Jon Krakauer has reflected on the 1996 Everest disaster, saying he wishes he’d never gone.
On May 10, it will be 30 years since a squall swept across Everest, killing eight climbers that night. Twelve climbers died on the mountain by the end of the season. This occurred at the dawn of Everest’s guided era.
Krakauer was there as a client of Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants. He was on assignment for Outside. The magazine story became the book Into Thin Air.
The Impact of ‘Into Thin Air’
Into Thin Air immediately surged to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The book seems to have supercharged the commercialization of Everest. Mass casualty events had become a regular feature of many seasons by the early twentyteens.
There were the four climbers who couldn’t get themselves down in 2012, 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. Some 13,000 summiters have seemingly been able to memory-hole the disasters and keep coming at the mountain, decade after decade.
Krakauer has written a new foreword to Into Thin Air, chronicling those changes as Vintage Books re-releases the book.
Krakauer’s Early Climbing Aspirations
Growing up, Krakauer’s heroes were Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld. Unsoeld was in Krakauer’s hometown, and his kids were friends with his family. When those guys climbed the West Ridge of Everest in 1963, that blew Krakauer’s mind. He saw those climbers as heroes.
As Krakauer became a serious climber, he resented all the gatekeepers. To go on an Everest expedition, you had to go through the American Alpine Club. Krakauer wrote off Everest.
The Dawn of Commercial Expeditions
David Breashears took Dick Bass to the summit. People would see Bass and think, if that guy can climb Everest, I can climb Everest. It was on. In the early ’90s, people started going to Everest.
- 1996 saw one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters of all time.
- Jon Krakauer was present as a client for Outside magazine.
- His book Into Thin Air became a bestseller.
Now, 30 years on from the disaster, Krakauer has spoken at length about that dark and stormy night and the after-effects that are still haunting him today.