Into Thin Air

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This article contains the information about the non-fiction book, for the TV series produced by TVB, please refer to Into Thin Air.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster is a non-fiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It details the author's expedition up Mount Everest on May 10, 1996, which turned catastrophic when eight climbers were killed on one day due to a 'rogue storm'. The author's expedition was led by the famed guide Rob Hall and there were other groups trying to summit on the same day, including one led by Scott Fischer, whose guiding agency was perceived as a competitor to Rob Hall's agency.

The author attributes such tragedies to the fact that the path to the summit is too crowded on the few days when weather is expected to be good. The other reasons include the fact that most of the climbers, including the author, were not expert climbers. They paid around $65,000 each for the climb and were, for the most part, dependent on the Sherpas and guides. However, the success to death ratio on Mount Everest in 1996 was actually lower than the historical average.

This book, being a rare first hand account of such a catastrophe, became a best seller. It also incited a controversy in the mountaineering community in its criticism of Anatoli Boukreev, an extremely experienced mountaineer who was serving as one of Fischer's guides, and had chosen to climb without using supplementary oxygen. Boukreev descended to Camp IV before Fischer's clients, and was later instrumental in rescuing the survivors from the South Col. Boukreev later defended his decisions in his own book, The Climb.

A 1997 TV movie named Into Thin Air: Death on Everest starred Peter Horton as Scott Fischer and Christopher McDonald as Jon Krakauer. It followed Krakauer as he chronicled the expedition. The movie, however, is extremely dramatized and chronicles events that never happened on the mountain. The event was factually covered in the 1998 movie Everest, which was coincidentally being filmed in May 1996.

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