Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

  In my opinion [DeWalt] has no real credibility having been 10,000 miles away from the event. I’m sure you agree that you could never have accurately written about high altitude without having been there, despite all your years of climbing experience. Contrary to what DeWalt states regarding climbing without oxygen, most experienced high-altitude climbers disagree with his conclusion … ALL evidence and all logic (oxygen = fuel = energy = warmth, strength, etc.) firmly dispute DeWalt’s claims.… Anatoli descended allegedly to be in position to provide assistance. But he never did find his clients, they were freezing to death across the Col. It was up to them to stagger into camp with the information so vital to their rescue.… Anatoli was sitting in his tent unable to assist anyone, until informed of the lost climbers’ position. Enough! It’s a pity Anatoli isn’t here to continue the dialogue. I stand by my conviction that he descended because he was cold and weary and couldn’t possibly remain (relatively motionless) on the summit waiting for clients.… Finally, why the continued debate about your book? Where’s the outrage about the real issues? … You just had the guts to put it all in writing.

  Many of us who were on Everest that May made mistakes. As I indicated earlier in these pages, my own actions may have contributed to the deaths of two of my teammates. I have no doubt that Boukreev’s intentions were good on summit day. I am absolutely certain that he meant well. What disturbs me, though, was Anatoli’s refusal to acknowledge the possibility that he made even a single poor decision.

  DeWalt has written that my criticisms of Boukreev in Into Thin Air were motivated by my “desire to keep the spotlight from settling on a question that began to loom in the weeks after the Everest tragedy of 1996: Did Krakauer’s presence on the Adventure Consultants expedition [as a writer for Outside magazine] contribute to the tragedy that unfolded?” In truth, I remain quite troubled by the possibility that my presence as a journalist, and Sandy Hill Pittman’s, may indeed have directly contributed to the disaster. Contrary to DeWalt’s cynical assertion, however, I have never tried to steer the debate away from this topic. Indeed, I’ve raised the subject myself in numerous interviews, to say nothing of this book. I suggest DeWalt go back and read this page, where I devote a long passage to this very subject. I have not shied away from admitting the errors I made on Everest, however painful it has been to do so. I only wish that others had presented their versions of the calamity with equal candor.

  Even though I have written critically about some of Anatoli’s actions, I have always emphasized that he performed heroically when disaster struck in the predawn hours of May 11. There is no question that Anatoli saved the lives of Sandy Hill Pittman and Charlotte Fox, at considerable personal risk—I have said as much on many occasions, in many places. I admire Anatoli immensely for going out alone in the storm, when the rest of us were lying helpless in our tents, and bringing in the lost climbers. But some of the decisions he made earlier in the day and earlier in the expedition are nevertheless troubling, and simply could not be ignored by a journalist committed to writing a full and honest account of the disaster.

  As it happens, much of what I witnessed on Everest was troubling, and would have been troubling even if there had been no calamity. I was sent to Nepal by Outside magazine specifically to write about guided expeditions on the world’s highest mountain. My assignment was to assess the qualifications of the guides and clients, and to provide the reading public with a discriminating, first hand look at the reality of how guided Everest climbs are conducted. I also believe quite strongly that I had a duty—to the other survivors, to the grieving families, to the historical record, and to my companions who did not come home—to provide a full report of what happened on Everest in 1996, regardless of how that report would be received. And that’s what I did, relying on my extensive experience as a journalist and a mountaineer to provide the most accurate, honest account possible.

  The debate over what happened on Everest in 1996 took a terrible turn on Christmas Day, 1997, six weeks after publication of The Climb, when Anatoli Nikoliavich Boukreev was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna, the world’s tenth-highest mountain. His loss was mourned around the world. Thirty-nine at the time of his death, he was a magnificent athlete who possessed tremendous courage. By all accounts he was a remarkable, very complicated man.

  Boukreev had been raised in a dirt-poor mining town in the southern Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union. According to British journalist Peter Gillman, writing in the London Mail on Sunday, when Anatoli was a boy his father

  had eked out a living making shoes and mending watches. There were five children, in a cramped wooden house with no plumbing.… Boukreev was dreaming of escaping. The mountains gave him his chance.

  Boukreev learned to climb as a nine-year-old, and his uncommon physical gifts quickly came to the fore. At sixteen he earned a coveted slot at the Soviet mountaineering camp in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan. At twenty-four he was selected to become a member of the elite national climbing team, which brought him a financial stipend, great prestige, and other benefits both tangible and intangible. In 1989 he climbed Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak, as part of a Soviet expedition, and upon returning to his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, was honored as a Soviet Master of Sport by President Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Due to the upheavals that accompanied the New World Order, this rosy situation was not to last long, however. As Gillman explains,

  The Soviet Union was breaking up. Two years later Gorbachev quit, and Boukreev—who had recently completed his own ascent of Everest—found his status and privileges vanishing. “There was nothing,” he told [Linda] Wylie [his American girlfriend]. “No money—you were in bread lines.” … Boukreev resolved not to succumb. If the communist order had disappeared, he must adapt to the new world of private enterprise, using his assets of a mountaineer’s skills and determination.

  In a remembrance of Anatoli posted on the Internet in early 1997, his friend Fran Distefano-Arsentiev* recalled,

  Those were desperate times [for Boukreev], just to be able to pay for food was a luxury.… [T]he only chance a Soviet climber had to go to the Himalaya was to compete within the system and win that privilege. Having the freedom to just go to the Himalaya, whether or not you are competent enough as a climber, was never an option. It was a dream.… Before Buka became famous there was a time when nothing came easily for him. But he pursued his dreams tenaciously with a vigor unlike anyone I have ever known.

  Boukreev became something of a global nomad in pursuit of both mountains and money to make ends meet. In order to scrape together a living, he hired on as a guide in the Himalaya, Alaska, and Kazakhstan; gave slide shows in American climbing shops; and occasionally resorted to common labor. But all the while he continued to tally an extraordinary record of high-altitude ascents.

  Although he loved climbing, and loved being in the mountains, Boukreev never pretended to enjoy guiding. In The Climb he spoke very candidly about this:

  I wish with all my power there were other opportunities for me to make a living.… It is too late for me to find another way to finance my personal objectives; yet it is with great reservation that I work to bring inexperienced men and women into this world [of dangerous high-altitude mountaineering].

  So he continued to take novice climbers to the high peaks, even after experiencing the horrors and controversies of the 1996 disaster.

  In the spring of 1997, one year later, Boukreev agreed to lead a team of Indonesian Army officers hoping to become the first members of their island nation to climb Everest—despite the fact that none of the Indonesians had any prior mountaineering experience, or, indeed, had even seen snow before. To assist him with his neophyte clients, Boukreev employed two highly accomplished Russian mountaineers, Vladimir Bashkirov and Evgeny Vinogradski, and Apa Sherpa, who had climbed Everest seven times. Moreover, in 1997, unlike in ’96, everyone on the team relied on bottled oxygen for the summit assault, including Boukreev—notwithstanding his i
nsistence that it was safer for him “to climb without oxygen in order to avoid the sudden loss of acclimatization that occurs when supplementary oxygen supplies are depleted.” In 1997, it also bears noting, Anatoli was never more than a few paces from his Indonesian clients on summit day.

  The team departed the South Col for the top just after midnight on April 26. Around noon, Apa Sherpa, in the lead, arrived at the Hillary Step, where he encountered the body of Bruce Herrod* dangling from an old fixed rope. Clambering over the deceased British photographer, Apa, Anatoli, and the rest of the Indonesian team labored slowly toward the summit.

  It was already 3:30 P.M. when the first Indonesian, Asmujiono Prajurit, followed Boukreev to the top. They stayed on the summit only ten minutes before heading down, whereupon Boukreev compelled the two other Indonesians to turn around, even though one of them was within 100 feet of the top. The team made it down only as far as the Balcony that night, where they endured a miserable bivouac at 27,600 feet, but thanks to Boukreev’s leadership and a rare night without wind, everyone descended safely to the South Col on April 27. “We were lucky,” Anatoli allowed.

  Boukreev and Vinogradski paused during their descent to Camp Four to cover Scott Fischer’s body with rocks and snow at 27,200 feet. “This last respect was for a man I feel was the best and brightest expression of the American persona,” Boukreev mused in The Climb. “I think often of his brilliant smile and positive manner. I am a difficult man and I hope to remember him always by living a little more by his example.” A day later Boukreev traveled across the South Col to the edge of the Kangshung Face, where he located the body of Yasuko Namba, covered her with stones as best he could, and collected some of her possessions to give to her family.

  A month after climbing Everest with the Indonesians, Boukreev attempted a speed traverse of Lhotse and Everest with a brilliant thirty-year-old Italian climber named Simone Moro.* Boukreev and Moro set out for the top of Lhotse on May 26. That same day, eight members of a separate Russian team—including Boukreev’s friend Vladimir Bashkirov, who had helped guide the Indonesians up Everest—also started up Lhotse. None of the ten climbers was using supplemental oxygen.

  Moro reached the summit at 1 P.M. Boukreev arrived twenty-five minutes later, but he was feeling ill and started down after spending only a few minutes on top. Moro stayed on the summit for perhaps another forty minutes, and then headed down himself. During his descent he encountered Bashkirov, who was also feeling sick but nevertheless still pushing upward. Late that afternoon Bashkirov and the rest of the Russians all reached the summit.

  Not long after the last of the Russians topped out, Moro and Boukreev arrived back at their tent and went to sleep. Upon waking the next morning, Moro turned on his radio and happened to overhear a transmission from some Italian friends who were in the process of ascending Lhotse. The Italians reported with alarm that, high on the peak, they had encountered the body of a climber dressed in a green down suit and yellow boots. “In that moment,” Moro says, “I realized that it could be Bashkirov.” He immediately woke Boukreev, who made a radio call to the Russian team. The Russians reported that Bashkirov had indeed died during the night from an altitude-related illness on his way down from the summit.

  Although Boukreev had lost yet one more friend to the heights, he did not let it dampen his passion for climbing the world’s highest mountains. On July 7, 1997, six weeks after Bashkirov perished, Boukreev made a solo ascent of Broad Peak in Pakistan. And exactly one week later he completed a speed ascent of nearby Gasherbrum II. Although Moro says that climbing all fourteen of the 8, 000-meter peaks wasn’t particularly important to Boukreev, he had now ascended eleven of the fourteen: only Nanga Parbat, Hidden Peak, and Annapurna I remained.

  Later that summer Anatoli invited Reinhold Messner to join him in the Tian Shan for some recreational climbing. During Messner’s visit, Boukreev asked the legendary Italian alpinist for advice about his climbing career. Since first visiting the Himalaya in 1989, Boukreev had accumulated an amazing record of high-altitude ascents. All but two of these climbs, however, had followed traditional, relatively oft-traveled routes with few technical challenges. Messner pointed out that if Boukreev wanted to be considered among the world’s truly great mountaineers, he would need to shift his focus to steeper, very difficult, previously unclimbed lines.

  Anatoli took this advice to heart. In fact, even before consulting with Messner, Boukreev and Moro had decided to attempt Annapurna I via a notoriously difficult route on the mountain’s immense south face that had been climbed by a strong Anglo-American team in 1970. And to increase the challenge, Boukreev and Moro decided to make their attempt on Annapurna in winter. It would be an exceedingly ambitious and dangerous undertaking, involving extreme technical climbing at high altitude in unimaginable wind and cold. Even when ascended by its easiest aspects, Annapurna—26,454 feet high—is regarded as one of the deadliest mountains in the world: for every two climbers who have reached its summit, one has died. If Boukreev and Moro were to succeed, it would be one of the boldest ascents in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.

  In late November 1997, soon after publication of The Climb, Boukreev and Moro traveled to Nepal and helicoptered to Annapurna Base Camp, accompanied by a Kazakh cinematographer named Dimitri Sobolev. It had been an unusually early winter, however. They were hit by frequent storms that dumped prodigious quantities of snow and sent giant avalanches thundering down their intended route. As a consequence, a month into the expedition they decided to abandon their original plan and instead attempt a different route at the eastern margin of Annapurna’s south face. It was a route that had been attempted several times by accomplished climbers, without success. The difficulties would be extreme—Boukreev’s team would have to ascend a formidable satellite peak called the Fang on their way to the summit—but the avalanche danger appeared to be significantly lower on this new route.

  Having erected Camp One at 17,000 feet below the first of the new route’s steep terrain, Boukreev, Moro, and Sobolev embarked from their tent at sunrise on Christmas Day, intending to establish a line of fixed ropes up a broad gully to a ridge that towered some 2,700 feet above their camp. Moro, in the lead, had climbed to within two hundred feet of the ridge crest by noon. At 12:27 P.M., as he stopped to pull something from his backpack, he heard a sharp boom. When he looked up he saw an avalanche of massive ice blocks hurtling directly toward him. He managed to scream out a warning to Boukreev and Sobolev, who were ascending the gully some 700 feet below, just before the wall of snow and ice plowed him from his stance and carried him down the mountain.

  For a moment Moro tried to arrest his slide by clutching the fixed rope, burning deep gouges into his fingers and palms, but it was to no avail. He tumbled approximately 2,600 feet with the cascading ice and was knocked cold. When the mass of frozen rubble came to rest on a gentle slope slightly above Camp One, however, by chance Moro happened to be on top of the avalanche debris. Upon regaining consciousness he looked frantically for his companions, but could find no trace of them. Searches by air and ground over the ensuing week proved futile. Boukreev and Sobolev were presumed to be dead.

  News of Anatoli’s death was greeted with shock and disbelief on several continents. He traveled prodigiously and had friends around the world. Many, many people were devastated by his passing, not least of them being the woman with whom he’d been sharing his life, Linda Wylie of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  Anatoli’s death was extremely upsetting to me, as well, for a host of complicated reasons. In the wake of the accident on Annapuraa, the debate over what happened on Everest in 1996 took on a different light. I pondered how things between Anatoli and me had come to such a state. Because both of us were stubborn and proud and loath to back down from a fight, our disagreement had escalated vastly out of proportion, diminishing both of us in the process. And if I’m being honest with myself, I have to accept as much responsibility for this as Boukreev.

  So do I wish I had
portrayed Anatoli differently in writing this book? No, I don’t think so. Nothing I’ve learned since the publication of Into Thin Air or The Climb leads me to believe I got things wrong. What I do wish, perhaps, is that I’d been a little less strident in a notorious exchange of letters between Anatoli and me that was posted on the Internet shortly after my original Everest article was published in Outside magazine in September 1996. This online spat established an unfortunate tone that intensified over the following months and thoroughly polarized the discussion.

  Although the criticisms I leveled at Boukreev in my Outside article and in my book were measured, and balanced by sincere praise, Anatoli was nevertheless hurt and outraged by them. He and DeWalt responded by attacking my character, and presenting some very creative interpretations of the facts. To defend my honesty, I was forced to present some damaging material that I had previously withheld to avoid hurting Boukreev unnecessarily. Boukreev, DeWalt, and St. Martin’s Press responded by intensifying their ad hominem attacks on me, and the tenor of the discussion only deteriorated over the period that followed. Perhaps, as DeWalt wrote in The Climb, there “is an advantage to an open and ongoing debate” over what happened on Everest in 1996. It’s certainly helped sell copies of his book—and mine, no doubt. But for all the bitterness that’s flowed, I’m not sure much of lasting importance has been illuminated.

  The dispute reached its nadir in early November 1997 at the Banff Mountain Book Festival. Boukreev was a panelist at a forum of eminent mountaineers. I had declined an invitation to participate as a panelist, fearing that the event might turn into a shouting match, but I made the mistake of attending as a member of the audience. When it was Anatoli’s turn to speak, he had Linda Wylie (acting as his interpreter) read a prepared statement that began with a declaration that most of what I had written about him was “bullshit.” The upshot was that I rose to Anatoli’s bait and some ill-advised, very heated words were exchanged across the crowded auditorium.