The Climb

by Anatoli Boukreev

  My first thought was to ignore the “Postscript.” However, upon a second and third reading, I came to understand how committed Krakauer was to perpetuating the characterization of Boukreev that he’d constructed for his readers in Into Thin Air, a characterization that I believe was seriously flawed and grossly misleading. To ignore Krakauer, I realized, would be to betray a trust. I had promised Anatoli that I would do what needed to be done if one day he did not come home. A response, I thought, was necessary.

  A RESPONSE

  “I believe that there are at least intersubjective criteria to tell if an interpretation is a bad one, in the very sense in which we are sure that … Marco Polo did not really see unicorns.”

  —UMBERTO ECO,

  Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

  The Boukreev-Krakauer controversy began with the publication of Krakauer’s article “Into Thin Air,” which appeared in the September 1996 issue of Outside.* In that article Krakauer criticized Boukreev’s descent ahead of clients on summit day:

  “Boukreev had returned to Camp Four at 4:30 P.M., before the brunt of the storm, having rushed down from the summit without waiting for clients—extremely questionable behavior for a guide.” Krakauer went on to say that Boukreev’s descent ahead of clients most “plausibly resulted from the fact that he [Boukreev] wasn’t using bottled oxygen and was relatively lightly dressed and therefore had to get down quickly.”†

  On July 31, 1996, in response to the article, Boukreev wrote Outside. He explained, as he had to Krakauer when he was writing his article:

  1. Scott Fischer had authorized his descent to Camp IV ahead of clients.

  2. He and Fischer had agreed that the purpose of his descent was to prepare for the possibility that he might have to assist descending climbers.

  In his letter to Outside, despite what he saw as critical omissions in Krakauer’s article, Anatoli was moderate in tone and encouraging of an objective consideration of the Everest tragedy. He wrote: “I know Mr. Krakauer, like me, grieves and feels profoundly the loss of our fellow climbers. We both wish that events had unfolded in a very different way. What we can do now is contribute to a clearer understanding of what happened that day on Everest in the hope that the lessons to be learned will reduce the risk of others who, like us, take on the challenge of the mountains. I extend my hand to him and encourage that effort.”

  Krakauer’s public response to Boukreev’s letter* was virtually unrelenting in its criticism of the man and his actions. He complained that Boukreev was unrepentant and arrogant. He didn’t acknowledge Boukreev’s complaint that Krakauer, in his Outside article, had neglected to disclose Anatoli’s explanation that his descent ahead of clients had been approved by Fischer.

  After reading Krakauer’s letter, Boukreev said, “For me, I don’t understand this situation.” Krakauer’s stridency and his unwillingness to acknowledge Boukreev’s explanation—that his descent ahead of clients had been authorized—puzzled Anatoli. He speculated, “What is purpose?”

  For a year and a half, Jon Krakauer was arguably the primary source for the story of the Everest tragedy, and much of what was published about those events drew heavily upon his account, resulting in what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has called the “circular circulation of information.”† Krakauer’s Everest reality, as he promoted it and the media repeated it, was becoming the public reality. Krakauer’s portrait of Boukreev as a guide of “questionable behavior” was starting to hang permanently in the public mind.

  Through it all, Boukreev was patient, knowing that eventually his side of the story would be heard. He worked hard on The Climb. He struggled with his English; he struggled with me, his coauthor; he tried to balance his climbing career against the demands of the book. He insisted on a book that did not attempt to place blame for the tragedy. The issues, he understood, were complex. The best he could do, he said, was to offer the events of Everest as he had experienced them.*

  Finally, in late October 1997, The Climb was published, and a few weeks later Boukreev had his last encounter with Krakauer. The occasion was the Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival, where Anatoli and I had been asked to participate in a series of public panel discussions. One of those, on the subject of media and mountaineering, drew a huge crowd—in part, I suspect, because, in the year and a half since the Everest tragedy, Boukreev had rarely spoken publicly.†

  For Boukreev, the event was of special importance. In August 1996, just after publication of Krakauer’s Outside article, Anatoli had sat quietly in the audience of a panel discussion during which Krakauer had made several comments with which Boukreev had taken serious and personal issue. Anatoli’s feeling was that Krakauer should have his platform, that a public forum was not the place for a confrontation between the two of them.‡

  In his presentation** Boukreev argued passionately that greater care should be taken by journalists who comment on the issues and activities of high-altitude mountaineering.* He let it be known that he had not been impressed with everything that had been written about the Everest tragedy of 1996. When it came time for the Q&A session, a feature of most of the panel discussions, Jon Krakauer was the first to take the audience’s microphone. Offering no supportive evidence, Krakauer said he felt The Climb was “dishonest” and went on to say that Boukreev appeared to be discouraging a free press on Everest. The panel moderator asked if any of the panel’s four members wanted to address Krakauer’s comments. They all remained silent.

  As the panel discussion drew to a close, David Roberts, like Krakauer a consulting editor for Outside, stood and assailed Boukreev, charging that The Climb was “self-serving.”

  Members of the audience and the panel were taken aback. Some audience members booed. The moderator intervened, and after a few moments civility returned to the auditorium. Later that evening, while Anatoli and I were having dinner with friends at a Banff pub, an officer of the Canadian Alpine Club came to our table and on behalf of Canadian mountaineers offered an apology for what had happened. “We don’t do things like that up here,” he said. An English mountaineer who had witnessed Krakauer’s and Roberts’s comments said with a wry smile that the whole thing seemed to him to have been “something of a cock-up.” As we were finishing our dinner, Anatoli said, “Tragedy of Everest was enough tragedy.” The disaster of May 1996, he thought, had been reduced to a sideshow.†

  THE ALLEGATIONS

  “A person reproduces himself by what he has done.”

  —BORIS MIKHAILOV,

  writer/photographer, Unfinished Dissertation

  In his “Postscript” Krakauer repeats many of the complaints and allegations that he has made since publication of The Climb and to which Anatoli and I have previously responded in other forums. But because in his “Postscript” Krakauer at times neglected to share with his readers the responses and refutations that have in the past been offered to his charges, it will be necessary here to revisit some sites where these issues have been argued before. To those who have made a concerted effort to follow the Boukreev-Krakauer controversy I apologize for the repetition they will have to endure, but, I suggest, something is to be gained by retracing the trail.

  THE “ERRORS”

  In the opening salvo of his “Postscript” Krakauer attempts to undermine the reliability of The Climb by discussing the “errors” he says he called to the attention of St. Martin’s Press, the majority of which he says were not corrected in the mass-market paperback edition, which appeared in July 1998.* In reality, the majority of what Krakauer specifically pointed to and labeled as “errors” were instances in the book with which he took issue for one reason or another. A careful consideration of Krakauer’s comments was made both by St. Martin’s Press and me, and we believe the mass-market paperback edition responsibly addressed his complaints.†

  INTERVIEWS

  Krakauer, in his “Postscript,” was critical of the fact that neither Anatoli nor I had interviewed some of the players in the Everest trag
edy—such as Mike Groom from the Adventure Consultants’ expedition—whom Krakauer deemed important to a telling of the Everest story. He made this complaint despite knowing that Anatoli, in deciding to coauthor The Climb, wanted not to offer a “codex catastrophical.” Boukreev felt that to undertake anything suggesting a definitive explanation of the tragedy would be to “play God,” and he wanted no part of such an undertaking. The Climb was to be a personal account.

  Krakauer also makes an issue of our “failure” to interview two members of the Mountain Madness expedition: Neal Beidleman, a guide with Anatoli on the Mountain Madness expedition and Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, Scott Fischer’s climbing sirdar. The charge of “failure,” which implies a lack of intention or effort, is more than curious.

  As has been previously noted, on December 16 1997, about eight months before Krakauer wrote his “Postscript,” I had informed him that I had asked Beidleman for an on-the-record interview and that Beidleman had declined to participate.

  Krakauer’s complaint that Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa was not interviewed for The Climb is one that he’s made several times during the Boukreev-Krakauer controversy. A chronology:

  December 8, 1997: Krakauer wrote a letter to Jed Williamson of the American Alpine Club and took issue with my “failure” to interview Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa.

  December 16, 1997: In a letter to Jed Williamson (copy to Krakauer) I responded: “I was very tempted to attend the memorial services for Scott Fischer and interview Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, but I chose not to intrude on his need to grieve the loss of his friend. Lopsang, as you know, died a few months later, and the chance to interview him was lost.”

  August 7, 1998: Krakauer, in a letter to Salon, said: “… baffling was DeWalt’s failure to interview Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, Scott Fischer’s head climbing Sherpa… . The reason for such conspicuous reportorial lapses can only be guessed at.”

  August 13, 1998: In a letter to Salon I responded to Krakauer’s revived charge: “It was my plan, stated in writing to potential publishers of The Climb, that I would interview Lopsang in Nepal in the winter of 1997. As Krakauer knows, Lopsang was killed in an avalanche before I had the opportunity to do so.”

  August 14, 1998: Krakauer, in a letter to Salon, responded to my explanation: “I’m heartened to hear that DeWalt intended to interview him, and sorry that Lopsang’s death precluded such an opportunity.”

  November 1998: In his “Postscript” to Into Thin Air: The Illustrated Edition, Krakauer says, “No less baffling was DeWalt’s failure to contact Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, Scott Fischer’s head climbing Sherpa. Lopsang had one of the most pivotal and controversial roles in the disaster.” … “The reasons for such conspicuous reportorial lapses can only be guessed at.”

  Krakauer’s intention in begging questions to which he already had the answers, I think, need not be guessed at.

  THE DEBRIEFING TAPES

  In The Climb Boukreev and I drew heavily upon a tape recording made at Everest Base Camp on May 15, 1996, five days after the disaster. That tape, referred to in the recording as a “debriefing” tape, stands as an important contribution to the historical record and has contributed immeasurably to an understanding of some of the factors that led to the tragedy.*

  In his “Postscript” Krakauer has charged that I didn’t “corroborate” the quotes drawn from the debriefing tape that were utilized in The Climb. That charge has left me somewhat confused. To “corroborate” is to make certain or to confirm by evidence. My question: What is it that needs corroboration?

  The participants in the taped debriefing agreed they would contribute the facts of the events on Everest as they knew them. Implied in that agreement was that each of them would speak truthfully. In choosing to use quotes from the debriefing tape, Boukreev and I assumed there was no need to verify the truth of the statements we chose to publish.

  Krakauer also says that two Mountain Madness expedition members, Klev Schoening and Neal Beidleman, have complained to him that statements made by them on the “debriefing” tape and used in The Climb were “presented out of context” and “badly misconstrued.” This claim I can only wonder about, because, prior to publication of the mass-market paperback edition of The Climb in July 1998, I communicated with both Beidleman and Schoening for the express purpose of discussing changes that might be made in The Climb. Neither of them challenged a specific detail in The Climb or suggested a change.*

  Rather than examine each of the Beidleman and Schoening quotes as presented in The Climb and their context, a transcript of relevant sections of the debriefing tape has been included in this edition (see pp. 304–372).†

  FACT-CHECKING

  Krakauer in his “Postscript” disagrees with Boukreev’s published claim in The Climb that Outside did not fact-check with Anatoli certain details of Krakauer’s article “Into Thin Air” before it was published. Krakauer offers a rather lengthy explanation for why he believes that is not the case. If what Krakauer claims is true, I don’t know how readers are to account for the errors that caught Anatoli’s notice when he read through Krakauer’s article. Among them, Krakauer’s claim that Boukreev was “relatively lightly dressed on summit day.” Photographs delivered to Outside, prior to publication of Krakauer’s article, clearly show that Boukreev was adequately dressed for his ascent.

  OXYGEN USE

  “It doesn’t bother me that some of our Sherpas and guides did not use oxygen. They had enough experience at altitude to know their limitations. These are exceptional people.”

  —CHARLOTTE FOX,

  Mountain Madness climber-client, “A Time to Live, a Time to Die,” The American Alpine Journal, 1997

  “From my perspective, if Anatoli had done anything different that day … the outcome would have been different. I think that every single action he took that day was in the best interests of his clients… . Oxygen is fine, but when it runs out, you hit a wall.”

  —SANDY HILL (PITTMAN),

  Mountain Madness climber-client, quoted in Dwight Garner, “Coming Down,” Salon, August 3, 1998

  “At a conservative flow rate of two liters per minute, each bottle [of oxygen] would last between five and six hours. By 4:00 or 5:00 P.M., everyone’s gas would be gone… . The risk of dying would skyrocket.”

  —JON KRAKAUER,

  Adventure Consultants climber-client,

  Into Thin Air

  Krakauer first criticized Boukreev’s not having used oxygen on summit day in his Outside article and since then has consistently argued that Anatoli should have. Krakauer repeated this criticism particularly hard in his “Postscript,” arguing that Boukreev’s not having used oxygen “preordained” his “decision to leave his clients on the summit ridge and descend quickly.” In an attempt to drive a finishing nail into his argument, Krakauer offered his readers an axiom: “Without supplemental oxygen, nobody—not even the strongest climbers in the world—can loiter on the frigid upper reaches of Everest.”

  The axiom Krakauer overlooked in building his case was: If you are climbing on the upper reaches of Everest with supplemental oxygen and you run out—no matter who you are—you can get into serious trouble, perhaps die, unless you get to a source of more oxygen.*

  Boukreev’s problem with Krakauer’s criticism of his not having used oxygen on the final assault was Krakauer’s continuing insistence on linking that fact to Boukreev’s descent ahead of clients. Boukreev was perplexed by Krakauer’s absolute refusal to consider that his descent—with Fischer’s approval—had been predicated upon his understanding of the second axiom. The Mountain Madness climber-clients could run out of oxygen before they made it back to Camp IV. If they did, their risk of dying would skyrocket.†

  Boukreev went down when he did on summit day, as he explained to Krakauer again and again, not because he was climbing without oxygen, but because the Mountain Madness climber-clients were.

  Boukreev and Fischer agreed before the expedition began that Anatoli—if he were properly conditioned and ac
climatized—would guide without oxygen, and that agreement was made within this context: on summit day Fischer would provide three canisters (eighteen hours of oxygen) for each of his climber-clients. Those climbers, he planned, would depart Camp IV at twelve midnight on the morning of May 10, climb to the summit, and be back by 6:00 P.M. before the hard fall of night and before their oxygen supplies were exhausted. And, what would happen if things went awry? Fischer had made it known to Mountain Madness climber-clients and members of his staff that he had hired Boukreev for his ability to conduct rescues, to bring help (oxygen, hot drinks, physical assistance) to descending climbers if they needed it. If his clients weren’t back at Camp IV by 6:00 P.M., Fischer would have the Boukreev card to play.*

  What actually happened on May 10 when Scott Fischer arrived atop the Hillary Step at 2:35 P.M.? He saw only one of his climber-clients, Martin Adams, and Boukreev. Somewhere above him were five more climber-clients, his other guide, Neal Beidleman, and his climbing sirdar, Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa. The climber-clients and Beidleman, at that point, had approximately three and one-half hours of oxygen remaining if they had been adhering to the oxygen flow rates recommended before the climb.† Fischer had to be wondering, Where are they? When would they be making their descent?‡ What should he do?

  When Fischer encountered Boukreev and Adams atop the Hillary Step, Boukreev said to Fischer, “I’m going down with Martin.” According to Adams, Fischer offered no objection, and as Fischer moved behind Adams to where Boukreev was standing, Adams prepared to go over the top of the Hillary Step and continue his descent. Boukreev has repeatedly explained that, at this point, he and Fischer had another conversation and they agreed that Anatoli should descend as quickly as possible to stand by at Camp IV. Boukreev and Fischer could appreciate, given the prevailing situation, that clients could run out of oxygen and get into trouble. If Fischer’s climber-clients ran out of oxygen on the descent, where were they going to get more oxygen? He needed someone below at Camp IV.