"Into Thin Air"

just finished reading a book that i consider one of my most captivating reads...

"Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer is a true, personal account of the 1996 Mt. Everest tragedy, in which 5 people died during a sudden snowstorm in May 1996. among the dead were two highly experienced and accomplished head-guides and owners of two high-altitude guiding companies. the author himself is an experienced mountain climber and journalist, who was commissioned by a magazine to join the Everest expedition and write about the guided ascent.

i appreciated how he included quite a bit of background information on mountain climbing and the history of Mt. Everest, since i didn't know much about either subjects. he wrote vividly about the exhausting experience of spending a few months traveling and acclimatizing before even beginning the summit ascent. when he began his detailed account of the Everest summit climb on May 10th, i was so enthralled that i couldn't put the book down.

it was an intense story of survival, and at times i couldn't believe some of the amazingly challenging obstacles they had to conquer in order to survive. i wanted badly for all the climbers to be safe, even though i knew that it was going to end tragically for some of them. i held my breath through much of the last portion of the book, and was saddened by each of the deaths.

however, as much as i enjoyed reading the book, i found some of the people's actions to be morally disturbing at times, such as intentionally leaving behind two severely incapacitated and barely-conscious climbers on the snowy summit simply because they were "as close to death as they could be while still breathing" and decided that they weren't worth saving and to instead "let nature run its course on them"... i mean, it's one thing if they didn't have enough manpower to help everyone down at once and had to choose to carry only one person with the best chance of survival... but the rescuers made this decision to leave the site empty-handed without carrying either of the two dying climbers. essentially, they were left for dead. quite disturbing, i thought. made worse by the fact that one of the two left-for-dead climbers actually woke up and miraculously made his way down to the camp on his own, and survived the entire ordeal! knowing he had suffered even more than necessary because the rescuers gave up on him earlier made it even more painful to read about.

after finishing the book in the evening, i couldn't stop thinking about it all night. it wasn't until the next day before the intensity of the story began to slowly wear off. i guess what haunted me the most was that this tragic nightmare was real, that it had actually happened, and that those people had truly suffered and died the way they did.

reading this book has given me a better understanding about the world of high-altitude climbing and the Sherpa community, a greater appreciation for high-altitude climbers and what they must endure and risk in order to reach their goals... and it has reinforced my decision to never, EVER attempt to climb Mt. Everest!