Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Key Figures

Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer, a journalist in his early forties, is approached by Outside magazine with a proposition: to hike to Everest Base Camp and write an article on the commercialization of the area. Krakauer nurses a boyhood dream of summiting Everest. He counter-proposes that he should join an expedition summiting the peak and write the article from this perspective. Outside magazine agrees and Jon Krakauer joins Rob Hall’s 1996 Everest expedition.

An accomplished and experienced mountaineer, Krakauer is shocked by the vastly mixed abilities in Rob Hall’s expedition. His concern turns out to be well-founded; the slow pace of a number of climbers is a causal factor in the loss of life on May 10. Krakauer is traumatized by the tragedy, and writes Into Thin Air as an act of catharsis.

Krakauer is the author of a number of renowned nonfiction books, including Into the Wild and Under the Banner of Heaven. His extensive mountaineering experience informs his examination of the 1996 Everest tragedy.

Rob Hall

Rob Hall is an experienced mountaineer from New Zealand. He has a wife, Jan Arnold, who is seven months pregnant with their first child at the time of the Everest disaster. Rob is extremely cautious and meticulously organized in his role as head guide of Adventure Consultants. An experienced Everest guide, Rob stresses the importance of strong and careful leadership and conservative decision-making to manage potential disasters which may emerge during climbs.

Krakauer’s characterization of Rob as careful and thorough makes Rob’s decisions on May 10—such as not adhering to his own strict turnaround time— more surprising. Krakauer uses Rob to illustrate that even the most careful mountaineers can make mistakes, and that on Everest these mistakes are often the difference between life and death.

Andy Harris

Andy Harris is a young and likable guide working with Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants on the Everest summit expedition. Krakauer gravitates to the young New Zealander, feeling that he has more in common with him than with many of the wealthier members of the expedition.

Andy Harris courageously brings oxygen to the struggling Doug Hansen on the Hillary Step. Andy’s hypoxic state seems clear in retrospect, based on both Krakauer and Lopsang Jangbu’s accounts of him seeming irrational and distressed. Krakauer posits that Andy’s oxygen mask may not have been working for a time, leading to him becoming hypoxic. Krakauer mistakenly reports seeing Andy arrive at Camp Four due to his own hypoxia and fatigue, leading to Andy’s family and friends being incorrectly told of his safe arrival. Krakauer feels immense guilt for this mistake, as well as his failure to notice his friend’s hypoxia. The specific circumstances of Andy Harris’s death remain unknown, but Rob Hall reports that “Harold was with me last night, but he doesn’t seem to be with me now.” This suggests that Andy reached Rob and Doug but perished sometime thereafter, supported by the fact that Andy’s jacket and ice-ax were found near Rob Hall’s body.

Sandy Pittman

Pittman is the epitome of Everest’s commercialization, which is critiqued extensively by many who believe that climbing a peak should require intense preparation and be a largely self-reliant activity. Instead, Pittman is able to climb Everest because of her wealth. Furthermore, she hires others to haul mountains of luxuries and equipment up for her, like the runners from Kathmandu who deliver the latest copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair. She is presented as the antithesis of a traditional, independent climber. In presenting her, Krakauer positions readers to question whether money should allow an ill-prepared individual to “buy” their way up Everest in comfort and style.

Pittman found that she became “a lightning rod for a great deal of public anger over what had happened on Everest” (300). Perhaps because she was so public and ostentatious, she unfairly shouldered the blame, even though she was simply a client on the Mountain Madness expedition.