Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air

In order to continue climbing Everest, many aspects of climbing need to be improved before more people endanger their lives to try and reach the roof of the world. The guides have some areas that need the most reform. During the ascension of Everest the guides made a plethora mistakes that seemed insignificant but only aided in disaster. The guides first mistake is allowing “any bloody idiot [with enough determination] up” Everest (Krakauer 153). By allowing “any bloody idiot” with no climbing experience to try and climb the most challenging mountain in the world, the guides are almost inviting trouble. Having inexperienced climbers decreases the trust a climbing team has in one another, causing an individual approach to climbing the mountain and more reliance on the guides. While this approach appears fine, this fault is seen in addition to another in Scott Fischer’s expedition Mountain Madness. Due to the carefree manner in which the expedition was run, “clients [moved] up and down the mountain independently during the acclimation period, [Fischer] had to make a number of hurried, unplanned excursions between Base Camp and the upper camps when several clients experienced problems and needed to be escorted down,” (154). Two problems present in the Mountain Madness expedition were seen before the summit push: the allowance of inexperienced climbers and an unplanned climbing regime. A third problem that aided disaster was the difference in opinion in regards to the responsibilities of a guide on Everest. One guide “went down alone many hours ahead of the clients” and went “without supplemental oxygen” (318). These three major issues: allowing anyone up the mountain, not having a plan to climb Everest and differences in opinion. All contributed to the disaster on Everest in

Just before reaching the summit, despite the fact that he was having difficulty breathing, Krakauer was actually quite calm but disoriented, and relatively excited about the prospect of reaching the summit. However, at the moment of his summit, he did not feel the elation that he expected, but rather apprehension and dread about what he knew to be a difficult descent.

Krakauer was fascinated by mountain climbing from a young age. “How would it feel, I wondered over and over, to be on that thumbnail-thin summit ridge, worrying over the storm clouds building on the horizon, hunched against the wind and dunning cold, contemplating the horrible drop on either side?” Asked Krakauer. He had received a book as a child that was full of information about mountain climbing, and he was fascinated. Krakauer was glued to his book for the next decade, until he finally decided to put his dreams into action. When he was twenty

“As a youth, [Krakauer was] told, [he] was willful, self-absorbed, intermittently reckless, moody. [He] disappointed [his] father…. Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in [him]…confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to please. If something captured [his] undisciplined imagination, [he] pursued it with a zeal bordering on obsession, and from the age of seventeen until [his] late twenties that something was mountain climbing” (134).

Lack of psychological safety within the team members failed to fix cognitive bias of irrationality. If members developed trust within the team, cognitive bias could have been prevented or at least minimized. The truth that climbers might make irrational decisions and find it hard to turn back when they are so closed to the summit was obvious, but teammates seeing this problem did not speak up since they did not feel that their thoughts were welcome and felt uneasy. More cognitive biases could also been prevented to lessen the complex system of the expedition. Since climbing Mt. Everest is already a high risk venture, any additional problems such as irrational decisions can cause a crisis. Using the early sign of issues with Hall’s team’s progress, it was obvious that the probability of failing the expedition was high before the team even started. Hall could have used the issues as a sign of the complex systems that exist, and could have used this knowledge to prevent any irrational decisions. The complex systems and the lack of psychological safety also contributed to the tragedy. The team members failed to communicate and trust each other, which then added more problems to the complex systems. For instance, Boukreev’s could have spoken up to his team leader, Fischer, about his concerns regarding his team members lacking experience to begin with. By speaking up, he could have prevented more chain reaction due to lack of communications and feedback within the

In this passage from Jon Krauaker's Into Thin Air, Jon Krauaker does not display the sense of accomplishment that one would expect from achieving such a difficult endeavor. He really displays a sense of grief and dissatisfaction from what he had accomplished. For taking a risk as life threatening as this, in Krauaker's eyes, he couldn't possibly be proud of what he had done when so many men had lost their lives during the same excursion that he journeyed on. Throughout this novel, Jon Krauaker uses immense amounts of rhetorical devices to display his emotion to convey his attitude toward the dangers of climbing Mt. Everest.

As much as I thought that the first chapter should have been removed, the book, overall, changed the way I viewed Mount Everest. The novel helps to understand that there is much more than just climbing up and down. For instance, when Krakauer talks about expenses and equipment, he says, “That autumn the ministry raised the permit fee again to fifty thousand dollars plus ten thousand dollars for each additional climber.” This shows that there is an extensive amount of planning and equipment to be covered. Krakauer also tells that a storm on Everest can be much more deadly than a storm at sea level. At the end of chapter twenty, he says, “Brice Herrod is now presumed dead, the twelfth casualty of the season.” Its descriptions like these which make me view Everest as both a great challenge, but also a potential deathtrap.

On May 10, 1996, nine people perished on Mt. Everest. Jon Krakauer, a writer from Outside magazine, was there to witness the events and soon after write the book, Into Thin Air, chronicling the disaster. Jon Krakauer is not only the writer and narrator of Into Thin Air but is also one of the main characters. Originally Outside Magazine planned to send Krakauer to Everest in order for him to write a story for the magazine. The climb was completely financed by the magazine with one of the leading Everest guide groups led by Rob Hall, an elite climber. Krakauer divides the people on the mountain into two main categories, tourist and elite. The elite being guides and Sherpas like Hall, Harris and Ang Dorje,

Rob Hall, the Kiwi guide of the Everest expedition group of Adventure Consultants, was the head guide during the terrible accidents of 1996. He led his team through many obstacles, facing them head on and never faltering until his last moments. Even in his dying breath he didn’t succumb to fear and didn’t want anyone to worry about him. Rob Hall would not leave Doug Hansen alone, even though he knew Hansen would die eventually, and didn’t desert him until there was a 100 percent certainty that Hansen was dead. Even though Hall himself had told all of the Adventure

Mount Everest is 29,092 feet tall. Imagine climbing this mountain with little to no experience. Would you survive? In the nonfiction novel Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, Krakauer and his recruited crews try climbing this mountain. With many deaths along the way to the top, readers are quick to blame characters in the book. However, character stands out from the rest: Krakauer. In the book Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, Krakauer is the most responsible for the other character’s deaths because he recruited and dragged along inexperienced mountain climbers, pushed them harder than they should’ve been pushed, and watched them suffer.

At first Jon Krakauer thought nothing of him when he first met Beck as shown in the book ""To aging Walter Mitty types like myself, Dick Bass was an inspiration," Seaborn Beck Weathers explained in a thick East Texas twang during the trek to Everest Base Camp last April. A forty-nine-year-old Dallas pathologist, Beck was one of the eight climbers on Rob Hall's 1996 guided expedition" (24). As the book went on and the conditions in Mount Everest got worst, Joe Krakauer's view of Beck changed as he ended up becoming one of the last few survivors of the 1996 expedition of Mount Everest through sheer determination, strength, and courage. For example "Although Beck was blind in his right eye and able to focus his left eye within a radius of only three or four feet, he started walking directly into the wind, deducing correctly that camp lay in that direction... Struck dumb by Beck's miraculous resurrection, an exhausted Hutchison crawled outside to answer the call" (264). From this observation Jon Krakauer transformation of his thoughts on Beck signify Krakauer realization of human

John Krakauer was an avid climber. He scaled many tall and fierce looking mountains, but that was in his twenties and thirties. He is now forty has a wife, a child and has given up the dangerous hobby. John works for a magazine company that would change him in a way he never thought possible. The offer of a lifetime could test his limits on his climbing skills, physical attributes and his motivation to live.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer was originally published in the year of 1996 based on the tragedy that had occurred on Mount Everest that year. This narrative would not have been a lot different if it was written 10 years or 100 years before the publishing date due to numerous reasons. The first reason would be that there was always someone who was willing to climb Mount Everest every chance that they would get. In his narrative, Krakauer talks about the people who tried to climb Mount Everest in the early 1900s. One of those climbers was Maurice Wilson, who had schemed to crash-land his airplane near Everest as an excuse to climb the mountain. When he found out that he wasn’t allowed to fly over Nepal, “…he hired three Sherpas, disguised himself as a Buddhist monk…By April 14 he was at the foot of Everest” (Krakauer 94). Wilson is an example of a person who would quickly accept any opportunity to climb Everest. He was extremely determined to climb the mountain even if he had to risk performing an illegal act, such as entering a country he wasn’t allowed to go in. The author himself didn’t leave the opportunity to climb Everest, as in a conversation with his wife, he lies that he wouldn’t climb the whole mountain. Another reason this narrative would not have been as different if it was written earlier is that there would always be a possibility of dying or finding a dead body. In the beginning of the narrative, the author speaks about people finding six dead bodies. Later on in the story, more of Krakauer’s teammates start to die as the intensity of the weather near the top of Everest increased. “One year later, when Shipton returned to Everest, his expedition came across Wilson’s frozen body lying in the snow at the foot of the North Col” (Krakauer 94). The death of Maurice Wilson, as recalled by the author, had occurred in the year of 1933, sixty-three years before the tragedy on the Everest expedition that the author was present in. Based on these reasons,

The Harvard Business School case Mount Everest – 1996 narrates the events of May 11, 1996, when 8 people-including the two expedition leaders— died during a climb to the tallest mountain in the world (five deaths are described in the case, three border police form India also died that day). This was dubbed the “deadliest day in the mountain’s history” (at least until April 18, 2014). The survivors and many analysts have tried to decipher what went wrong that day, find an underlying cause, and learn from the event.

On May 10, 1996 six people died trying to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. These people were parts of two expeditions that were in the Himalayas, preparing to ascend the summit for six weeks. The first group was under the direction of Rob Hall, who had put 39 paying clients on the summit in five years. Hall was considered the leader of the mountain and the man to see no matter what the discrepancy. Group two, headed by Fisher, who like Hall, was trying to start a profitable business in providing the experience of climbing Mt. Everest to all for the price of 60 to 70 thousand dollars. Unfortunatly, neither man would live to tell the tale of this expedition.