I’m most of the way through The Climb and it’s clear Boukreev has a different philosophy about climbing than Fischer, but I don’t get the impression that he was motivated by ambition to get to the top. He just had a different idea about what the climbers needed. And when you read his account, the poor guy was on his own to save everyone. I can imagine to hear Krakaur’s account of things, criticizing his actions, would be such an emotional blow, as he was already dealing with survivor’s guilt after doing incredibly heroic and selfless things to save others.
They both really took it too far, IMO, especially over as minor a point as whether or not Fischer told him to go down or not. I’m glad they both seemed to realize this and calmed things down eventually, though. I don’t get the impression DeWalt researched as well as Krakauer and Krakauer is a way better writer. But I do believe Boukreev’s account.
What is clear from reading both books is that both expeditions were pretty disorganized, and both Mountain Madness and Adventure Consultants didn’t help things by teaming up. Confusion over who was fixing the ropes etc really slowed everyone down. I think they were both kind of competing with each other which made them lose track of safety. That combined with some inexperienced clients really created some problems. Bourkeev’s limited grasp of English didn’t help. Just a perfect storm of tragedy.
I’m going to read Beck’s book next, and then call it a day.
Google News now thinks I’m a mountaineer! No way in hell. I am going to read about other people being miserable though to take focus off my own problems. Maybe next I’ll read about Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole.
Start with The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. He was on the expedition, and his book compares favorably to Into Thin Air. He’s also pretty funny for such a grim story.
Before you move on to polar expeditions, you should really read Touching the Void mentioned above, and Buried in the Sky that I mentioned much earlier in the thread.
Touching the Void is an amazing story of survival, and Buried in the Sky is more about the Sherpas than the rich clients hiring them. It’s a good counter-perspective.
Cherry-Garrard for the win. I listened to it while lying on the floor of my cabin, rising only to vomit, during a Class 3 hurricane in the Drake Passage on the way to Antarctica. Take-away message: Oh, susan, you think you’ve got it bad?
That’s probably the best, though I did spend time with two other ladies (one wearing a tall fur hat) in a hot tub, with drinks, watching ice floes covered in penguins slide by.
I thought I was done but apparently after The Climb there are like a dozen postscripts including a detailed rebuttal to Jon Krakaur and full transcript of the recording made by the survivors five days after the disaster (minus Krakauer for some reason.) I’ve read all of it now.
Thoughts: When I look at Krakauer’s book, I see it less as a work of objective journalism and more as a trauma narrative. Memory is faulty, I suspect traumatic memory is even more so. When you’ve been through a traumatic experience you might think you remember all of the details of how you were victimized, but you’re going to forget and confuse a lot of stuff, and as you construct this narrative to make sense out of what you have experienced, you may kind of remember things in a self-serving way. This is just my personal experience. Part of processing trauma is at least in part conceptually building a more cohesive understanding of what happened beyond what you remember.
Because of this, I’m beginning to question Krakauer’s credibility on certain aspects of this story. By his own account he confused a stranger for a friend on the mountain, with devastating consequences. Now, according to DeWalt, Krakauer’s report that he tried to persuade Beck Weathers to descend with him is directly contradicted by Weathers’ own account that he begged Krakauer to help him and Krakauer did not. (Beck’s account would better explain why Krakauer feels so guilty.) And Krakauer claims to have witnessed the conversation between Boukreev and Fischer when others say he wasn’t there. So this is a man whose hypoxia and fear probably messed with his memory of things a lot.
Boukreev claims there was a conversation with Fischer in which they decided he should descend to Camp IV and make tea and prepare to send up oxygen to climbers descending. There is no real reason not to believe this happened. It’s what Boukreev reported matter of factly in the recording five days after the disaster, before anyone accused him of abandoning climbers (I presume.) And it’s the same thing he reported in his book. It’s also corroborated by a conversation Fischer had with Bromet a few weeks before the ascent.
When his characterization of Boukreev was called into question, Krakauer said some pretty vitriolic things. For example he said Boukreev probably rescued Fox and Pittman because it wouldn’t look so good for him to be sitting there drinking tea at Camp IV while people died. I mean, that’s a terrible thing to say about someone who risked their life not once but three times to help rescue people when nobody else could or would help him. Not only that, but it’s irrational for him to single out a guy on someone else’s expedition to blame for the death of members of his own expedition. Everyone on Boukreev’s team, save Fischer, lived. Seems like both Fischer and Boukreev made the right call to me.
What I think is that Into Thin Air helped Krakauer make sense of what happened. When that narrative was threatened, he turned aggressive rather than adjust the narrative. I don’t think he’s a bad person, but one really struggling in the aftermath of this tragedy. Compare to Boukreev who grieved and put together another Everest expedition with a hundred redundancies and went up and buried the bodies, got artifacts for the deceased’s loved ones, talked and apologized to Namba’s husband for not being able to save her… Like really healthy grief and trauma processing stuff from my vantage.
Another interesting thing to me is the survivors recording a collective account of what happened within days of the event. This was sort of comparable to psychological debriefing, which has been shown in studies to make trauma worse and make survivors start to remember other people’s stories as things they personally experienced. The way they did this recording on Everest is people would talk until one of them disagreed with the account and then they would interrupt. So basically they constructed their own collective trauma narrative. I wouldn’t call even that recording unassailable.
@Spice_Weasel, I just want to say that I’m finding your thoughts on this extremely interesting and educational! I have read Into Thin Air but only second-hand articles about the resulting drama – I could see that everyone involved, maybe especially Krakauer, was struggling with memory, probably in large part due to hypoxia, but that was as far as I really went in thinking about it.
There’s a fairly recent thread on this where people said pretty much the same thing: Krakauer was very much discombobulated, and has since acknowledged it. I’m on my phone or I would hunt it down for you.
I am interested in hearing people’s interpretations. Sometimes I think that I am too much of an apologist for Bookreev because I read his book first. Certainly nobody behaved perfectly but I feel somewhat validated in my opinion when I see that someone else read all of the books and basically had the same overall opinion that I did.
I do think that Krakauer does a good job of describing just how confusing it can be when your oxygen levels are low. The saddest thing is that nobody seemed to learn anything from the 1996 deaths. If anything, the mountain is more crowded and more touristy than ever.
Sorry for hijack, but just popping in to say that historic polar expedition disaster narratives (and even non-disaster narratives, like Nansen’s First Crossing of Greenland) are IMHO unsurpassed for summer-heat reading. Glaciers and blizzards are very refreshing to read about on a broiling July or August day.
