Essay 2

COMMENT:
If I could do this piece over again, I would have re-read the book a third or fourth time in hopes of getting a better understanding. I had such a hard time wrapping my frugal and lazy mind around the fact that people would spend that kind of money to subject themselves to that kind of pain, suffering and the very real chance of death in order to be able to say they had climbed Mount Everest. Also, my shy, girly side would never attempt any trip that involved an absence of real flushing toilets. However, the discussions really helped me to understand this book as well as I did. Without them, I would have been completely lost after the first fourth of the book.




Pain of Everest

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer tells the story of the deadly 1996 Mt. Everest expedition. Krakauer gives a first hand account of the events leading up to the disaster. Hired by Outside magazine to tell the story from base camp, Krakauer requested the funding to go to the top of the world, knowing “that Everest had killed more than 130 people since the British first visited the mountain in 1921 – approximately one death for every four climbers who’d reached the summit” (28). Climbers paid upward of $65,000 to put their lives at extreme risk and climb Mt. Everest.
These people spent two months attempting to accustom their bodies to the brutal conditions on the mountain. They would be required to take themselves to the verge of death, relying on a group of people who were virtual strangers in order to make it home alive. Even before Krakauer and the other members of Adventure Consultants began their climb to base camp, he was apprehensive, stating he “suspected that each of (his) teammates hoped as fervently as (he) did that Hall had been careful to weed out clients of dubious ability, and would have the means to protect each of us from one another’s shortcomings” (40). Krakauer would endure extreme pain his entire time on the mountains simply to “spend less than five minutes on the roof of the world” (8).
Early on in his quest up Mt. Everest, Krakauer began to suffer. At the Khumbu Glacier, Krakauer was surrounded by Sherpas and climbers from a dozen different expeditions, German trekkers, herds of emaciated yak, three of four stone toilets overflowing. While Krakauer attempted to sleep in a flea and lice infected bunk in a lodge heated by yak dung, he “developed a dry, persistent hack that would stay with (him) until the end of the expedition” (Krakauer 54). At this point, other members of the expedition have virulent intestinal ailments and altitude-induced headaches (Krakauer 61). By the time Krakauer had been at Base Camp for a few weeks, sleep became elusive and his digestive system slowed down to the point his “arms and legs began to whither to sticklike proportions” (72).
After his first attempt at reaching Camp One, Krakauer is struck with a migraine like headache that sickens him (86). When he reached Camp Two, he is “afflicted with a raging red-wine hangover” (Krakauer 111) type of headache from the altitude. Still he continued on with his journey to the top of the world. The pain seemed to motivate him to continue to test his body to the outer limits.
As time past, Krakauer’s body continued to break down. On the team’s first attempt to climb to Camp Three, the weather forced them to turn around (Krakauer 130). When the team made it to Camp Three on the next attempt, Krakauer was fearful of developing High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE) or High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE) (144). However, he did not. At this point the team’s acclimatization was officially complete and Krakauer was breathing well. His body was not as lucky. He had “lost nearly twenty pounds of muscle mass” (Krakauer 145). He had “burned up virtually all of (his) subcutaneous fat, making (him) vastly more sensitive to the cold” (Krakauer 145). But what he describes as his worst problem was his “chest; the dry hack (he’d) picked up weeks earlier in Lobuje had gotten so bad that (he’d) torn some thoracic cartilage during an especially robust bout of coughing at Camp Three” (Krakauer 145). Krakauer’s solution to these problems was to “rest, gobble ibuprofen, and force down as many calories as possible” (146) because in five days he was going to attempt to be on top of the world.
Shortly before midnight on May 9, Krakauer’s team of fifteen people and the Mountain Madness team of fourteen and four others left the Camp Four to attempt to climb to the peak of Mt. Everest. Krakauer had not eaten or slept well in more than two days (172). On more than one occasion, Krakauer was forced to stop and wait on the slower members of the team in the bitter cold (174). Krakauer was emotionally and physically exhausted at this point. However, he knew he had much further to go before he would reach the top of Everest. Even then, he knew he must have the energy and the ability to make it back to camp.
When they reached above the South Col and entered into the Death Zone, “survival is to no small degree a race against the clock” (Krakauer 181). Time was of the essence. When they reached above 27,400 feet there were no ropes fixed and Krakauer was forced again to wait for the rest of the team to arrive. Again, he was forced to wait. He used his energy that would have been better used in climbing the mountain, waiting on the rest of his team member to catch up.
Battling against time and a quickly diminishing oxygen supply, Krakauer was one of the lucky few to reach the top of Mt. Everest and come back down alive. In all, twenty-nine people lost their lives that day attempting to climb to the top of the world. Was it worth it? To some who were able to overcome the pain and suffering of this expedition, perhaps it was. But to others, that lost their lives, lost body parts and were simply lost and never found, surely it wasn’t worth the sacrifice.


Work Cited
Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air. Anchor: New York, 1997.