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The South
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Contents Adventure & Sport Five
Ultimate Everest Apa
Sherpa-21 Times
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INTO THIN AIR
A
Personal Account of the Everest Disaster
By
Jon Krakauer
Illustrated.
318 pp. Pan Macmillan
‘Into Thin Air’ is an
account of events that took place on 10 May, 1996 when members of three
separate expeditions tried to climb the world's tallest mountain. A freak
storm hit Everest, leaving eight climbers dead as they were trying to
descend, many among them having summited the peak - the greatest loss of
life on any one day in the history of mountaineering on Everest. Jon
Krakauer, a journalist-mountaineer who was on one of the expeditions as a
‘client’, was on an assignment from Outside magazine to report on the
commercialisation of Everest. Standing on the summit of Everest, he saw
nothing that "suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down." He was
caught in the storm on his descent from the summit, but lived to tell the
tale.
Getting to the summit is the mid-point of an Everest
expedition. Getting back down alive is the tougher half. In his riveting book, Jon Krakauer relives the
fateful day of the storm and its aftermath, with its moments of heroism and
sacrifice. What went wrong? The root of the problem remains Everest’s
excessive commercialisation. Mr Krakauer joined a fee-paying expedition led by Hall, over the Southeast Ridge. There were, at the time, 30 other expeditions preparing to summit Everest, and the Base Camp had the semblance of a tent city. Describing his fellow clients on the expedition, Mr Krakauer writes: ''In outlook and experience they were nothing like the hard-core climbers with whom I usually went into the mountains. But they seemed like nice, decent folks.'' The clients had little or no mountaineering experience and each had paid $65,000 to be led to the summit. Inexperienced members slow down the rest of the climbers, create bottlenecks and delays that are life-threatening in the Death Zone.
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