Into Thin Air: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

In India, in 1852, a clerk rushed into the office of Sir Andrew Waugh, surveyor general of India, and excitedly explained that a Bengali employee named Radhanath Sikhdar had just discovered the highest mountain in the world. Sikhdar used mathematics to estimate the height of a large mountain in Nepal—29,000 feet above sea level. Nine years later, Andrew Waugh named the mountain “Everest,” after George Everest, his predecessor at surveyor general. Mount Everest quickly became a popular site for explorers. Yet, from the date of Everest’s “discovery” in 1852, it took 101 years before anyone succeeded in climbing it.

Mount Everest is a massive, three-sided pyramid of ice and rock. Most of its early explorers tried to climb it from the northern, Tibetan side. In 1924, a British explorer named Edward Felix Norton got within 900 feet of the summit. The day after Norton’s achievement, two of his teammates, George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine, tried to make it all the way. That night, a storm hit, and neither Mallory nor Irvine was ever seen again. Whether Mallory and Irvine made it to the summit has been hotly debated, but recently explorers found Mallory’s corpse in a ledge, suggesting that he and Irvine probably didn’t succeed.

In 1953, a large British team, headed by Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa mountaineer, set out to climb Everest. On May 29, 1953, Hillary and Norgay became the first people to climb to the top of Everest, just three days before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The coincidence of the two events caused an outpouring of patriotism in Great Britain, and Hillary and Norgay were knighted and became international heroes.

On May 22, 1963, Krakauer was nine years old. A team headed by Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld climbed to the summit of Everest via the West Ridge of the mountain. The West Ridge is a highly difficult climb, much more so than the route taken by Hillary and Norgay in 1953. Unsoeld was a close friend of Krakauer’s father, and he quickly became Krakauer’s hero. By his early twenties, Krakauer was an experienced mountaineer. He loved the sense of freedom that climbing provided—and the friendly competition of racing to the top. For most of his twenties, Krakauer worked as a fisherman and a carpenter, making just enough money to fund trips to Alaska.

By the time he was thirty, Krakauer had mixed feelings about Everest—strangely, he thought it wasn’t challenging or beautiful enough to be worth climbing. By that time, more than one hundred people had climbed Everest, and mountaineers had established reliable trails. In 1991, the Nepalese government began charging for climbing permits. By the middle of the 1990s, it cost 50,000 dollars to climb Everest, and many mountaineers argued that Everest had become overly commercialized.

In 1995, one of Krakauer’s editors asked him to join an Everest expedition and write an article about it for the magazine Outside. Krakauer asked for a year to prepare for the physical demands of the climb; he also asked the magazine to pay the 65,000-dollar climbing permit. After some thought, Krakauer’s editor agreed. In 1995, Krakauer was 41 years old, and a little “past his prime” for mountaineering. He had to face the fact that more than one hundred people had died trying to climb Mount Everest. Nevertheless, in 1996, when his editor told him that there was now a place for him on an upcoming Everest expedition led by Rob Hall, he agreed to go without a second thought.