'I wish I'd never gone'

On May 10, it will be 30 years since a squall swept across the upper reaches of Everest, killing eight climbers that night in what was then one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters of all time. (By the end of the season, twelve climbers had died on the mountain in all.) Worse, this was at the dawn of Everest’s guided era, when strong, competent Western mountaineers thought they could pacify the mountain’s myriad death traps and build, as Mountain Madness guide and owner Scott Fischer famously put it, “a yellow brick road right to the summit.”

Writer Jon Krakauer was there as a client of Kiwi Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants on assignment for Outside, and the magazine story he turned in became the book Into Thin Air, which immediately surged to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Far from dissuading would-be clients and guides, the book seems to have supercharged the commercialization of Everest. By the time I was reporting on the mountain regularly in the early twentyteens, mass casualty events had become a regular feature of many seasons. There were the four climbers who couldn’t get themselves down in 2012 despite the good weather, the 2014 serac collapse that killed 16 Sherpa porters, and the avalanche set off by the 2015 Nepal earthquake which took at least 19 lives in Base Camp. The death toll climbed and so did some 13,000 summiters’ apparent ability to memory-hole the disasters and keep coming at the mountain, decade after decade.

Now, 30 years on, Krakauer has written a new foreword to Into Thin Air, chronicling those changes as Vintage Books re-releases the book. I spoke with him at length about that dark and stormy night and the after-effects that are still haunting him today.

This interview has been condensed for clarity and length. 

Take us back to 1996. The guiding era was already underway, but it was still kind of in its infancy. Things were transitioning from the era of national expeditions—the Swiss expedition, the British expedition—to the commercial era. You seemed to see what was coming.

Krakauer: My heroes growing up were Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld. Unsoeld was in my hometown, and his kids were friends with my family. When those guys climbed the West Ridge of Everest in 1963, that blew my mind. Those climbers were heroes, not the astronauts, not the football players. So I paid a lot of attention to Everest. But as I became a serious climber in my teens and twenties, I resented all the gatekeepers. To go on an Everest expedition, you had to go through the American Alpine Club. I thought, who are these guys with clipboards who get to decide? I wrote off Everest.

Then [the late] David Breashears, who I knew from Boulder, took Dick Bass to the summit. Bass was unusually strong but self-deprecating. People would see him and think, if that guy can climb Everest, I can climb Everest. It was on. Then in the early ’90s, people started hiring guides. Alex Lowe, a good friend of mine, guided Everest three times and got clients to the top twice. The only time he didn’t was on the Kangshung Face in 1994.

That was Sandy Pittman’s expedition, right? It struck me as insane that of all the places she ended up, it was the nearly vertical 7,000-foot East Face of Everest. Nobody goes there.

Nobody goes there. It’s almost suicidal. She was there with the world’s best climbers, Steve Swenson and Alex. She never claimed to be elite, but she didn’t let on that she was being guided. She paid Alex to guide her. Once the guiding started, well, it’s the highest mountain in the world. If somebody said you could go to space for a lot of money, people would line up. So in ’95 Outside called and said there was an expedition leaving in a matter of days. I said yeah, I want to go. Then I thought, I don’t want to sit at base camp for two months. I said, let me go next year and I’ll train. And that’s how I ended up there in ’96. By then it had been going on for a few years, but ’96 was when it was getting really serious.

When you finished the magazine story and the book, was there any part of you that thought you’d successfully warned the world and that people would back off?

I was sure I’d destroyed the nascent Everest guiding industry. I’d killed it in the crib. I really believed that. Then I found out my book was actually the best advertising it ever got. Eric Simonson said it on the record. “We couldn’t buy advertising like that book.” I remember on book tour, people would look at me and say, “You climbed Everest.” You could see them thinking, that f***ing guy.

I came home with incredible survivor’s guilt, because my presence on the mountain, I believe, had a direct influence on the catastrophe. I think it distorted Rob Hall’s judgment. Scott Fischer was there, and Scott’s team was younger and stronger, and all his clients made the summit. Rob felt pressure to get as many of his clients up as possible, so he didn’t turn around people he should have.

I only learned recently from Frank Fischbeck, the oldest guy on our team, who lives in Hong Kong. He turned around early on May 10 because he didn’t feel right. What I didn’t know until a few months ago is that as he was descending, he passed Rob, and Rob tried to talk him into going up. He’d done the same with Doug Hansen [who died on the descent], and Doug had said no, and then Rob talked him into going up. If Rob hadn’t done that, I don’t think the catastrophe would have happened. And then Rob didn’t turn Doug around at one or two. Doug summited at four p.m. That cascaded. Doug collapsed on the ridge, so Andy Harris had to stay with him, which left Mike Groom as the only guide below with clients. Mike had been escorting Yasuko Namba, the smallest member of our team, but at the Balcony [the high promontory that defines the beginning of Everest’s Southeast Ridge] he ran into Beck Weathers, blind, and had to short-rope him down. Mike’s one of the heroes. Three feet of rope, Beck’s blind, Beck’s a big guy. If he hadn’t had to do that, Yasuko would’ve been fine.

On the mountain you mistook Mountain Madness client Martin Adams for Andy Harris, giving Harris's teammates and family false hope that he was alive. I know you've beaten yourself up about that mistaken identity. Thirty years later, how does that sit with you?

Mistaking him for someone else was bad. I felt terrible because I told his parents a story that wasn’t true. First that he made it down, then that he walked off the Lhotse Face. They were dealing with the tragedy and getting all this misinformation from me. But what I really felt guilty about was that Andy and I had similar climbing experiences. We were buddies. When I came down, I’d been out without supplemental oxygen for 90 minutes waiting for people to go up the Hillary Step. I got back to the South Summit and Andy was there, acting bizarre. He wasn’t in his right mind. There were full oxygen bottles he insisted were empty. We couldn’t convince him they were full.

If I hadn’t been a client, if I’d been his climbing partner, I would’ve said, Andy, something’s wrong, we have to get down now. I didn’t, because clients aren’t allowed to have agency. I was always being reprimanded for that.

So Andy ended up staying up there. Rob called him back up when Andy finally convinced the bottles were full. Andy went, and he had a malfunctioning oxygen rig too. He died up there. Doug, I think, fell off the narrow ridge where there was no fixed rope. Rob and Scott should never have gone up that day without ropes fixed first. There’s no way Rob could have gotten Doug across that knife-edge ridge—with a 7,000-foot drop on one side and 8,000 on the other—without rope. And the irony is Rob was the most conscientious. He had rules. He lectured us about turnaround times.

That he then completely ignored.

Completely ignored. And when you have a client in such bad shape that the only way to save yourself is to abandon them, most guides can’t imagine doing that. I know a guy in Boulder who lost a foot to frostbite because he stayed with a client. That last night, May 11, when Rob was still alive on the South Summit, Guy Cotter and Ed Viesturs were on the radio trying to convince him to leave, telling him everyone else was already down. He wouldn’t come down.

When people ask me about going to Everest, I always say don’t. They say it’s safer than ever. I say, listen, there are still a lot of people up there who don’t belong. There’s a real chance you’ll pass somebody in trouble and be unable to help them. Are you prepared for that moral quandary? It’s not going to make you feel good. There’s great moral hazard in going to Everest.

On the topic of inexperienced clients, Sandy Pittman (now Hill) caught a lot of heat for being a socialite with a taste for the finer things. The Vanity Fair story, the Dean & DeLuca coffee, the satellite phone, the Bialetti espresso maker. In retrospect, doesn’t time vindicate her? If you put her on the mountain now, she’d be one of the better clients.

Yeah, I don’t think she was the cause of the tragedy at all. She doesn’t deserve to be the scapegoat. She was actually stronger than several clients on my team. She’d been to altitude. She’d been on two Everest expeditions. I’d never been above 17,000 feet. Sandy liked being the main character, that’s true. The shit she was doing was crazy, bringing copies of all these magazines, the Sherpas looking at the lingerie ads going whoa. But she didn’t cause the disaster.

One of the things I corrected in the new edition because I felt bad about Sandy: Lopsang Jangbu, Scott’s sirdar, carried a 40 or 50 pound electronic device up to the South Col so Sandy could file dispatches live from 26,000 feet. That wasn’t Sandy’s fault. That was Scott’s fault for letting Lopsang do that. Sandy was there specifically to file these reports. That was her job. Scott should have said no. He was sick with a liver issue and originally was going to carry it himself. Lopsang said no, I’ll do it. Scott should have said neither of us should do it. I passed Lopsang puking on his boots that morning. He wasn’t using oxygen, which he normally didn’t need, but any guide should have been. Lopsang and Scott, the two strongest guys on the team, were at the back for most of the day.

What about Anatoli Boukreev? Your interpretation of him was controversial. You criticized him for guiding without oxygen, not carrying a pack, descending ahead of clients. Thirty years on, how does that hold up?

I think the controversy was stirred up intentionally by his ghostwriter, [G.] Weston DeWalt. There were a lot of false statements in that book that I tried to get the publisher to correct. They wouldn’t. But I reported on Anatoli absolutely correctly. I praised him as one of the strongest climbers ever. I praised him for heroically saving the lives of three of his clients. He deserves all the credit for that. But he should never have guided without oxygen. He had to go down ahead of his clients. Without oxygen, you can’t stay warm if you stop. So he had to go down fast, which meant Neal Beidleman, the junior, least-experienced guide, never having climbed Everest, had to bring the clients down. Neal got them to the South Col. Some got lost in the storm and ended up in the [Death] Huddle. Some of Rob’s clients died. But without Neal, none of them would’ve gotten down. Nobody calls Neal a hero. He’s just as deserving as Anatoli.

Anatoli was Russian. The Russians don’t coddle people. He told me multiple times: If client cannot climb mountain, should not be there. Not my job to get client to top. And he’s right. That was Scott’s fault for hiring him. Anatoli was amazing. He’d acclimatize wearing golf shoes with spikes instead of boots. He didn’t carry a pack because he didn’t have oxygen. The next year, he successfully guided a Malaysian team on Everest, and damn straight he used oxygen.

And he died on Annapurna in December 1997.

Trying the south face with Simone Moro. Got avalanched. And Lopsang died in an avalanche on the South Col route of Everest in the post-monsoon season of ’96. Tragic. Brilliant climber. People compared him to [Reinhold] Messner, and I don’t think that was inaccurate.

In the foreword you note that statistically the mountain is getting safer despite the images we see every year. Can you explain that?

What’s made it safer is that guides have figured out what it takes to get clients up. The average now is 1.6 guides per client. That’s a government requirement. You need them to carry all the oxygen bottles, because in ’96 we had three bottles each. You had to climb reasonably fast and keep flow at half, two liters a minute. No margin for error. Now there are fixed ropes literally every inch from base camp to the summit. Up rope and down rope on the Hillary Step. Two-lane highway in parts. You can have all the oxygen you’re willing to pay for, eight liters a minute. People start using oxygen at base camp now.

I get the cheating argument. Oxygen is a drug, you’re already using it, who’s to say two liters is fine and eight isn’t. That’s bullshit. What bothers me is the crowds. From 1921 through 1996, one person was killed for every five who reached the summit. From ’97 through 2025, that ratio dropped to one death per 68 summits. Last year, five climbers died and 866 reached the top, one fatality for every 173 climbers. Those are good odds. But if 4,000 people died in the New York Marathon, they’d shut it the f**k down. On Everest, five deaths is no problem.

What I’m worried about is a mass casualty event. A serac could collapse and kill 200 people. That could happen as we speak. This year there’s a huge serac, the size of an apartment building, leaning over the icefall route. When it goes, there are often 200 people in the icefall. In 2012, Russell Brice sent his entire expedition home because he worried about a similar serac on the West Shoulder. People were furious. They didn’t get their money back. Two years later, when the icefall avalanche killed 16, it made him look smart. This year the rope-fixing is two weeks behind schedule, which means everyone’s going to be acclimatizing late and going for the first window in late May. They’re anticipating a thousand summits this year.

That’s like 500 Westerners and 500 Sherpa guides.

Right. You’re going to have traffic jams worse than what you’ve seen. And the icefall scares me. Even when there’s no specific serac threat, you hear the seracs going.

I’ve walked those ladders. They’re terrifying. In 1996, Rob Hall picked May 10 because that was historically a good day. Now you’ve got computer models. Can you explain how better forecasting actually makes things worse?

They’re more accurate. May 10 now would be considered too early. You’re missing a couple weeks of acclimatization, and it’s colder. The prime days are May 23, May 25, before the monsoon. The smarter guides will tell their clients, it’s going to be crowded, we’ll wait for another window. The problem is FOMO. People paid $60,000 or $100,000 or $500,000, sometimes a million. They say, I’m not going to sit out a good day, what if there isn’t another? Everyone goes at once. Some pundits and guide services say it’s not a problem, people just need to be patient. But people aren’t patient. Especially in the icefall, where you’re going through eight times, four round trips. The ladders are bottlenecks. You’re on a ladder, there’s a serac right there, you don’t know if it’s going to tip.

And in ’96 a traffic jam meant a dozen people. Now it’s hundreds.

Hundreds. There just wasn’t enough experience to know you needed fixed ropes for clients, and an up rope and a down rope on the Hillary Step. I remember getting to the top of the Step. I knew I was being stupid. Rob said you have three bottles, and one stays at the South Summit for the descent. You shouldn’t need it on the way up. By May 10, all bets were off on that. But I believed it, so I was determined to get to the top fast. I could have, except when I got to the top of the Step to rappel down, there were 30 people coming up. I had to wait 90 minutes without oxygen. I am not Ed Viesturs, I’m not Reinhold Messner. I’m just an ordinary human. I don’t know how many million brain cells I lost, but it was a lot.

What about the Sherpas in 1996? Reverence and respect, sure, but they were still in a kind of helper role. Talk about the evolution, and whether there were aspects of the story locked behind a language or cultural barrier.

The most interesting change in 30 years is that Sherpas are now the gatekeepers. Most guide services are run by Sherpas. They call the shots. They’re recognized as the strongest, best, most skilled guides on the mountain. In ’96 it was thought that Sherpas wouldn’t turn clients around. That was true. They were too deferential. They didn’t speak English well enough to argue. There was still this colonial holdover, the “Sahibs” and the “coolies.” They were the load carriers, the cooks. You didn’t get to know them. Rob made an effort to dispel that. We ate dinner with them in the cook tent. One of my best friends to this day is our cook, Chhongba Sherpa. He helped establish the Khumbu Climbing Center.

I bet 90 percent of the clients in ’96 couldn’t name their Sherpas. Didn’t know who carried their loads. A few like Lopsang, who was flashy and spoke English. Or Ang Dorje, Rob’s quiet, very strong sirdar, who later married an American and now has dual citizenship. The guides still called the Sherpas “the boys.” Send the boys up. That doesn’t fly anymore. There was a simmering resentment. After this whole thing I got involved with the American Himalayan Foundation. I’m [the] board chair now. So I spend more time in Nepal and know the dynamics.

The Sherpas now are the best, but they’re not perfect. They’re competitive. The Sherpa-run outfits underplay risks. They can charge $50,000 instead of $100,000 because they don’t pay the $15,000 permit fee or travel.

And a lot of them are becoming IFMGA-certified, speaking five languages.

Alex Lowe. One of the best things he did was notice that nobody had trained the Sherpas in technical skills. They didn’t know how to tie knots. They were just good athletes who acclimatized well. He was appalled because Sherpas were dying. He had the idea to start the climbing school that became the Khumbu Climbing Center. After Alex was killed in ’99, Jenni Lowe and Conrad [Anker], who she married, launched it. I was an instructor the first two years, 2004 and 2005. You could tell right away these guys picked it up fast. Jenni and Conrad set up an exchange where Glacier, Rainier, and Grand Teton national parks hosted Nepali guides for advanced rescue training. There are now a lot of Sherpas guiding internationally and doing it well.

Before that, the pathway was: I was a cook boy, then they gave me a pack and sent me up the mountain.

Despicable. It took years and a lot of resentment. The first time it really came to the fore was 2013, the Sherpa brawl. The rope-fixing team was working on the Lhotse Face. There was a meeting where everybody agreed to stay off the face for the day. Three Europeans, two of them superstars, Simone Moro and Ueli Steck, decided they’d just speed-climb past. When they crossed the ropes, they knocked down a little ice. Mostly the Sherpas were like, what the f**k, you can’t even stay off the mountain for a day, you’re so arrogant. It was disrespectful. They got into a fight pushing and shoving on the Lhotse Face.

The last place in the world you’d want a tussle.

Twenty-three thousand feet. The Sherpas turned around and went down. The Europeans made it worse by saying f**k, the guide companies are going to be pissed, and then fixing the ropes themselves, further insult. When they got to Camp 2, a hundred Sherpas attacked them with rocks and kicks. It was ugly. That opened people’s eyes. Then in 2014, the icefall avalanche. A house-sized ice block hit 25 people, killed 16. All Nepali high-altitude workers. The Sherpas went on strike and shut down the season.

I showed up at Base Camp the day after that. We were at the meeting where they were all standing around and it almost felt Maoist. There was this feeling like the platitudes had finally washed away and they were asserting control.

I forgot you were there. Was that scary?

It felt like anything could happen. But what they wanted was respect and their due. Some of the people who died had been carrying gear for that wingsuit guy from Louisiana who was going to jump off the summit. It put in stark relief how big a risk these guys were taking for Westerners’ career goals.

A lot of the Sherpas I know say I don’t want my kids doing this. They send their kids to private school in Kathmandu. But a lot of Sherpa kids do want to do it. They’re starting their own guide services. It’s lucrative if you own one. And now the Sherpa-run services exploit their Sherpas the same way Westerners did. The clients are safer because of the extra oxygen, but the Sherpas are at greater risk because they have to spend more time in the icefall hauling oxygen up to 26,000 feet. There’s all kinds of moral hazard with being guided up Everest.

Why do people pick apart your story like the Kennedy assassination?

There’s a fascination with Everest. Look at the debate that’s raged forever about whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit in 1924. Every weird conspiracy theory still going. People are getting rich on YouTube doing it. The YouTubers who saw money being made stirring the pot about Mallory and Irvine are now doing it with ’96. There was a lot in ’96. At altitude, your memory sucks. You try to figure out what happened by talking to each other. Were you there? You sure? Everyone’s memory is different, which leaves room for alternative theories.

Toward the end of the book you were wringing your hands about oxygen, postulating that maybe banning it would help. People have gone from three bottles to five or six. Now there’s xenon, which may help with acclimatization.

Xenon’s interesting. In laboratory settings, Furtenbach Adventures has been experimenting for years. They’re convinced that if you breathe it under medical supervision it increases your blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity, same principle as EPO. The jury’s out. Even Furtenbach acknowledges it really just means you don’t have to acclimatize at base camp. Sleeping in hypoxic tents probably helps more. Last year a team of British special forces guys climbed Everest London-to-London in five days using xenon. Mind-blowing. But most of that wasn’t xenon. It was the hypoxic tents and full-flow oxygen from base camp. They had Sherpas helping carry it. They were really fit.

There are also all these environmental problems on Everest with the human feces up there. I mean that they're starting to try to force people to bring it down.

I was surprised when I was first reporting there. People had blue barrels for poop at Base Camp, but as soon as you went above Base Camp, everyone was straddling crevasses. And it all melts back down to Base Camp.

Right now there are 2,000 people at base camp with all the support staff. Hopefully most of it’s getting carried out. But the thousand people above base camp, it’s not.

I think the SPCC [Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee] is now selling wag bags and requiring people to carry them and use them.

That’s the rule now. You can’t get off the mountain without a fine unless you produce 20 pounds of shit. That’s cool. But there’s so much corruption. Helicopters above Camp 1 are supposed to be for emergencies. It’s now common for people who survived the summit to claim a medical problem so they can get airlifted from Camp 2 instead of going through the icefall.

They’re using heavy-lift drones to haul gear up through the icefall now.

[Last] week, because the icefall has been closed, they’ve been ferrying ropes up to Camp 2 [with drones] and it’s worked. The Himalaya is warming faster than the rest of the world. The icefall is more unstable, no one disputes that. There's talk of just helicoptering people above the icefall for safety. Is that climbing Everest? It’s the same thing. But I predict it’ll happen. It’ll make Everest more popular than ever. It’s still Everest. You still come back and say I climbed Everest.

When I tried Denali in ’87, it kicked my ass. I came back with a lot of respect. I went again in 2013 with Conrad [Anker] and Jeremy Jones. In some ways Denali is harder than Everest because nobody carries your tent or sleeping bag. You haul all your own food and gear. On Everest you don’t. That itself should make it not count. There are so many compromises now it’s hard to say this is okay and that isn’t. So it’s like, well, everything’s okay. That’s the future of Everest.

Do you still view climbing Everest as a foundational life experience?

Foundational, but not in a good way. The morning of May 10, climbing from high camp before dawn, Ang Dorje and I were the first to the Balcony at 27,600 feet. Crystal-clear night, the monsoon visible in the Terai with constant lightning. One of the most memorable experiences of my life. But I am ashamed I climbed Everest. I wish I’d never gone. If nobody had died, I’d think it was pretty cool. Having been party to the disaster, it’s just shame and guilt. I try to warn people that sh*t will happen again. The Everest boosters say don’t listen to Krakauer. Don’t listen to me, but I might be right.

You guys had a fax machine at base camp. Now there’s Starlink, espresso machines, the 8848 Residence with a four-poster bed for $50,000 a season. People do Everest plus five other peaks in rapid succession. Is there any wilderness left in the Himalayas?

Yes. The greatest achievement in mountaineering history, in my view, was Reinhold Messner’s [ascent of the North Face of Everest]. In 1978 Messner and [Peter] Habeler became the first to climb Everest without oxygen via the Southeast Ridge. Two years later he went back alone to the north side and did a partial new route, solo, in the middle of the monsoon, no oxygen. You can still do that. No one’s repeated it. You can stay off the two primary guided routes. The route Jim Morrison just skied, the direct North Face into the Hornbein, hasn’t been climbed much. Or the Loretan-Troillet ascent in ’86: two Swiss guys, no ropes, no oxygen, no tent. Climbed at night because the snow was firmer. They reached the summit in 36 hours and glissaded down, 47 hours round trip. You can still do that. Pick a different route.

But most people who pay to be guided just want to say I climbed Everest. They don’t want to climb Everest, they want to have climbed Everest. I don’t blame them. But it makes me sad. This great, beautiful mountain commodified and reduced to—

A line in the bio of your TED talk. It’s the world’s biggest metaphor.

That’s right. I’m 72 now, mellowing. I’m willing to say, sure, why not? If you’re willing to take the risks and the moral hazard, go for it. I still don’t think it’s a good idea.

My PTSD is still there. Much better, but it’s there, and the guilt is there. Every May 10 is a rough day. Doug and Andy were close friends. I still have their picture up above my desk. I’m not over it. I don’t think a lot of us in ’96 are. I made a bad decision. I regret going. Having gone, I don’t regret writing the book. But I wish I’d never gone.