Mount Everest looms large over the world. It is the highest point on earth and, for nearly 100 years was an unattainable goal. After Sir Edmund Hillary conquered it with his Sherpa guides in 1953, it continued to attract record-seekers and intrepid mountaineering explorers. Thirty-five years later the world has changed the nature of climbing of the once barely attainable goal. Jon Krakauer, writing for Outside magazine, accompanied a "commercial" expedition during the ill-fated climbing season of 1996. Into Thin Air is his personal narrative of the calamitous storm that took so many lives and was so quickly communicated to the world. It is a powerful story.
As the 1980s and 1990s arrived the nature of climbing the mountain the Sherpas revere as a god changed drastically. Now the explorers were basically sated and the rich paid to be "guided" and assisted to the top. Mountaineers of different levels of competence and of responsibility formed companies to take "clients" to the summit. The mountain began to accumulate refuse, garbage, used air tanks and corpses. Only recently did some of the more responsible groups, particularly the commercial expeditions, begin to donate time and effort to haul some of the detritus down the mountain.
The spent oxygen bottles blighting the South Col have been accumulating since the 1950s, but thanks to an ongoing litter-removal program instigated in 1994 by Scott Fischer's Sagarmatha Environmental Expedition, there are fewer of them up there now than there used to be. Much of the credit belongs to a member of that expedition named Brent Bishop (the son of the late Barry Bishop, the eminent National Geographic photographer who summitted Everest in 1963), who initiated a highly successful incentive policy, funded by Nike, Inc., whereby Sherpas are paid a cash bonus for each oxygen bottle they bring down from the Col... (It has resulted) ... in the removal of more than eitht hundred oxygen canisters from the upper mountain from 1994 through 1996.
To the Sherpas and the serious mountaineer community the sacred mountain, Sagarmatha, is endangered by the new paying customers who are led to the top (when possible), assisted heavily by their guides and who often even walk without carrying packs. Their loads are carried for them by their guides and Sherpas. It is part of the modern world where the highest summit has been climbed and the new goals are undersea and in outer space. Even there, plans exist for the tourist industry to take over lower Earth orbits by shuttle and new, private spacecraft. Even the moon awaits an H.G. Wells dream.
To a non-mountaineer whose heart failure allows altitudes no more that 2900 feet, the desire to struggle to a mind-numbing, deadly, cold environment of 29,000 feet seems totally without logic. And yet, as they say when asked why they climb the highest (but not most beautiful) peak, "because it is there." This obsessive quality and strangeness come through in the narrative by one of the summit-bitten, Jon Krakauer. Krakauer was assigned to the commercial expedition that was one of the worst affected by the sudden storm at the summit and the string of errors that led to numerous deaths. He was writing for Outside magazine about the commercialization of the mountain as well as fulfilling his lifelong dream of conquering the great mountain.
Article comments