14-02-2025
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.
