never interviewed anyone. He’s always asking for more photographs to analyze and complaining that National Geographic won’t send him theirs.

I think that even before he came along, this was part of the appeal of this story, the impression that if you just studied all of these details hard enough, you could arrive at some fundamental truth.

Well, I don’t think there’s anything enigmatic or very mysterious in a meaningful way about what happened. I think it’s really clear—other than why Rob didn’t turn people around.

One thing is that for clients of Rob Hall, each of us got three bottles on summit day. That was it. That’s all we paid for, that’s all we got. We had to live with that. With Scott Fischer, you could pay more and get a fourth or fifth bottle, which is what Sandy and maybe others apparently did. I didn’t know that until afterwards, and, you know, in retrospect, it’s like, what was Rob, what were these early guys, thinking? Why not just bring enough oxygen and enough Sherpas to carry that oxygen and charge people more?

Well, it just wasn’t done. It was thought to be cheating. Rob Hall would say, “Man, if you can’t get to the top with two bottles and one for emergencies on the way down, you don’t belong on Everest.” He said that probably 20 times that month. That was his thing, the old-school “We’re climbers here.”

Sounds like machismo.

Absolutely, climbing is full of that, and Boukreev was the same. It was prestige. And there’s a lot of climbers out there where that motivates them. To date, there have been 221 climbers who have climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen. There have been approximately 13,000 who have climbed it with oxygen.