Interesting interview with Jon Krakauer, who wrote "Into Thin Air", and it is now 30 years later.
On May 10, it will be 30 years since a squall swept across the upper reaches of Everest, killing eight climbers that night in what was then one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters of all time. (By the end of the season, twelve climbers had died on the mountain in all.) Worse, this was at the dawn of Everest’s guided era, when strong, competent Western mountaineers thought they could pacify the mountain’s myriad death traps and build, as Mountain Madness guide and owner Scott Fischer famously put it, “a yellow brick road right to the summit.”
Writer Jon Krakauer was there as a client of Kiwi Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants on assignment for Outside, and the magazine story he turned in became the book Into Thin Air, which immediately surged to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Far from dissuading would-be clients and guides, the book seems to have supercharged the commercialization of Everest. By the time I was reporting on the mountain regularly in the early twentyteens, mass casualty events had become a regular feature of many seasons. There were the four climbers who couldn’t get themselves down in 2012 despite the good weather, the 2014 serac collapse that killed 16 Sherpa porters, and the avalanche set off by the 2015 Nepal earthquake which took at least 19 lives in Base Camp. The death toll climbed and so did some 13,000 summiters’ apparent ability to memory-hole the disasters and keep coming at the mountain, decade after decade.
Now, 30 years on, Krakauer has written a new foreword to Into Thin Air, chronicling those changes as Vintage Books re-releases the book. I spoke with him at length about that dark and stormy night and the after-effects that are still haunting him today.
Interview with Jon Krakauer
