Word: krakauer
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Last year, at about 1 p.m. on the 10th of May, Jon Krakauer, on assignment for Outside magazine, plodded toward the 29,028-ft. summit of Mount Everest. Sucking a lean mixture of bottled oxygen and air that only partly made up for the dire thinness of the atmosphere, he managed a single step to three or four heaving breaths. To his oxygen-starved brain, the world beyond his rubber mask, he writes, "was stupendously vivid but seemed not quite real, as if a movie were being projected in slow motion across the front of my goggles. I felt drugged...
...Krakauer clicked the traditional victory snapshots and started back down the mountain. But Into Thin Air, his fascinating and troubling account of the climb (Villard; 293 pages; $24.95), is no chronicle of triumph. He was in ragged physical shape. A wracking cough had torn loose chest cartilage; his body had burned away 20 lbs. of muscle mass; he was running out of bottled oxygen. But the deadliest element of his situation was one he barely noticed: innocent-looking clouds rising from valleys to the south. They were the tops of thunderheads, carrying a violent spring storm that would kill...
...guiding outfits encouraged recklessness. Hall's successful Adventure Consultants was being crowded by newer ventures, notably the Mountain Madness service of Scott Fischer, a skilled American climber. There was powerful pressure for them to ignore their turnaround times, beyond which it was foolish to continue heading upward. Fischer told Krakauer that if Pittman reached the summit, she was certain to boast about it on New York talk shows...
...Krakauer, a thoughtful man and a fine writer (his Into the Wild, a report of a wilderness death in Alaska, was one of the best nonfiction books of 1996), says the ratio of misery to pleasure on Everest was greater than on any other mountain he has climbed. He draws no ringing conclusions from the disaster, although he thinks that banning bottled oxygen might keep weaker climbers off the mountain...
...making a movie for IMAX, reported passing the bodies of his friends Fischer and Hall. One other death, a South African whose colleagues let him climb past his turnaround time, brought the fatalities for the season to 12. If that number is compared with the 84 people who summitted, Krakauer observes dryly, "1996 was actually a safer-than-average year...