Introduction to the Vintage Books Edition (2026)

When the first edition of Into Thin Air was published in the aftermath of the 1996 Everest calamity, I assumed the disturbing events I described would persuade amateur climbers that paying a lot of money to be guided up the highest mountain on Earth was a bad idea. It seemed likely my book would deal a crippling blow to the burgeoning Everest guiding industry.

I was wrong. The deadly hazards I wrote about attracted novice climbers to Everest like gamblers to a slot machine. The owner of one of the prominent guiding companies told me Into Thin Air was better advertising for his business than anything he could have imagined.

When I climbed to the summit of Everest in May 1996, I was the 621st person to arrive there* since the mountain was first summitted in May 1953, a span of forty-three years. During the thirty years following my ascent, Everest was summitted more than 13,000 times. At least 90 percent of those ascents were made by clients and employees of commercial guiding companies.

As this astonishing number suggests, scaling the world’s highest mountain is a very different experience than it was in 1996. Most notably, Everest climbers are now less likely to die. From 1921, when the first serious attempt to climb the mountain was made, until 1996, the summit was reached approximately 640 times and 144 people were killed—a ratio of one in four. In 1996, 84 climbers reached the summit and twelve died—a ratio of one in seven. In recent years that ratio has diminished to one death for every ten summits.

The greater likelihood of surviving an Everest expedition might come as a surprise, given the numerous photos of alarming traffic jams on the mountain that have gone viral online in recent years. Hideously long lines of climbers stopped in their tracks by gridlock on the summit ridge, the Lhotse Face, and in the Khumbu Icefall are now a regularly recurring phenomenon. The gridlock happens because there are a very limited number of days when the weather on the upper reaches of Everest is favorable for climbing to the summit. It is common, therefore, for a great many of the approximately 900 to 1,000 individuals who try to climb the Nepal side of the mountain each year to head for the top on the same day—usually one of first dates in May with a propitious weather forecast.

Patient climbers who are willing to wait and make their summit attempt at a later date are much more likely to avoid dangerous congestion, but they also face the very real risk of missing an acceptable weather window altogether, forcing them to go home without reaching the summit. FOMO (fear of missing out) thus tends to afflict almost everyone on the mountain, hence the massive traffic jams.

Since 1996, he ever-growing number of people who attempt to climb Everest (many of whom are not highly experienced mountaineers) is without question a dangerous development, but it has been mitigated by other, no less significant developments:

Prophylactic use of dexamethasone: Anecdotal evidence suggests clients of guided ascents are now likely to dose themselves with oral dexamethasone, a powerful steroid. This has proven to be an effective way to minimize the risk of contracting high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE) and high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), potentially fatal ailments that are common on Everest.

Acclimatizing elsewhere before arriving at Base Camp: Many companies now guide their clients up nearby mountains such as Lobuche East or Island Peak to acclimatize before they go above Base Camp on Everest. This allows the clients to make fewer rotations through the deadly Khumbu Icefall before heading for the summit. Additionally, many clients now acclimatize at home before coming to Nepal by sleeping in plastic tents with limited oxygen that simulate high altitude.

More accurate weather forecasts: Most commercial expeditions now pay private meteorological forecasters to provide localized, exceptionally accurate predictions of what the weather will be above 26,000 feet on Everest on any given day.

Improved oxygen systems: Oxygen masks are now much more efficient and reliable.

Additional oxygen: In 1996, most clients were provided with only three oxygen canisters on summit day, which effectively required us to restrict our flow rate to a maximum of two liters of oxygen per minute. It is now common for clients to be provided with as many oxygen bottles as they’re willing to pay for, allowing them to dial their regulators up to maximum effective flow—four liters per minute—for their entire ascent above Camp Three on the Lhotse Face. This makes attempts on the summit considerably safer and much more likely to result in a successful ascent.

Additional assistance from Sherpas: To provide unlimited oxygen, commercial expeditions must also provide enough high-altitude workers to stock all those additional oxygen bottles at the South Col and then carry extra oxygen for clients to use on summit day. When Rob Hall’s team departed our highest camp for the summit on May 10, 1996, four Sherpas accompanied the eight clients—a ratio of one Sherpa per two clients. These days at least one Sherpa guide is typically assigned to accompany each client, and it is not uncommon for two or more Sherpas to accompany a single client.

Because of the greater demand for high-altitude workers on Everest, there are now many more Nepalis employed by commercial guiding operations. An even more noteworthy development is the dramatic increase in the number of guiding companies owned by Nepalis. Most of the guiding operations on Everest are presently owned and run by Sherpas, and almost all the highly qualified guides who work for companies owned by both Nepali and non-Nepali operators are Sherpas. No longer do Nepalis primarily function as kitchen workers and load carriers. They are now frequently the most skilled and accomplished guides on the mountain. For all intents and purposes, climbing activity on the Nepal side of Everest—where most ascents take place—is now controlled by Sherpas. They install and maintain all the fixed ropes and all the ladders in the icefall. They call the shots. They’re the gatekeepers.

This remarkable transformation can be traced to a variety of factors, but among the most consequential was the creation of the Khumbu Climbing Center, a project launched by the American climbers Jenni Lowe and Conrad Anker in 2004 to teach technical climbing skills to Nepali high-altitude workers. The idea to create the KCC came from Jenni’s first husband, Alex Lowe—a friend and occasional climbing partner of mine regarded as one of the world’s foremost alpinists. Alex guided Everest three times—in 1990, 1993, and 1994—and summited with his clients twice. When Alex was on Everest in 1990, he met and befriended Rob Hall, the owner of the company that guided me up the mountain in 1996.

Alex participated in at least nine Himalayan expeditions, during which he worked closely with numerous Sherpas, including several who became close friends. During these expeditions he was appalled by how little technical training most Sherpas had received, putting them at great risk. Many Sherpas had never been given an opportunity to learn such basic mountaineering skills as how to tie a figure-eight knot. To protect them from harm, Alex believed it was vitally important to establish a program in Nepal for teaching technical climbing skills to high-altitude workers.

Tragically, Alex was killed in an avalanche on Shishapangma in October 1999, before he had an opportunity to accomplish this goal. When Jenni Lowe became a widow, the empathy she felt for the many Nepali families who had lost husbands and sons working for commercial expeditions made her more certain than ever of the need to teach climbing skills to Nepali high-altitude workers.

In 2003, Jenni began soliciting donations to make Alex’s vision a reality. I introduced her to Chhongba Sherpa, a dear friend I’d met in 1996 when he was employed as Rob Hall’s Base Camp cook. An excellent organizer, Chhongba volunteered to play a leading role in helping Jenni and Conrad Anker put together the first Khumbu Climbing School, which was held in the winter of 2004 in the village of Phortse, 13,000 feet above sea level. For that inaugural course, I volunteered to be one of eight American instructors who spent a week teaching thirty-two Nepali students essential knots, belaying techniques, protocols for safe glacier travel, techniques for ascending fixed ropes, and technical ice climbing skills. It was such a rewarding experience that I returned to Phortse in 2005 and volunteered to be an instructor again.

The Khumbu Climbing Center has been teaching climbing skills to Nepalis ever since. Jenni and Conrad also established a unique exchange program with the United States National Park Service that brought Nepali guides trained by the KCC to America, where they were taught rescue protocols and other advanced skills by climbing rangers at Denali, Yosemite, Grand Teton, and Glacier Natonal Parks. Over the past couple of decades, the KCC has certified more than 1,000 Nepali guides who are presently employed by commercial guiding companies on Everest and throughout the world. For a long time now, almost all the instructors at the KCC have been Nepali graduates of the KCC.

In 2024, Jenni Lowe retired from her unpaid job as the KCC’s president and primary fundraiser. The Juniper Fund, a highly regarded nonprofit founded by the esteemed Himalayan guides David Morton and Melissa Arnot Reid, has taken over responsibility for funding the KCC, ensuring that high-altitude workers will continue to receive crucial training in the years ahead.

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The Nepali workers deserve much of the credit for making Everest a less dangerous mountain for guided clients than it used to be. But climbing Everest is still exceedingly hazardous, especially for the Nepali workers themselves. Because clients now receive a lot more oxygen than they used to, the high- altitude workers must make even more trips through the deadly Khumbu Icefall to carry those additional oxygen canisters to the upper mountain.

Additionally, the rapidly warming Himalayan climate is making the carapace of snow and ice that covers much of the Everest massif increasingly unstable and therefore makes the Icefall increasingly likely to be the site of another mass casualty event like the avalanche that thundered down on April 18, 2014. Giant blocks of tumbling ice struck twenty-five Nepali workers as they carried loads through the Icefall, killing sixteen of them—the deadliest calamity in the mountain’s history. The loss of so many lives triggered a labor strike by angry workers demanding adequate insurance, equitable pay, and more respect. The strikers shut down climbing on Everest for the remainder of the 2014 season.

One year later, there was an even deadlier mass casualty incident. On April 25, 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake rocked Nepal, killing approximately 9,000 people throughout the country, and shaking loose a massive avalanche that smashed into Everest Base Camp, killing an estimated twenty to twenty-two people there. Everest may be safer, statistically, than it used to be, but earning a living by laboring on its heights remains an exceptionally hazardous occupation.

As I mentioned above, the most accomplished guides on Everest are now Nepali, and Sherpas are effectively in charge of the Nepal side of the mountain. This seems only right, given that Mt. Everest rises from the Sherpa homeland. Shamefully, however, it has taken much longer than it should have for Nepalis to get the deference and respect they deserve from foreign climbers. Resentment over this affront has festered for decades among Sherpas. In 2013, the frustration erupted at 23,500 feet, halfway up the mountain’s Lhotse Face. The most thoughtful account of this infamous incident is the one Melissa Arnot Reid wrote in her memoir, Enough: Climbing Toward a True Self on Mount Everest, published in 2025.

Sherpa expedition leaders announced that on April 27, 2013, a large Sherpa team would begin installing the fixed ropes on the Lhotse Face that every commercial team on the Nepal Side of the mountain would rely on. The Sherpas asked everybody else to refrain from climbing anywhere on the Lhotse Face while they fixed the ropes—a routine request to safeguard the ropefixing team. During a meeting of all the commercial teams, there was unanimous agreement that every climber would stay off the Lhotse face for the duration of the rope-fixing operation. And almost everyone did stay away on April 27—everyone but two famous professional alpinists, Ueli Steck and Simone Moro, and the cinematographer documenting their ascent, Jonathan Griffith. Steck was Swiss, Moro Italian, and Griffith was English. None of them were affiliated with a commercial guided team.

Arnot Reid explained that on the morning of April 27, the three Europeans headed up the mountain from Camp Two at 21,300 feet, intending to climb to Camp Three at 24,000 feet on the Lhotse Face to acclimatize before coming back down and attempting an ascent of the difficult, seldom-climbed West Ridge route without supplemental oxygen. They were climbing unroped, moving very fast up the face, and had no intention of interfering with the Sherpa rope fixers. For most of the morning they stayed more than 100 feet away from the Sherpa team. Problem was, to reach Camp Three, at one point the European climbers had to cross the ropes being installed by the Sherpas, passing directly above some of them as they worked. This was a serious breach of mountain protocol, Arnot Reid wrote, and as the three Europeans did it, they inadvertently knocked off small chunks of ice that struck the Sherpas.

The Sherpas were furious—in part because the falling ice was potentially a genuine hazard, but mostly because they considered the Europeans’ arrogant refusal to honor their request to stay away from the Lhotse Face to be incredibly disrespectful—which it was. The leader of the rope-fixing team, Mingma Tenzing, immediately rappelled down and started yelling at Steck and Moro, initiating a confrontation that other Sherpas soon joined. The altercation quickly degenerated into a frightening scuffle on steep ice at 23,500 feet, provoking Moro to call one of the Sherpas a machikne to his face. The Nepali translation of this word is motherfucker, but it is considered by Sherpas to mean something significantly worse. As Arnot Reid explained, Even when Sherpas teach Westerners bad words, they tell them never to say that one, and Simone [Moro] knew it.

Moro’s obscene insult was so objectionable to the Sherpas that they abandoned their unfinished work and collectively descended to Camp Two. A mob of a hundred Sherpas then approached the Europeans’ tent and started throwing rocks at Ueli Steck. A stone struck him in the face, Arnot Reid wrote,

and he crumpled into a heap on the ground. The Sherpas swept in to surround him, kicking at his curled-up body. I lunged in front of him, yelling, No violence! and shoved him into the blue tent behind us. I didn’t know whose it was, but it didn’t matter. Ueli was inside, and I was outside , and I wasn’t letting anyone through.

A few minutes later Arnot Reid found Simone Moro hiding in another tent and admonished, You have to go out, get on your knees, and say ‘I’m sorry.’ Moro refused. Eventually Arnot Reid convinced him how important it was that he apologize. When Moro finally came out of the tent and reluctantly kneeled, she wrote,

the front row of Sherpas began to kick at him. As he started to say a quiet I am sorry, one of them stepped forward and slapped him across the face.… I yelled at everyone as I put myself in front of Simone, pushing him back into the tent. My voice was firm. That’s it. [Simone and Ueli] will leave, but you have to leave too. It is over!

The mob dispersed. Steck and Moro fled Camp Two and hurried down the Khumbu Icefall with their tails between their legs.

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The so-called Sherpa brawl of 2013 was ugly. But the confrontation led to a more honest, long overdue assessment of the historic relationship between Sherpas and foreign climbers—an assessment reinforced by the labor strike following the 2014 avalanche. These shocking incidents compelled foreigners to acknowledge that Sherpas have played an essential role—and have been exposed to disproportionate risks—on almost every significant Everest expedition since the very first one in 1921 yet have seldom been regarded as equal partners. Now, thirty years after the 1996 disaster (and 104 years after the first Sherpa deaths on the mountain occurred when seven load-carriers perished in an avalanche below the North Col in 1922), the hard-won respect that Nepali high-altitude workers deserve is wonderful to behold.

Other developments since 1996 are less wonderful. The swarms of climbers who now arrive every April to be guided up the Nepal side of Everest give a big boost to the regional economy. At the same time, however, they inflict significant harm to the environment, and new regulations concerning trash and human waste removal have failed to adequately address the degradation.

Developments over the last thirty years have wrought a different kind of degradation, as well. Climbing to the highest point on Earth is still an adventure that entails considerable risk and typically requires weeks of immense effort. But the commodification of the mountain has stripped away much of what once made climbing Everest such a uniquely profound experience. As the journalist Carl Hoffman mused in a review of a recent book about the Everest guiding industry, these companies perform an admirable service by providing expertise and assistance that now enables almost anyone to climb Everest. Nevertheless, he writes, it’s hard not to look at those pictures of clients stacked on the side of the mountain in long lines, clutching their handrails and not think, gross. That something fundamental to exploration and adventure and the human experience of it has been lost, is lost; that the thing they’ve purchased is a thing so vastly different from its very idea as to render it meaningless.

Jon Krakauer

Boulder

November 2026

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This edition of Into Thin Air has been revised throughout to reflect new information that has come to light since the last edition was published in 1997. Among the most obvious emendations are new elevations for Mt. Everest and Makalu. When I wrote the 1997 edition, the widely accepted height of Everest was 29,028 feet. In 2020 a more accurate joint survey by Nepal and China nudged the official elevation upward to 29,031.69 feet. I have thus cited 29,032 feet as the elevation of Everest in this edition of my book. I have also revised the elevation of Makalu from 27,824 feet (the widely accepted height in 1996) to 27,838 feet, which is the widely accepted elevation presently.

* according to the Himalayan Database

Introduction to the First Edition (1996)

In March 1996, Outside magazine sent me to Nepal to participate in, and write about, a guided ascent of Mount Everest. I went as one of eight clients on an expedition led by a well-known guide from New Zealand named Rob Hall. On May 10 I arrived on top of the mountain, but the summit came at a terrible cost.

Among my five teammates who reached the top, four, including Hall, perished in a rogue storm that blew in without warning while we were still high on the peak. By the time I’d descended to Base Camp nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more lives would be lost before the month was out.

The expedition left me badly shaken, and the article was difficult to write. Nevertheless, five weeks after I returned from Nepal I delivered a manuscript to Outside, and it was published in the September issue of the magazine. Upon its completion I attempted to put Everest out of my mind and get on with my life, but that turned out to be impossible. Through a fog of messy emotions, I continued trying to make sense of what had happened up there, and I obsessively mulled the circumstances of my companions’ deaths.

The Outside piece was as accurate as I could make it under the circumstances, but my deadline had been unforgiving, the sequence of events had been frustratingly complex, and the memories of the survivors had been badly distorted by exhaustion, oxygen depletion, and shock. At one point during my research I asked three other people to recount an incident all four of us had witnessed high on the mountain, and none of us could agree on such crucial facts as the time, what had been said, or even who had been present. Within days after the Outside article went to press, I discovered that a few of the details I’d reported were in error. Most were minor inaccuracies of the sort that inevitably creep into works of deadline journalism, but one of my blunders was in no sense minor, and it had a devastating impact on the friends and family of one of the victims.

Only slightly less disconcerting than the article’s factual errors was the material that necessarily had to be omitted for lack of space. Mark Bryant, the editor of Outside, and Larry Burke, the publisher, had given me an extraordinary amount of room to tell the story: they ran the piece at 17,000 words—four or five times as long as a typical magazine feature. Even so, I felt that it was much too abbreviated to do justice to the tragedy. The Everest climb had rocked my life to its core, and it became desperately important for me to record the events in complete detail, unconstrained by a limited number of column inches. This book is the fruit of that compulsion.

The staggering unreliability of the human mind at high altitude made the research problematic. To avoid relying excessively on my own perceptions, I interviewed most of the protagonists at great length and on multiple occasions. When possible I also corroborated details with radio logs maintained by people at Base Camp, where clear thought wasn’t in such short supply. Readers familiar with the Outside article may notice discrepancies between certain details (primarily matters of time) reported in the magazine and those reported in the book; the revisions reflect new information that has come to light since publication of the magazine piece.

Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. Their advice was sound, but in the end I ignored it—mostly because what happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life.

It hasn’t, of course. Moreover, I agree that readers are often poorly served when an author writes as an act of catharsis, as I have done here. But I hoped something would be gained by spilling my soul in the calamity’s immediate aftermath, in the roil and torment of the moment. I wanted my account to have a raw, ruthless sort of honesty that seemed in danger of leaching away with the passage of time and the dissipation of anguish.

Some of the same people who warned me against writing hastily had also cautioned me against going to Everest in the first place. There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act—a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.

The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.

Jon Krakauer

Seattle

November 1996

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Mount Everest Spring 1996

*

Adventure Consultants Guided Expedition

Mountain Madness Guided Expedition

MacGillivray Freeman IMAX/IWERKS Expedition

Taiwanese National Expedition

Johannesburg Sunday Times Expedition

Alpine Ascents International Guided Expedition

International Commercial Expedition

Himalayan Guides Commercial Expedition

Swedish Solo Expedition

Norwegian Solo Expedition

New Zealand-Malaysian Guided Pumori Expedition

American Commercial Pumori/Lhotse Expedition

Nepali Everest Cleaning Expedition

Himalayan Rescue Association Clinic

(in Pheriche Village)

Indo-Tibetan Border Police Everest Expedition

(climbing from the Tibetan side of the mountain)

Japanese-Fukuoka Everest Expedition

(climbing from the Tibetan side of the mountain)

* Not everyone present on Mt. Everest in the spring of 1996 is listed.

ONE

EVEREST SUMMIT

MAY 10, 1996 • 29,028 FEET

It would seem almost as though there were a cordon drawn round the upper part of these great peaks beyond which no man may go. The truth of course lies in the fact that, at altitudes of 25,000 feet and beyond, the effects of low atmospheric pressure upon the human body are so severe that really difficult mountaineering is impossible and the consequences even of a mild storm may be deadly, that nothing but the most perfect conditions of weather and snow offers the slightest chance of success, and that on the last lap of the climb no party is in a position to choose its day.…

No, it is not remarkable that Everest did not yield to the first few attempts; indeed, it would have been very surprising and not a little sad if it had, for that is not the way of great mountains. Perhaps we had become a little arrogant with our fine new technique of ice-claw and rubber slipper, our age of easy mechanical conquest. We had forgotten that the mountain still holds the master card, that it will grant success only in