Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Everest Disaster, by Jon Krakauer Macmillan, 293pp, £16.99 in UK
In August 1996, Vanity Fair published a pretty damning profile of a high-stepping wealthy American journalist, Sandy Hill Pittman. A publicity hound who preferred to make rather than report news, Pittman had set her sights on becoming the first North American female to ascend the Seven Summits - being the highest peaks on seven continents. Critics who believed that she should stick to ball gown rather than boots had often remarked that her climbing skills were of the purely social kind.
Three months earlier, Pittman's blind ambition was associated with tragedy. In May 1996, Everest recorded its worst single season since men first set foot on it seventy-five years before. Twelve men and women perished in a storm on its southern flank, eight of whom died in one day. That Pittman should be among the group who survived was largely due to the bravery of others, including those who had been paid to guide her up there.
To her critics, Pittman's very presence on Everest that spring represented everything that was and is wrong about the rapid commercialisation of high-altitude mountaineering. In the last few years, anyone with more money than mountain skills can now buy the necessary help to "conquer" the world's highest peaks. Professional western guides who once recorded their own ascents with the assistance of Nepalese staff are now an integral part of what has been called the "summit-bagging" business.
Sixteen months ago, Jon Krakauer, an American author, journalist and mountaineer, joined a commercial expedition to take a first-hand look at the trend for Outside magazine. An accomplished climber, he had no experience of altitude above 17,000 feet. As he nervously watched some of his team mates donning new boots, little was he to realise that his inner voice - sounding like "Chicken Little" at the outset - was giving him good warning about what lay ahead.
Krakauer lived to tell a tale: of stupidity, arrogance, egotism, cruelty and incredible courage, as members of three separate expeditions were caught out in hurricane-force winds, having already lost valuable time, and oxygen, in bottlenecks near the summit. He was among the lucky few to spend a brief few minutes at 29,028 feet. But instead of waxing lyrical about the wonders of "standing on top of the world", he admits that he worried - wisely - about being only half-way there. Cold and exhausted, he still had to get down, having had no sleep in fifty-seven hours, and little to eat.
The author escaped the worst of the storm, but some of his fellow travellers, including two leading guides, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, did not. The heartbreaking story of that last phone call home to his wife by New Zealander Hall dominated the headlines afterwards. Krakauer's own article caused some anger and considerable upset among bereaved relatives. One of them, Scott Fischer's sister, wrote him a particularly bitter letter, criticising his analysis of what went wrong.
In this much more lengthy account, which probably took greater courage to write than the physical effort made on the mountain, Krakauer admits that even he, as a witness, did not have all the facts before him. He passed one of the guides in difficulty on the way down, didn't recognise that he was in trouble, and reported that he was safe when he wasn't. He discovered much later that he had even got the circumstances of death wrong in the confusion. This was partly due to the ferocious conditions, and partly due to the effects of altitude, which one climber so aptly described as like "a nail driven between the eyes".
This book, then, is an attempt to set the record straight with some new information received after his feature was published. Rather than express opinions, Krakauer now prefers to let the facts speak for themselves. He admits to continuing nightmares, and to survivor's guilt. There is little attempt to moralise; indeed, while one admires the guides who refuse to abandon their clients and the sherpa staff - some of whom have egos of their own - one grows to like the cheque-book climbers who have little in common apart from a grim determination to realise their dreams.
Even Sandy Hill Pittman, who had insisted that a sherpa lug a satellite phone up to 26,000 feet and who tended to include gourmet food and espresso coffee-makers in her kit, comes out reasonably well.
Some of the detail is a bit confusing at times, but Krakauer's riveting testimony gives an insight into why climbers left colleagues for dead, and why certain questionable decisions seemed logical at the time. The solution? Ban bottled oxygen, except for emergency use, he suggests: in this way, only experienced climbers will make summit attempts. The problem is that both Nepal and Tibet need hard currency earned through expedition permits, and climbing can never be a safe and "rule-bound" enterprise.
People who don't climb mountains assume that the sport is "a reckless, Dionysian pursuit of ever escalating thrills", he says. But it is not like bungee jumping or sky diving. There is much preparation and a greater sense of personal responsibility. Above base camp, the expedition becomes an "almost Calvinistic undertaking". Even in good weather conditions, the ratio of misery to pleasure is greater than on any other mountain. Whatever the motive, he says, Everest is "primarily about enduring pain".
Lorna Siggins is an Irish Times staff journalist, and reported on the successful 1993 Irish Everest expedition