When noted outdoor writer and climber Jon Krakaeur was offered an assignment to climb Mount Everest as a member of a guided expedition last May, he jumped at the chance. Guided expeditions, which lead dozens of people up the world’s highest mountain each year, have become a big business. Krakauer’s assignment from Outside magazine was to climb the mountain with such a group and report on how these expeditions operated. Things went horribly wrong while he was on Everest, and twelve people died. Into Thin Air is his spellbinding account of what happened.

Everest was the exclusive domain of experienced mountaineers for decades after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first to successful climb the 29,035 foot mountain in 1953. In 1985 Dick Bass, a wealthy yet inexperienced climber, paid to be guided up Everest. Within a decade of Bass’s climb, dozens of guided expeditions were taking almost anyone who was in reasonable shape up Everest, as long as they could dish out up to $70,000 for the trip.

Krakauer joined Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants, a New Zealand expedition service considered to be one of the best in the business. Scott Fischer’s Seattle-based Mountain Madness and other groups were also climbing Everest at the same time as Hall’s group. Both Hall and Fisher offered the same service; both were in competition with each other. Both wanted to get all their clients to the top and back safely; the more clients you got up and back, the better your advertising for next year’s climb.

Krakauer is knowledgeable student of climbing history, and part of Into Thin Air describes Everest and the surrounding area, the Sherpas who assist the expeditions, and the history of Everest mountaineering. As Krakauer’s team ascends from camp to camp, he provides details about the nature of the climb and the various climbing parties on the mountain.

In climbing season, Everest is crowded place. In 1996 alone, nearly 400 people would climb up the mountain from Base Camp, and 84 would reach the summit. The reason climbers show up en masse is the weather: there is a brief window in May and October when the jet stream does not blast the mountain top with intense wind and snow.

Climbing the world’s tallest mountain is a risky business. Of the 630 people who have climbed Everest since 1921, 144 of them have died. That’s a death rate of nearly one in four. The bodies of the dead literally line the trail. 1997 is no exception, as this climbing season has already claimed over half a dozen lives.

Despite his climbing experience, Krakauer had nonetheless never been above 25,000 feet, an area climbers call the “Death Zone” because the oxygen is so thin that normal bodily functions are impaired. In extreme cases, this oxygen depletion can be fatal; in the best of cases it can severely hamper judgment, a condition Krakauer likens to being “slipped an overdose of a powerful sedative.” For this reason bottled oxygen is usually used near the summit.

Getting up Everest is half the battle. The trick is getting back down. The final summit day involves leaving Camp Four on the windy, barren, 26,000 foot feet high South Col in the middle of the night. In order to insure that everyone can make it back down safely, guides like Hall and Fischer set a predetermined time when the summit attempt is abandoned and everyone heads back down. This was a cardinal rule of Hall’s and Fischer’s. In 1995, Doug Hansen, a client of Hall’s, had been forced to turn back within several hundred yards of the summit. Hansen had rejoined Hall last May, after Hall had repeatedly assured Hansen that he would make it to the top.

Summit day, the final push to the peak and back, was a series of mistakes that produced fatal results. Timing and organization between the various expeditions went seriously awry. The first sign of trouble was the lack of climbing ropes. Each of the expeditions was supposed to send Sherpas to install ropes on the most difficult sections of the final summit route. No ropes had been placed, so traffic was brought to a standstill on the narrow trail to the peak while climbers waited for the ropes to be placed. These long delays used up precious oxygen, and many climbers depleted their supplies.

Despite having rigid rules to the contrary, both Hall and Fischer ignored their own self-imposed arly afternoon “turn around” time. Had they stopped climbing and turned back, a number of climbers, including Doug Hansen, would not have reached the summit. Consequently, climbers were struggling up to the top late in the afternoon. By 3:30, when it began to snow, Krakauer “could scarcely tell where the mountain ended and where the sky began in the flat, diminishing light.” This storm, which blew up unexpectedly, had engulfed the mountain with hurricane force winds and whiteout conditions by 6:00, making it impossible to see and increasingly dangerous to move on the mountain.

Krakauer’s narrative, at this point in the tragedy, is simply riveting. Although Krakauer had managed to stumble back to his tent on the South Col through the blinding storm, most of his party was still scattered across the summit ridge. A group of climbers had made it down to the South Col but were unable to find the camp in the blizzard. Exposed to hurricane force winds and a wind chill near 100 degrees below zero, they remained huddled together through the night, just a few feet away from a 7000 foot precipice. One of the climbers died of exposure, while another became comatose and was left for dead by his fellow climbers. As morning dawned and the storm still raged, Krakauer relates how he and his peers began a desperate search for the remaining climbers.

Among the missing were guides Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, who, in their efforts to get as many climbers up Everest as possible, remained on the mountain top too long to beat the storm back down. Hall stayed near the top with Doug Hansen, who had collapsed from exhaustion. Atop the Hillary Step, a rugged part of the final summit, Hall radioed back reports throughout the night. As oxygen depletion and hypothermia set in, Hall’s radio accounts were “disturbingly confused and irrational.” Eventually the transmissions stopped as Hall slipped into unconsciousness and died. Fischer, who reached the summit at 3:40- nearly three hours after a normal turn-around time, was exhausted and disoriented. He was unable to make the climb down, collapsed, and died.

The next day, Krakauer and the rest of the surviving climbers limped down from the South Col to the camps further down the mountain. They were battered, bruised, and often frostbitten, and they left nearly a dozen people dead on the mountain behind them.

Mountain tops, according to Henry David Thoraeu, are places where people go at their own risk. “It is a slight insult to the gods to climb” mountains, he wrote, adding that only the “daring and insolent” would confront nature in the inhospitable realm of the world’s peaks.

What could be more daring and insolent in the face of nature than to climb the highest peak on the planet? As Krakauer watched the tragedy unfold, he was intimately involved in the process. His ability to act was impaired, partially due to effects of oxygen deprivation on his judgment, and partially due to the savage effects of the storm. He was unable to do little more than save his own life, but was left with the nagging uncertainty that he might have possibly been able to save others. It was event, Krakauer confesses, that “rocked my life to its core.”

This uncertainty gnaws at his soul, providing an underlying ethical tension that lends Krakauer’s tale an air of wrenching honesty. Into Thin Air is much more than an account of a mountain climbing tragedy. It is a soul-searching testimonial by a man who feels that he “was a party to the death of good people.” Given these motivations, as Krakauer’s prose flows powerfully and elegantly across the pages, his need for answers results in a narrative that magnificently transcends the story line and begs bigger questions about the life and death in the face of nature’s power.

At its best, writing about nature enlightens us about our relationship with the natural world, expands our awareness and understanding of that relationship, and examines our position vis a vis nature’s seeming insouciant disregard for human life. Humbled in the face of nature, Krakauer beautifully and painfully relates his story in Into Thin Air, enlightening us in the process. With Into Thin Air , Krakauer has made the literary passage from good outdoor journalist to a first class nature writer. It is a rite of passage he paid for dearly, and is still paying for today.