Into Thin Air10 May 2023 Last month during our peregrinations in Spain I read several books, one of which was Jon Krakauer's account of the 1996 Everest disaster he witnessed firsthand: Into Thin Air. Having grown up being regaled by my Uncle Bob's climbing stories this was familiar territory. Since then I have visited deep into the Arctic up to the 77th parallel and climbed in the Rockies up over 14,000 feet. Those experiences give me some firsthand taste of extreme cold and altitude, but Everest is a whole nother level entirely. Krakauer takes us there in all the gritty, miserable details of the climb. He was there as a journalist, but guides were taking people who had enough money to drop $60 grand on the trip but not a lot of qualifications. Some guides had also grown blasé about the dangers after a number of successful years. In a hundred different ways they were unprepared for the worst the mountain could throw at them and missed or ignored a number of warning signs. In some cases they also ignored their own rules to get their clients paying $60 grand to the top. Those guides paid with their lives when things went bad. The thing I remember most about my Uncle Bob's Everest story is that he chose to turn back when it seemed like the right decision. As a child he told me and my brother Packie this story and we had a hard time believing that he would work so hard for something, nearly reaching the pinnacle of climbing after many years, and turn back so close to the end. He concurred Denali, the Matterhorn, and numerous peaks in Antarctica. With Bob he always measured the risks and was prepared with the right equipment. Still he endured much suffering on these journeys which also created an impression on us youngsters. To read Krakauer's book was then a bit of a nostalgic journey for me as I made my own journey along the Camino with it's warm weather and small, generally insignificant, sufferings. The commonality, though, is the community - all of us moving in the same direction toward the same goal. ![]() |
Last altered 10 May 2023 by Bradley James Wogsland.
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