Into Thin Air-Book Report (Connor)

A Book Report By: Connor

I just finished the book Into Thin Air. Into Thin Air is about an Everest expedition, narrated by a journalist who was on the journey but lives in Seattle, Washington. At the start of the journey, there are 11 people from his expedition who go up the mountain. Only 6 come down. Some of the important ones are Beck Weathers, a forty year old from Texas; Sandy Pittman; Rob Hall, the leader of the expedition and a good friend of Krakauer’s; Andy Harris, one of the guides on the expedition who Krakauer gets attached to; and of course, Krakauer himself.

The expedition starts in Kathmandu, where they take a helicopter to a point at which they begin hiking to the Everest base camp. After they walk to the launching point for the climb, they set up their expedition tent among the many others in the area. Base camp is really crowded because some expeditions keep their tents up year round, and with so many companies heading climbs, it gets a little busy. After an abnormally long ten-day stay in base camp (you usually only stay at base camp for three days, but they had to stay longer because a Sherpa fell off of a glacial face), they walked beside the Kashung face, a teetering cliff ready to fall down at any minute. From there, they preceded to camp two, where they stayed the night and then walked up to camp three, 3,000 meters above. By that point, Krakauer had established who the best and worst climbers were. Doug Hansen was not as strong. However, Krakauer himself was pretty fast, and he usually climbed with Andy Harris, another one of the stronger climbers and one of the guides. They developed a bond after spending so much time together on the trail, and continued to hike together up to camp four on the south Col, a flat piece of ice about a 10 hour’s walk from the summit.

Once they made it to the high camp on the Col, they rested for a few hours before being roused to start the hike to the summit. Hall, a very strict enforcer of rules and safety on the mountain, instructed everybody to not get too far ahead because he wanted to supervise everybody on the stretch leading up to the part on the mountain just under the summit called the Hillary step. The notorious step is named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first climber to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen. He took a route along a precarious ridge to do it. Now, everybody calls that ridge the Hillary step. The rendezvous point that Hall was talking about was a common meeting place called The Balcony, a ledge that is kind of the launching point before going up the Hillary step and then to the summit. Krakauer and one of Hall’s most trusted Sherpa’s, Ang Dorje, went ahead to wait for the others at The Balcony.

After everybody else, including Hall, got up to The Balcony, Krakauer and Dorje scrambled up the Hillary step and summited Everest. They only stayed on the summit for a few minutes, though, because the amount of fatigue that you feel in your legs when you reach the summit is nothing short of unbearable. And the climb is not the hardest part of Everest. Getting down is even harder. As Krakauer was trekking down to the Hillary step, his supplemental oxygen ran out. Then, things went from bad to worse. There was a traffic jam on the Hillary step. Two more expeditions were climbing up the step. One was a Taiwanese expedition, led by Makalu Gau. The second was a documentary expedition. At the helm of this climb, was Scott Fisher. The two expeditions coming up were a problem because the Hillary step can only hold one singe-file line, and if you try to make it a two-lane street, somebody is going to die.

Once it finally cleared up, Krakauer managed to get to the South Peak, where more oxygen was waiting for him. Once he had more oxygen, he used his crampons to get down a smooth sheet of ice, and back to the south Col. There, he got to his tent, and, thoroughly wasted from the climb, lost consciousness.

While he was asleep, the storm hit the mountain. Rob Hall and Doug Hansen were stranded on the peak in -100 degree wind chill, and 40 knots of it. Doug died right away, but Hall held out longer. He initially survived for twelve days without food or supplemental oxygen at 29,700 feet when the temperature was 125 below zero. Rescue attempts were made to try to save him, but nobody could get up or down the Hillary step with the storm blowing faster than a car on the highway. Hall eventually perished under the conditions.

There was another casualty when a group of people on the documentary team could not find the south Col camp, and they were forced to try and wait the storm out on the east side of the south Col, right next to a sheer cliff of ice, with a deep canyon at the bottom. Eventually, the strongest people in the group (A.K.A. the guides) started wandering and trying to find the camp to get help. Eventually, they did manage to locate the camp, but there was no help available. Everybody was too tired, too cold, or too busy keeping him or herself from dying. Eventually, over the course of five days, people started to regain some strength and started to rescue some of the survivors. Two of them were hours away from dead and coated in a three-inch thick layer of ice that you had to hack with a pickaxe to get off. One of them was Beck. They painfully made the decision to let nature run it’s course, and to leave them to die. However, when everybody was trying to get Hall away from the summit and down safely, Beck walked into the camp, ice and all. They got doctors and medical treatment immediately, and started thawing Beck’s limbs.

After 5 more days, some of the assistant guides that had survived decided to launch an evacuation of Everest high camp on the south Col. Beck managed to walk down to camp three where an army helicopter from the Nepalese air force would pick the worst of them up, one at a time and take them to Kathmandu for medical treatment. First went Gau, the leader of the Taiwanese expedition. He had critical frostbite and a bad case of hypothermia. Close to death, he was lifted to the Nepalese capital, and managed to survive. Next, Beck was taken to Kathmandu where he also lived to fight another day.

The rest of the sad little group walked down to base camp, with the assistance of Sherpas from other climbs, who wanted to help them. One of the Sherpas got beaned twice in the back of the skull with rocks falling from a light avalanche. He was (luckily) okay.

Stepping back, I think that one of the main ideas of this book is that you should never give up on something or someone. The book showed this because everybody gave up on Beck, but he was able to walk out of the freezing cold in hurricane force winds when he was pretty much a walking corpse. I really enjoyed this book because it is a fast-paced adventure novel with a lot of good suspense. It has a lot of humor, but some curse words. On the whole, it was one of the best books I have read.