DEATH IN THE CLOUDS

By John Skow

Last year, at about 1 p.m. on the 10th of May, Jon Krakauer, on assignment for Outside magazine, plodded toward the 29,028-ft. summit of Mount Everest. Sucking a lean mixture of bottled oxygen and air that only partly made up for the dire thinness of the atmosphere, he managed a single step to three or four heaving breaths. To his oxygen-starved brain, the world beyond his rubber mask, he writes, "was stupendously vivid but seemed not quite real, as if a movie were being projected in slow motion across the front of my goggles. I felt drugged, disengaged." A bit later, without drama or any great feeling of elation, he reached the top: "a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb."

Krakauer clicked the traditional victory snapshots and started back down the mountain. But Into Thin Air, his fascinating and troubling account of the climb (Villard; 293 pages; $24.95), is no chronicle of triumph. He was in ragged physical shape. A wracking cough had torn loose chest cartilage; his body had burned away 20 lbs. of muscle mass; he was running out of bottled oxygen. But the deadliest element of his situation was one he barely noticed: innocent-looking clouds rising from valleys to the south. They were the tops of thunderheads, carrying a violent spring storm that would kill 11 climbers before it blew itself out.

Thirty expeditions of various sizes and degrees of competence were somewhere on the mountain at the time. Ten of these were commercial ventures, run by professional adventure-travel guides, whose clients, some experienced climbers and some not, paid as much as $65,000 or $70,000 a head to be led up the world's highest peak. "With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill," said New Zealander Rob Hall, a respected climber who headed Adventure Consultants, the best-known of the guiding outfits. Hall added, in a comment that was to echo mournfully, "The trick is to get back down alive."

Arguments about the ethics and common sense of such guided ascents had been wafting about the world's always contentious mountaineering community. No question: some clients were inept fools and a danger to everyone. Mountaineering was in danger of becoming an extreme sport for the rich, with gaudy adventure-travel stunts such as being guided up the highest mountain on each continent. A New York society woman named Sandy Hill Pittman was on hand to complete this cycle, along with masses of electronic equipment lugged by Sherpas, including a satellite phone with which she intended to file Internet dispatches from Camp Four, at 26,000 ft. Did she deserve to be mocked for her pretensions or admired for her pluck? (Pittman did reach the top, "short-roped" or dragged there by a Sherpa, and got back down, after collapsing and being revived by an emergency steroid injection.)

The rivalry of the guiding outfits encouraged recklessness. Hall's successful Adventure Consultants was being crowded by newer ventures, notably the Mountain Madness service of Scott Fischer, a skilled American climber. There was powerful pressure for them to ignore their turnaround times, beyond which it was foolish to continue heading upward. Fischer told Krakauer that if Pittman reached the summit, she was certain to boast about it on New York talk shows.

The fast-rising storm caught climbers far above the high camp, some of them still heading uphill much too late in the day. Hall bivouacked near the summit, below the Hillary Step, with Doug Hansen, a friend and client who had reached the top after two tries, and there they both died. Before that happened, Hall had radioed to his wife Jan in Christchurch, "I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart." Fischer, too weak to descend in the gale, froze to death somewhere below. Eight others died from the storm, but of several climbers who missed Camp Four in zero visibility and huddled all night in the snow, most survived. Rescuers already at the tents did what they could to find the others, without much success.

Krakauer, a thoughtful man and a fine writer (his Into the Wild, a report of a wilderness death in Alaska, was one of the best nonfiction books of 1996), says the ratio of misery to pleasure on Everest was greater than on any other mountain he has climbed. He draws no ringing conclusions from the disaster, although he thinks that banning bottled oxygen might keep weaker climbers off the mountain.

Climbing continued after May 10. An American, Ed Viesturs, who was making a movie for IMAX, reported passing the bodies of his friends Fischer and Hall. One other death, a South African whose colleagues let him climb past his turnaround time, brought the fatalities for the season to 12. If that number is compared with the 84 people who summitted, Krakauer observes dryly, "1996 was actually a safer-than-average year."