Everest a Year Later: False Summit

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Outside Magazine May 1997

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True Everest
Everest a Year Later: False Summit
After a lifetime of wanting, Jon Krakauer made it to the world's highest point. What he and the other survivors would discover in the months to come, however, is that it's even more difficult to get back down.

By Mark Bryant


	(Photograph by Andrew Eccles)

For this magazine it began four years ago, when we heard that 40 climbers, several of them clients on commercially guided expeditions, had reached the summit of Mount Everest on a single day. That so many should crowd onto the highest spot on earth was astonishing and troubling. What might this suggest to other weekend climbers about the apparent ease of adding Everest to one's trophy case? What might it augur on a peak already swarming with too many climbers too inexperienced to save themselves—let alone others—if caught by one of the Himalayas' frequent storms? It seemed a foregone conclusion that reality would soon strike home with a vengeance. The only question was when.

By the time we asked contributing editor and lifelong climber Jon Krakauer to examine firsthand the circumstances that might lead to a disaster, things had only gotten worse. Swelling ranks of amateur climbers were paying ever fatter sums to be escorted up the peak, and some outfitters seemed to be all but guaranteeing the summit. Guide Rob Hall ran an ad boasting of a "100 percent success rate." "Hey, experience is overrated," another guide, Scott Fischer, told Krakauer while we were shopping around for a commercial expedition for him to join. "We've got the big E figured out, we've got it totally wired. These days, I'm telling you, we've built a yellow brick road to the summit."

If only that had been true. Instead, on May 10, 1996, after Krakauer and 23 others reached the top, dozens of climbers became trapped on the descent, pinned down by gale-force winds and triple-digit windchill. Eight lost their lives, including Hall and three others on Krakauer's six-person summit team. Another who died that day: Fischer. By the end of the month, 12 people on the mountain would perish, the highest single-season body count in Everest history.

Krakauer and many of the other survivors were left scarred and shaken. Nevertheless, Krakauer turned around and wrote, with real and awful authority, "Into Thin Air," a hypnotic, heartbreaking account of the tragedy published in Outside's September 1996 issue. No other article in the magazine's 20 years has prompted the reaction this piece has; many months later, we're still receiving letters from readers haunted by Krakauer's tale. It's a story that won't go away. Nor, given its chastening ramifications, should it. A fellow writer and friend of the magazine recently remarked that the episode put him in mind of another instance of nature slapping down humankind and our runaway hubris: the sinking of the "unsinkable" Titanic. Then he asked if anyone had learned anything this time around.

Krakauer has now expanded his report into a searing book, also titled Into Thin Air, to be published this month by Villard. With the grim anniversary of the tragedy approaching, editor Mark Bryant sat down with Krakauer in the Seattle home he shares with his wife, Linda Moore. Friends and colleagues for 15 years, Krakauer and Bryant assessed the damages, explored the practical and moral dimensions of risk, and talked about how Jon and his fellow survivors are faring in the aftermath.

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