Latest news with #Krakauer
Telegraph
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Everest is overcrowded with inexperienced mountaineers, but a new law could solve the crisis
In the annals of mountaineering epics and tragedies, few events have seared in the minds of climbers and the public like the disaster of Everest 1996, when eight people died after becoming trapped in a terrible storm. It was a story told in Jon Krakauer's best-selling book Into Thin Air. The fact they were mostly inexperienced and commercially guided added to the furore and debate. It's a debate that continues to this day, almost 30 years on. Rarely does a year go by without an Everest drama hitting the headlines, from long queues to the summit, environmental issues relating to rubbish to the ethical questions around the treatment of Nepalese porters and Sherpa guides. Now, in a bid to curb overcrowding on the mountain and to ensure that everyone who attempts to climb the 8,849m (29,032 ft) peak has the right experience, the Nepalese government has announced that in future, only those who've climbed a 7,000m mountain will be able to get a permit. There's just one catch – the mountain has to be in Nepal, sparking a backlash among some climbers. Divided opinion 'That wouldn't make any sense,' Lukas Furtenbach, who's leading a team of British clients up the mountain this month, told the Reuters news agency. 'I would also add mountains that are close to 7,000 metres to that list and that are widely used as preparation [for Everest], like Ama Dablam [Nepal], Aconcagua [Argentina], Denali [Alaska] and others.' But Simon Lowe, managing director of Sheffield-based expedition organisers Jagged Globe said it's a great idea. 'I think it's a brilliant thing, and long overdue,' he said. 'I advocated this a long time ago as a means of relieving pressure on Everest, making sure that only those people who go have some good previous experience.' Lowe, who led the actor Brian Blessed on an expedition on the north side of Everest in that season of 1996, added that he was fine with the idea of Nepal insisting the qualifying mountain had to be in their country. 'They need to protect their own tourism income from mountaineering. So why would they not make it one of their own mountains?' The new law, provided it passes both houses of the Nepalese parliament, will make little difference to Jagged Globe as they normally insist anyone applying to climb Everest has previously climbed an 8,000m mountain (there are eight mountains over 8,000m in Nepal) – or has exceptional mountaineering experience. But he says others are not so discerning. 'The big worry has been for a long time, too many people were going to Everest basically with no experience, having never worn crampons before.' Bending the rules The British alpinist and guide Victor Saunders, who has led clients to the summit six times, wonders whether the law will be enforced. 'There's enough competing interests for it to be forgotten about,' he said. 'They have suggested this rule multiple times and dropped it in the past, and there's always a chance this could happen again.' Lowe added that Nepal doesn't always have a strong track record of sticking to its own rules, pointing out that helicopter flights to and from Everest are only permitted for medical emergencies, but regularly ferry time-strapped clients. Indeed, when the Furtenbach-led team, which includes the current MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, the former Royal Marine Al Carns, attempts to climb the mountain this month in seven days from London, they will use helicopters to get to the mountain. The end of the 'social media mountaineer' Briton Adriana Brownlee, who in 2022 became the youngest woman to climb all 14 of the world's 8,000m mountains at the age of 23, said the law is needed. 'It's a good idea because at the moment Everest is extremely overcrowded and there are a lot of inexperienced mountaineers… One of the main reasons for this is the explosion of influencers, social media mountaineers and people posting about Everest and it's looking easier and easier. The reality is it's still a difficult mountain to climb.' But she said the idea of sending novices up a 7,000m peak in Nepal may not be the best solution. 'If you jump straight to a 7,000er and then you go to Everest I think that's a recipe for disaster.' Instead, she said clients should prove themselves on 6,000m mountains first. 'But we need more safety on Everest,' she added. 'I've seen way too many times that people just aren't ready for the mountain.' Tashi Malik, a well-known Indian adventurer who climbed Everest with her twin sister Nungshi in 2013, agreed, but warned it must be applied fairly. 'It's essential that this policy is implemented with transparency – ensuring access doesn't become overly restricted for passionate climbers from less privileged backgrounds,' she said. Overcrowding and poo bags Overcrowding has been blamed for the high number of deaths on Everest. At least 12 climbers died, and another five went missing on Everest in 2023 when Nepal issued 478 permits. Eight climbers died last year. The issue was dramatically brought to light by a photo taken in 2019 by the record-breaking climber and ex-Gurkha, Nirmal Purja. It showed a long line of climbers stretching to the summit. Similar pictures have gone viral since. Overcrowding is ironically one of the unintended consequences of one of the things that has improved dramatically on the mountain since 1996, said Lowe. 'We've got really good weather forecasting now, but the problem with that is everybody goes for the summit on the same day.' Another issue related to the numbers on the mountain is rubbish and human waste. Last year it was reported that climbers would have to climb with poo bags and return them to base camp, from where human waste is carried down the valley in barrels. Despite this, it's been estimated that there's over 5,000kg of waste in base camp, which sometimes seeps into the water supply. The clean-up of Everest Clean-up attempts do happen. In 2019, the Bally Peak Outlook Foundation removed two tonnes of waste off the mountain – over half from the so-called death zone, above 8,000m. But rubbish removal is an ongoing project. The new law also proposes a non-refundable rubbish fee. For all that, the mountain known by the Nepalese as 'Sagarmatha' – the Head of the Earth touching the Heaven – remains an incredible endeavour for those brave enough to try. 'It's still a worthy objective,' said Saunders, 'the same way the London marathon is. But if your idea of mountaineering is to enjoy some solitude and escape from people then obviously it doesn't fit with that.' 'I had an incredible time,' added Brownlee, who summited the mountain in 2021. 'Mount Everest is a beautiful mountain. I would highly recommend it. The key is to make sure you're ready and have a good expedition company and an amazing guide and you'll be safe. There's no feeling like reaching the summit.'
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The Independent
07-04-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
NewsNation describes Trump skipping dignified transfer of dead soldiers for LIV event as ‘golf diplomacy'
Conservative media critic Steve Krakauer suggested that President Donald Trump was 'thinking a few chess pieces down the board' when he skipped the dignified transfer of four dead American soldiers to attend a Saudi-backed LIV Golf event at a Trump golf course, prompting a NewsNation anchor to applaud Krakauer's analysis. 'Golf diplomacy, I like that,' Anna Kooiman reacted on Monday. The president was on the receiving end of blistering criticism after he departed for his Mar-a-Lago estate on Thursday afternoon to attend a dinner with LIV golfers and a tournament over the weekend. Besides taking heat for sending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his stead to receive the remains of soldiers who were killed in a training accident, Trump was also lambasted for leaving Washington for a long weekend after his 'Liberation Day' tariffs rocked international markets and created economic turmoil across the globe. During his lengthy stay in Florida, Trump not only watched LIV golfers compete and played in a tournament at his own golf club, he also spoke at a $1 million-a-person fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago for his super PAC. The president's weekend activities prompted New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman to claim that Trump 'stopped caring about certain optics' a long time ago and that he's now 'going to do what he wants.' During Monday's broadcast of Morning in America, Kooiman — a former Fox News anchor who joined NewsNation last year — described Haberman as a 'leading liberal New York Times journalist' before airing her recent comment about Trump skipping the dignified transfer to stay at Mar-a-Lago. She then asked Krakauer — the executive producer of Megyn Kelly's podcast and a NewsNation media contributor — whether he agreed these were 'bad optics' for the president. 'I'm not sure they're bad optics,' he said. 'I would say that what's interesting about this is they are optics for sure. And you think about what could have been good optics, and it's something that President Trump understands, perhaps, better than anyone is the idea of how optics drives the cycle.' Stating that Trump likely wasn't 'going to win any credit on the PR side' from Haberman and other mainstream media outlets if he did attend the transfer of remains, Krakauer stated that Trump was conducting Middle East policy with his attendance at the LIV event. 'I do think that it was a little bit surprising because maybe he would have gone to this dignified transfer in another era, but right now, there's so many different balls in the air when it comes to foreign policy, domestic policy and everyday is deciding what optics you have to just sort of decide what is the most important that moment,' he declared. 'And I think he made it. He made the decision about — from a foreign policy point of view — to go to the Saudi event.' After Kooiman stated that Haberman doesn't 'normally say glowing things about the president' anyway, she wondered what kind of media attention Trump could have received if he'd just gone to the transfer. Saying that there 'would not have been some positive news cycle for Trump' from legacy media, Krakauer said the president may have received favorable coverage from conservative outlets if he had attended. 'I don't think he needs that,' he added. Instead, Krakauer asserted that Trump was playing multi-dimensional chess when it came to his Middle East policy before suggesting that the president had already connected with the families of the deceased soldiers. 'It's not just optics,' he said. 'He understands, I think, people in a way that most people don't, and it wouldn't surprise me if a day or two days down the road sometime this week, we get a little bit more about what may have happened between President Trump and those families themselves, whether behind the scenes or in front of the cameras.' In the end, though, Krakauer insisted that Trump's time spent hanging out with pro golfers and hitting the links was all part of the president's diplomatic approach. With Kooiman saying that 'this is different' because Trump could 'get quite a bit of work done while he's actually on the golf course,' Krakauer agreed. 'Exactly. He's not just out there on the course,' he reacted. 'As strange as it may sound about golf, this is diplomacy.' Bringing up the potential merger of the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, Krakauer concluded by saying the merge could be about Trump wanting 'to expand the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia' and that weekend's events could 'really move the needle' on the success of Trump's foreign policy. 'Yeah, and as he's saying 50 countries are…asking to come to the table to try to lower these tariffs,' Kooiman responded. 'Golf diplomacy, I like that.'
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Everest' true story: Here's what happened to the real Mount Everest disaster climbers (plus a side-by-side look at the film's cast)
Though Jason Clarke and Jake Gyllenhaal lead an A-list cast in Everest, the real star of the 2015 movie is the mountain itself. Located in the Himalayas near the China-Nepal border, Mount Everest is said to be the planet's highest mountain above sea level. As such, it's become a destination for mountaineers and thrill-seekers all over the world. The danger and grandeur promised by Everest also brought out audiences, with Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur's film pulling in a worldwide gross of over $203 million on a $55 million budget. Now that the film is streaming on Netflix, new viewers may be curious about the events depicted in the film. So, is Everest based on a true story? Are the characters played by Gyllenhaal and Clarke inspired by real people? Read on as we answer those questions and more. Set in 1996, Everest follows two expedition groups, Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness, on a climb to the summit of Mount Everest. The former is led by Kiwi mountaineer Rob Hall (Clarke), an experienced climber who has previously ascended Everest four times. Joining him is an American journalist, Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly). The latter is led by Scott Fischer (Gyllenhaal), a macho American mountain guide who climbed Everest's peak two years prior to the events of the film. The two groups combine, but the arrival of a full-scale blizzard impacts their path and vision. The dream to climb Everest is strong, but the climbers nevertheless struggle with altitude sickness, hypoxia, and high-altitude pulmonary edema as they try to return to their base camp. Yes, Everest is based on a real-life tragedy in which eight people died while trying to climb Mount Everest in 1996. Several climbers who survived the storm wrote memoirs about their experience on the mountain. The most famous is Krakauer's Into Thin Air, a book EW called "a horrible triumph" that "offers readers the emotional immediacy of a survivor's testament as well as the precision, detail, and quest for accuracy of a great piece of journalism." (Survivor Anatoli Boukreev, played in Everest by Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, penned his own book refuting some of Krakauer's claims, though Krakauer stands by his account.) But Everest isn't a direct adaptation of either book. Though it draws much inspiration and information from climber Beck Weathers' Left For Dead, the screenplay by William Nicholson (Les Miserables) and Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) is considered an original, cumulative account of their own research. As director Kormákur explained to Entertainment Weekly, it was also informed by previously-unheard audio tapes between the climbers and base camp. 'None of the books that have been written had access to these tapes,' Kormákur told EW. 'They put them away and wanted to try to move onward with their life. But they listened to it with us which was incredibly moving and, of course, very traumatic for them to go through again. But it was also very informative because we got all the small details. There were very different stories out there in many of those books and we wanted to try to understand what was misunderstood. And a lot of this came through those tapes.' Several lines in the film, Kormákur said, are taken directly from the tapes. He told EW that this was part of an effort to "humanize" the climbers. "I didn't want to ridicule or create a villain that doesn't exit… or a hero that didn't exist," he said. "I wanted to be true and show the mistakes and failures that happened on the mountain. This isn't about a group of people who go up a mountain and get blown off by a storm. They were in real bad shape before the storm came in. The storm was just the final thing that finished them off.' When EW's writer asked him about Krakauer's bestseller, Kormákur was dismissive. 'To be honest I wasn't that interested in telling a story about a writer on a mountain," he said. "I've seen a lot of movies about writers. His book is a first-person account and there are a lot of things that he assumes or thought that happened that didn't really happen. This is the story of a group of people who are going up this mountain and I wanted to be true to that.' For his part, Krakauer, who also penned the popular nonfiction books Into the Wild and Under the Banner of Heaven, is not a fan of Everest. 'It's total bull," he told the L.A. Times following the film's release. "Anyone who goes to that movie and wants a fact-based account should read Into Thin Air.' He also took issue with a scene in the film in which his character neglects to help with a rescue attempt due to being snow blind, saying, "I never had that conversation." By and large, the Everest cast plays real people who were on Mount Everest in May 1996. Below, take a look at who plays who. Australian actor Jason Clarke has appeared in a variety of critically acclaimed and award-winning films, including Zero Dark Thirty (2012), The Great Gatsby (2013), and Mudbound (2017). Most recently, he played Lakers coach Jerry West on HBO's Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022–2023) and the supremely hateable Roger Robb in the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer (2023). Clarke plays Rob Hall, an experienced mountaineer who famously summited the seven highest peaks in the world in seven months alongside climber Gary Ball. As depicted in the film, his wife, Jan Arnold, was pregnant at the time of his death. They met during an Everest summit attempt in the early '90s. "Rob had a very dry, laconic sense of humor," Guy Cotter, a friend of Hall's, told PBS. "You first meet him and you think, 'This guy's all business.' And Rob would have everything organized; he'd be sort of making sure everything was going well. He wasn't the sort of character who would stand up and just order everybody around; he always gave a lot back. There was always a lot of fun, a lot of smiles, a lot of subtle, wry jokes that you had to know him for a little while before you'd get the hang of it." Jake Gyllenhaal, one of the 21st century's most recognizable actors, has deftly pivoted between blockbuster fare (Spider-Man: Far From Home, The Day After Tomorrow) and more challenging, cerebral fare (Donnie Darko, Zodiac, Enemy). His work in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) scored him an Academy Award nomination. Most recently, he appeared in Doug Liman's Road House reboot (2024) and Apple TV+'s Presumed Innocent series (2024). Related: The 15 best Jake Gyllenhaal performances Gyllenhaal plays Scott Fischer, who, prior to his death, had climbed both Everest and K2, the two highest peaks on the planet. Friends described him as "larger-than-life" with an "incredibly magnetic personality." Though Josh Brolin found early success in The Goonies (1985), his career really took off with his disquieting turn in the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men (2007). Since then, he's worked with some of the best living filmmakers, including Paul Thomas Anderson (Inherent Vice), Denis Villeneuve (Dune, Dune 2), Oliver Stone (W.), and Spike Lee (Oldboy). He received an Academy Award nomination for his performance in Gus Van Sant's Milk (2008). And, of course, he played Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Brolin plays Beck Weathers, a climber who was part of Hall's expedition. During the storm, he fell into a hypothermic coma but survived. In 2000, he wrote a memoir about the tragedy, Left For Dead: My Journey Home From Everest. John Hawkes was nominated for an Oscar for his turn in 2010's Winter's Bone, though you may also recognize him from series like Deadwood (2004–2006), Eastbound & Down (2009–2013), and True Detective: Night Country (2024). His film credits include American Gangster (2007), Lincoln (2012), and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), as well as The Perfect Storm (2000), another story of a real-life tragedy. Hawkes' Doug Hansen was a passionate climber from Washington who worked as a postal worker. Lou Kasischke, a survivor of the climb, described Hansen as "very determined," while Weathers said he was "in his element" on the mountain. He was one of the eight who died on the expedition. Emily Watson's debut film role in Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) scored the actress her first Academy Award nomination, with her second coming two years later for Hilary and Jackie (1998). Since then, Watson has appeared in films like Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008), and Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017). She also had an Emmy-nominated turn in HBO's Chernobyl (2019) and recently starred in Dune: Prophecy (2024). Watson plays expedition associate Helen Wilton, who survived the storm and would later join Everest director Kormákur in listening to the audio tapes from the tragedy. Michael Kelly is best known for playing Doug Stamper on Netflix's House of Cards and CIA agent Mike November on Amazon Prime's Jack Ryan. Most recently, he had leading roles on Taylor Sheridan's Special Ops: Lioness (2023–present) and HBO's Batman spinoff The Penguin (2024). Kelly plays Jon Krakauer, the acclaimed author who chronicled his experience on Everest in the bestselling book Into Thin Air (1997). In an interview with the L.A. Times following the release of Everest, the Times wrote that Krakauer found his portrayal in the film to be a "personal affront." He also noted that Kelly never reached out to him prior to filming. Sam Worthington has appeared in several blockbuster films, including Terminator Salvation (2009) and Clash of the Titans (2010), though most audiences know him as Jake Sully from Avatar (2009) and Avatar: The Way of the Water (2022). He also starred in Under the Banner of Heaven (2022), FX's adaptation of another Krakauer book. Worthington plays Guy Cotter, the now-CEO of Adventure Consultants and a survivor of the blizzard. He served as a consultant on Everest, telling HuffPost that he worked to ensure the cast and crew's safety during filming and would let Kormákur know if anything looked "bogus or just plain wrong." Speaking to Worthington's performance, he cracked, "He obviously doesn't have my charisma or sense of humor but he did ok! Seriously though, it's pretty hard to connect with someone portraying you, and I think there wasn't a lot of scope from the director for him to portray more emotion in the scenes, so I thought the performance was reasonable." According to Kent Harvey, Everest's second unit director of photography, many of the climbing sequences were shot in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy. Additional filming was done in Nepal, with the actors making part of the trek to the Everest base camp, though the actors did not actually film at the real base camp. Instead, the base camp was constructed at Italy's Cinecitta Studios. As for the Hillary Step, a 40-foot vertical rock face that serves as one of the most challenging parts of the Everest climb, the site was built at Pinewood Studios in England. "They had [Everest climber] David Breashears and a bunch of Sherpas there as consultants," Harvey told Outside. "It was incredible. It all looked very real. But it was still surrounded in green screen." The crew did, however, need to get real Everest footage to incorporate into the film. According to Havey, that was a challenge. "You can't just take your average Hollywood crew person to the top of Everest," he said. "I had to assemble a team of people that had a lot of experience climbing, had spent time on Everest, but also had some familiarity with the movie-making process. I also wanted some guide friends that could do stunt double work." Upon release, EW's critic called Everest "a relentless 3-D workout" that "stages all of the high-altitude chaos effectively, if a bit too chaotically." He continues, "It may sound cold to say that while all of the performances are solid, it's the danger of Everest that's the film's primary lure. But no one pays IMAX ticket prices for nuanced human drama, and the film's dizzying climbing scenes and vertiginous don't-look-down moments are what give it its heart-quickening power. Shot in Nepal and Italy, Everest makes you feel how mismatched and exposed even the strongest climber must have felt when a blizzard kicked up during this group's descent, leaving them stranded and doomed." But all that chaos ultimately serves to confuse, turning these real-life figures into "a sea of parkas." His review reads, "Maybe that's the point — that Mother Nature doesn't discriminate. But I doubt it. Plus, it shouldn't be. When the lights come up, you don't want to feel like you've watched a better Cliffhanger. You want to understand the tragedy you've just watched. Yes, you want to be entertained, but you also want the icy, whipping wind of reality to sting." Read EW's full B- review here. Everest is currently streaming on Netflix. You can also rent or buy it via Amazon the original article on Entertainment Weekly
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Yahoo
Into Thin Air Has Been Attracting Criticism for Decades. Now Jon Krakauer Is Finally Going Nuclear.
On May 10, 1996, 43 climbers attempted to reach the summit of Mount Everest. By the following day, five of them were dead. The tragedy—occurring at a time when the commercial guiding business was ramping up on the mountain and the dream of summiting Everest seemed suddenly available to anyone able to afford the $68,000 price tag—electrified the public. The most celebrated account of the disaster came from journalist Jon Krakauer, first as a barn-burning feature in Outside magazine, which had commissioned him to cover the climb as a participant, and later as the bestselling book Into Thin Air. People have been arguing about the catastrophe ever since, from the 1997 book The Climb, by Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian-Kazakhstani guide who felt he'd been unfairly portrayed in Into Thin Air, to a present-day YouTube campaign against Krakauer. The latter, conducted by a lawyer in Irvine, California, named Michael Tracy, was purportedly triggered by a rash of recent YouTube videos from various creators, all excoriating another climber who was on the mountain that day, Sandy Hill Pittman. One of the most viewed of these—titled 'Ungrateful Socialite Endangers Climbers on Deadly Mount Everest Excursion' and narrated by a creepily soft-voiced therapist who makes videos about famous true crimes and seems to have a sideline in 'analyzing' the women climbers he blames for various mountaineering disasters—gives a pretty good sense of the tenor of these debates. For his part, Krakauer has long shown himself ready to return fire to his critics. At issue is whom to blame for those five deaths. Two of the lost were the leaders of rival guiding companies Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness, and the other three were, like Krakauer, clients of Adventure Consultants. The most immediate cause of the tragedy was a fearsome blizzard that beset Everest the evening of May 10, as the climbers were descending. As Krakauer tells it, multiple factors—errors, reckless deviations from plans, bad luck, ambition, and physical weakness—contributed to the catastrophe. This complex answer, however, proved unsatisfying to many armchair adventurers, who promptly selected Pittman, a hateably rich white woman who wrote dispatches of the climb for an NBC website and was friends with Martha Stewart, as their preferred culprit. Pittman's gig, a very early form of travel blogging, required bringing heavy technical equipment (then seen as a superfluous luxury) up to base camp in order for her to connect to the internet; in one notorious post, she wrote, 'I wouldn't dream of leaving town without an ample supply of Dean & DeLuca's Near East blend and my espresso maker.' Had the climb not ended in tragedy, this pronouncement might have come across as dashing, but with five bodies in the snow, it made Pittman a target. Tracy initially claims to be defending Pittman from misogynistic attacks in the first of 17 videos he has posted to YouTube about Everest 1996 over the past year. However, it soon became obvious that Krakauer is his real target. Replete with impressive-looking info dumps, sketchy arguments, shameless speculation, crude taunting, and juvenile A.I.–generated images, Tracy's videos come across as quintessential YouTube crankery. Either despite or because of this, they've earned him 134,000 subscribers. For several months, Krakauer tried not to feed the troll, but this week he posted a detailed response in eight videos (with corresponding text versions on Medium). Much of the argument here gets deep in the weeds of the events of 1996, with each of the disputants addressing questions regarding the fullness of oxygen bottles cached high on the trail, whether fixed ropes were used, and how close one person was standing to another at a particular moment. Small details do matter a lot in the perilous conditions atop the highest mountain on the planet, but they don't mean much to readers who aren't willing to bury themselves deep in the rabbit hole that is this story. Suffice it to say that Krakauer defends himself ably, acknowledging the handful of instances in which Tracy has caught genuine inaccuracies in Into Thin Air—such as for how much of the trail Pittman had to be 'short roped' by a guide (Krakauer's book overstated the amount)—promising to correct them in future editions, and otherwise easily refuting Tracy's claims. Krakauer has the overwhelming advantage of having interviewed most of the survivors of the tragedy in depth and of having actually been there at the time. In summary, however, Tracy argues that the cause of the disaster was, essentially, 'arrogant guides' who did not provide enough oxygen bottles and who detained their clients on the summit in order to perform some kind of 'stunt' that never came off. (The first claim has some merit, although, because of the deaths of the leaders and confusion about the oxygen caches placed on the mountain, the facts may never be established; the second is ludicrous and easily debunked by Krakauer.) Tracy objects to what he asserts is Krakauer's preferred 'narrative': that 'inexperienced climbers,' particularly Pittman, were 'the root of all evil on the mountain.' This is a gross misrepresentation of Into Thin Air. Pittman was certainly widely reviled in the aftermath of Everest 1996 (and in the years since), but this was largely the result of a dishy Vanity Fair profile, not Krakauer's book. Whatever Tracy may know about mountaineering, he has no grasp at all of the worlds of magazine and book publishing. As a result, the motives he attributes to Krakauer for allegedly slanting his reporting are a fantasia of delusional notions about how both industries work. For example, Tracy describes Krakauer's feature assignment from Outside as 'nothing more than corporate product placement for Adventure Consultants,' when in fact the magazine paid for Krakauer's spot on the climb with both cash and trade in the form of ad space, retaining editorial control over the piece itself. Laughably, Tracy insists that a first-person account of surviving a famous disaster in one of the most dangerous places on earth would be of insufficient interest to editors and readers unless it was reduced to a 'simple story' in which 'people are punished for their obvious hubris.' (The irony of this accusation goes unnoticed.) Lastly, and most bizarrely, Tracy claims that Krakauer covered up the culpability of Rob Hall, the proprietor of Adventure Consultants and one of the people killed in the tragedy, to protect a company that (in actuality) he knew had endangered his own life and to which he owed nothing. Concealing Hall's guilt, Tracy believes, contrived 'some greater mystery' that enabled Krakauer to 'sell all of his books.' The selling point of Into Thin Air is manifestly not that it's an investigation into the cause of the disaster or a morality tale. Krakauer, possessed of the unbeatable angle of having actually been there, didn't need either of those frameworks to publish a bestseller. He has no reason to misrepresent what happened on the mountain, and his willingness to fix inaccuracies, even those discovered by a bad-faith actor like Tracy, demonstrates his commitment to reporting the truth as best he can. This requires balancing the first-person accounts of other climbers, people whose memories may be compromised by exhaustion and the oxygen deprivation experienced at high altitudes. Some of those involved have altered their accounts over time. Yet none of the errors Tracy uncovered substantively undermine Into Thin Air. Perhaps the most egregious of Tracy's videos on this subject accuses Krakauer of callously abandoning fellow climber Yasuko Namba, who died only 350 yards from the base camp. The climbers became separated from each other in the descent and blizzard, and when Krakauer finally made it back to his tent, he was out of oxygen and collapsed in exhaustion. Some of the team members at the camp went back out to search for the missing, but one of those who did told Krakauer, 'You were so far past the point of ordinary fatigue that I thought if you attempted to help with a rescue you were only going to make the situation worse—that you would get out there and have to be rescued yourself.' In his video, Tracy portrays Krakauer as heartless: aware of Namba's distress and capable of aiding her, neither of which was the case. In Into Thin Air and to this day, Krakauer writes that Namba's death still 'haunts' him and that he wishes he had had the strength to go back out into the storm to help with the search. Tracy has since removed this cruel video from his channel. Krakauer writes that he learned that this was the result of pressure from the YouTuber's 'own supporters' in Tracy's private Discord server. In a notice posted to his YouTube channel, Tracy writes only that the video pointed out discrepancies between Into Thin Air and another climber's memoir of the disaster, and that 'Krakauer took issue with attributing these discrepancies to some motive.' Here's a pro tip: Real journalists admit their mistakes and correct them because they have a commitment to the truth. People who crow about their own infallibility do not. Why do people still feel compelled to argue about the Everest 1996 tragedy nearly 30 years after the event? Because, as Krakauer writes, this disaster was 'the result of multiple, complex, interrelated factors,' and because many key facts can never be established, as the witnesses to them died on the mountain. At our worst, human beings rebel against such situations. We want to believe that clear-cut blame can be determined because it brings the terrifying forces that sometimes crush us under our control. Also, as the internet demonstrates over and over again, we just love picking a villain, then doubling down on the choice until we've transformed them into an absurd caricature of wickedness. Whatever need this impulse serves, it's never a desire to know the truth.
