Book of the week: Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer was on Everest in May 1996 as a client on a guided team, and came home with the account of a storm in which eight climbers died. Thirty years later it is still the book most people have read about the mountain, and still worth reading before you go.
In May 1996 Jon Krakauer was on Everest as a client of the New Zealand guide Rob Hall, sent by Outside magazine to write about guided climbing. He reached the summit on 10 May. Eight climbers died in the storm that followed, and Into Thin Air, published the next year, is his account of it.
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How a magazine story became a book
Krakauer had largely given up serious climbing when Outside asked him to go. The plan was to stay at Base Camp and report on the business of selling Everest. The assignment woke a boyhood wish to climb the mountain, and he asked his editor for a year to train for the summit instead. His article ran in September 1996. The book gave him the room the article did not: the walk in from Kathmandu, the weeks of acclimatization, the people on his team and the summit day hour by hour.
A book about the machinery as much as the storm
The storm is the centre of the book, but most of its pages are about what surrounded it. Commercial expeditions had made a place on Everest something you could buy, and Krakauer argues that competition between guided teams wore away safety habits that experienced guides had built up over years. That is why it still reads as current. Much of what he described is how a Nepal-side expedition works today, and the route from the South Col to the summit has not moved.
First published in 1997. The edition on the card is the 1999 paperback, which adds a long postscript answering his critics: 332 pages, ISBN 9780385494786.
Jon Krakauer, and the climbers in his book
Krakauer, born in 1954, is an American journalist and climber. Before Everest he had written Eiger Dreams and Into the Wild, and he went on to write Under the Banner of Heaven. Several of the people in his book are on the 7 summits record. Rob Hall, who led his team and died on the mountain on 11 May, had completed both lists by 1994. Yasuko Namba reached the summit that day to finish the 7 summits, and died on the descent.
For the 30th anniversary in May 2026, Krakauer gave National Geographic a long interview about what the disaster cost him and where he now stands on the questions the book raised. The blog's post on that interview has the highlights.
Everyone who was there wrote it down
Few days in climbing have been written about from so many sides. Anatoli Boukreev, a guide on Scott Fischer's team, answered Krakauer in The Climb. Beck Weathers, left for dead on the South Col, wrote Left for Dead, and the Danish climber Lene Gammelgaard wrote Climbing High. Lou Kasischke, a client on Hall's team who turned back below the summit, wrote After the Wind. Graham Ratcliffe, who spent the night of the storm on the South Col, argued in A Day to Die For that the teams had forecasts showing the storm coming. Matt Dickinson saw the same storm from the Tibetan side. The Library holds them all, and reading two or three beside Krakauer is the fairest way to understand May 1996.
The blog's post about Beck Weathers follows one of the climbers who survived it.