Into Thin Air v. The Climb: A Book Review, and Why We've Clearly Learned Nothing Since 1. The crowd of climbers attempting the summit, from National Geographic“Mountains don’t kill people, they just sit there”–Ed Viesturs, 1. IMAX expedition. 11 people have died on Mount Everest in the 2. It’s a high body count for a climbing season that is only about two months long and ends this week. But is it really surprising? A season of unfavorable weather creates crowds of climbers all rushing to the top during in a short window of clear skies. A film crew making a documentary.

Not surprisingly for a car crammed full of people, something possibly less-than-legal may have been going on, since once the wreck happens eight passengers bolt away. Family Guy. The Griffin household includes two teenagers, a cynical dog who is smarter than everyone else, and an evil baby who makes numerous attempts to eradicate. The story of New Zealand's Robert "Rob" Edwin Hall, who on May 10, 1996, together with Scott Fischer, teamed up on a joint expedition to ascend Mount Everest.

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A wealthy doctor, perishes in the cold. A 6. 9- year- old Spaniard on oxygen dies of exhaustion. A broken leg means certain death.

A miraculous rescue. It’s a story that sounds familiar. Because it’s one you’ve heard before.

One more death this year and this season is the deadliest on Everest since 1. That year, 1. 2 people died in a matter of a week or so. It was huge news. Expedition members spent years haunted by the loss of teammates. Books were written.

But we all learned from the logistical oversights and our own hubris. Or actually, I guess, not at all.

Apparently Mt. Everest is destined to become a titanic all it’s own. CBC published an account from an expedition member who called Everest “a morgue”, littered with corpses. Since of which are now landmarks or trail markers, one is “guy with the green boots”.

The guy with green boots. An unidentified climber who is now a landmark.

CBC news. And now that there are so many corpses littering Everest, the removal of them has become an inevitability. Fort Collins local and climbing blogger, Alan Arnette, was on Everest this year and has been interviewed in an article detailing the extreme difficulty and danger the removal of bodies presents, as well as the absurd cost- some up to $3. In light of this season’s tragedies, (and I almost have a hard time calling it that because its not like an earthquake or a flood; this whole thing is entirely preventable), I thought it fitting to do a book review.

An expedition advertisement touting the triumps of an amature climber on Everest. Of the several books written about the 1. Watch Autumn Online Hulu here. Everest Disaster, the two best known are Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer and The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev. For those of you unfamiliar with the tale, the main take away is that some very experienced mountaineers took a bunch of rich clients, some with high altitude experience some with none, up Everest with disastrous results. By the end, several clients, sherpas, guides and both expedition leaders were dead. Bad storms are blamed, but so is the competition between the two expeditions to become financially viable enterprises.

Camp 2 at night, from National Geographic. It pushed both to make bad decisions. Having 3 expeditions attempt on the same day created slow moving crowds. Failing to enforce the 2pm turn around is now acknowledged as a huge mistake. Slow climbers were too exhausted to summit and return safely, several ran out of oxygen, and a large group was lost in a storm on the way back.

Two of those lost in the storm were left for dead. A lot of blame got thrown around. Jon Krakauer’s novel is that, a novel. If you’ve read any of his other books you know they are extremely well- written and engaging. It’s a great read. My problem with that is that when you’re telling a story, not an account, the people you are writing about become characters and your subject becomes full of foreshadowing and thematic relevance which weren’t there when you started out.

There are some other problems too. He is an experienced mountaineer. In Into the Wild, he spends an entire chapter tooting his own horn about an ascent of Devil’s Thumb, but in Into Thin Air, his own accounts of his experience level are all over the board. Sometimes he is as fast as the guides leading the expedition, sometimes he claims to not really know what he’s doing. Which sounds suspiciously like a cop- out. That’s important when we’re considering that he was part of the decision making group that decided to leave Yasuko Namba and Beck Weathers for dead.

Weathers survived, but with most of his face and several limbs needing to be removed. Beck Weathers the Austin, TX doctor with severe frostbite. To Krakauer’s credit, however, he takes a lot of the blame for that and does not try to rationalize it away. And he went to a lot of trouble, as he always does, to uphold his journalistic integrity by interviewing everyone from both expeditions and doing a lot of research into the exact days and times when everything happened and piecing it together as objectively as possible. And he used the platform he had to bring the buying and selling of Everest to our attention…. Krakauer did not, however, have the same inside perspective of someone who was part of organizing an expedition and was privy to all the internal logistics, like Anatoli Boukreev did.

One critic called his book refreshingly authentic in comparison to Krakauer’s slickly written narrative, which I agree with. There is actually so much detail about the nuts and bolts of putting the Mountain Madness expedition together that you really need to get at least fifty pages in before anything interesting happens. The use of footnotes is excessive. Watch Cadillac Records Online Facebook. Its the hallmark of a writer trying to get a point across, not trying to entertain.

The route to the summit, from the BBCThe book is written, very simply, in response to Krakauer’s searing criticism of Boukreeev’s actions in 1. He defends the fact that he descended ahead of the clients with the totally legitimate argument that someone needed to be at camp to get clients safely out of their gear, warmed up, and in tents. But mostly to be rested in case a rescue was necessary. And it was. Of the 6 people lost in the storm, Boukreev rescued four.

And the next morning, he went back up toward the summit to attempt a rescue on his still missing expedition leader. To no avail. Anantoli Boukreev. Regardless, the fact that he was awarded for his heroism largely goes unnoticed. In the footnotes of his novel, however, a friend of his points out that although he was not the type to hand hold, none of the clients on his expedition died. Several in Krakauer’s did. So whose guides weren’t doing their job?

It is recognized that Boukreev was not good at typical guide duties, like chatting up clients, helping them with tents, and coaching them through tough spots. He felt that if you needed hand- holding, you shouldn’t be on Everest and should be turned around. Line of climbers on Everest, from National Geographic. Possibly, that was the most insightful thought to come out of the 1. But from Krakauer’s radio records, we know Scott Fisher the expedition leader was often unhappy with this behavior.

And Krakauer and Boukreev’s disagreements erupted into a full on feud, complete with shouting matches- at least one during a press event. But this all ended only a year after the Everest disaster when Boukreev was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna. Jon Krakauer. I have a problem with the fact that Krakauer chose to release a ton of documents and information “disproving” some of Boukreev’s accounts. Information which he had back in 1. Boukreev was already dead. What is he trying to prove?

His account is by far the more well- known. He really had nothing to prove. It almost seems pointless to assign too much blame when no amount of preparation makes Everest safe.

I could go on forever probably. There is also the whole issue of Krakauer misidentifying Randy Harris as someone who returned safely when in fact he had probably been dead for hours. Watch The Paperboy Online Full Movie here.

Would the entire tragedy have been avoided if Boukreev had been around to keep clients from getting lost? But if you want more, both books are worth your time and have extensive materials detailing the year or so after the 1. But this year, just as in 1. Who belongs on Everest? What about oxygen?