A Postscript to “Into Thin Air”
Written as an afterword to the 1999 edition of my book about the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster, here is my response to the allegations made by Anatoli Boukreev in his book, “The Climb”
In November 1997 a book titled The Climb arrived in bookstores — Anatoli Boukreev’s account of the 1996 Everest disaster, written by an American named G. Weston DeWalt. It was fascinating, for me, to read about the events of 1996 from Boukreev’s perspective. Parts of the book were powerfully told, and moved me deeply. Because Boukreev took strong exception to how he was portrayed in Into Thin Air, however, a significant portion of The Climb is devoted to defending Boukreev’s actions on Everest, challenging the accuracy of my account, and calling into question my integrity as a journalist.
Mr. DeWalt — who oversaw research for the book, and has assumed the role of Boukreev’s spokesman — undertook the derogation of Into Thin Air with notable energy and enthusiasm. He has tirelessly expressed his view of my book — and my character — in print and radio interviews, on the Internet, and in personal letters to family members of those who died on the mountain. In the course of this campaign, DeWalt has brandished an article from the July/August 1998 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review with particular relish. Titled “Why Books Err So Often,” and written by a Missouri-based author and instructor of journalism named Steve Weinberg, the article raised doubts about the accuracy of three recent bestsellers. One of the books singled out for criticism was Into Thin Air. DeWalt was delighted with Weinberg’s article, and has cited it frequently.
When pressed, Weinberg sheepishly admitted to me that he based his criticism of Into Thin Air on nothing more than his reading of DeWalt’s book: Weinberg simply echoed DeWalt’s allegations, without bothering to independently check the accuracy of any of those allegations. After his article was published, Weinberg posted the following clarification in the Columbia Journalism Review:
My article distinguishes Krakauer’s book from other bestsellers that have been criticized. Though a small portion of the book has been challenged, none of the critics have proved factual errors.
Into Thin Air was included in my article not to damn it, but rather to question a publishing practice. Book A comes out, Book B challenges it, and the author, editor, and publisher of Book A do nothing to answer, leaving readers confused.
Upon reading this, I asked Weinberg to elaborate. He explained that he had mistakenly assumed I accepted the validity of DeWalt’s allegations because the first paperback edition of Into Thin Air (which was published in 1998, five months after The Climb) hadn’t included a rebuttal to those allegations. Weinberg then argued — quite persuasively — that whenever an author believes his credibility has been impugned, the author has a professional obligation to publish a rebuttal in a timely manner, lest readers be misled. After hearing Weinberg out, I reconsidered my earlier reluctance to engage in the hurly-burly of a public debate.
When The Climb was initially published, I had made a deliberate decision not to rebut DeWalt’s charges in a public forum. Instead, I documented some of the book’s numerous errors in a series of letters to DeWalt and his editors at St. Martin’s. A spokesman for the publisher indicated that corrections would be made in subsequent editions.
But when St. Martin’s released a paperback edition of The Climb in July 1998, most of the errors I’d pointed out seven months earlier were inexplicably repeated in the new edition. Such apparent disdain for the truth on the part of DeWalt and his publisher troubled me. The new edition and its uncorrected errors came to my attention, coincidentally, a few days after Weinberg had lectured me about the duty of journalists to defend their work. This confluence of circumstances convinced me to end my reticence and stand up for the accuracy and integrity of Into Thin Air. Unfortunately, the only way to do that was to point out some of the misrepresentations in The Climb. I broke my self-imposed silence in the summer of 1998 by talking to Dwight Garner (who at the time was working as a reporter for Salon), and rebutting DeWalt’s charges in an addendum to the illustrated edition of Into Thin Air published in November 1998.
Then, in June 1999, St. Martin’s released an expanded, repackaged edition of The Climb that included a lengthy new chapter assaulting my credibility. It was this latest screed from DeWalt that inspired me to write the postscript that follows.
Of the six professional climbing guides who were caught high on Everest when the storm hit on May 10, 1996, only three survived: Boukreev, Michael Groom, and Neal Beidleman. A scrupulous journalist intent on describing the tragedy accurately, in its full complexity, would presumably have interviewed each of the surviving guides (as I did for Into Thin Air). Decisions made by each of the guides, after all, had immense bearing on the outcome of the disaster. Inexplicably, DeWalt interviewed Boukreev but neglected to interview either Groom or Beidleman.
No less baffling was DeWalt’s failure to contact Lopsang Jangbu, Scott Fischer’s head climbing Sherpa. Lopsang had one of the most pivotal and controversial roles in the disaster. It was he who short-roped Sandy Hill Pittman. He was with Fischer when the Mountain Madness leader collapsed during the descent; Lopsang was the last person to talk to Fischer before he died. Lopsang was also the last person to see Rob Hall, Andy Harris, or Doug Hansen before they died. Yet DeWalt never made any attempt to contact Lopsang, even though the Sherpa spent much of the summer of 1996 in Seattle, and was easy to reach by phone.
Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa perished in an avalanche on Everest in September 1996. DeWalt has insisted that he intended to interview Lopsang, but the Sherpa died before he got around to it. This is a convenient explanation (and perhaps true), but it nevertheless fails to explain why DeWalt didn’t interview any of the other Sherpas who played important roles in the disaster. It also fails to explain why he didn’t interview three of the eight clients on Boukreev’s own team, and several other climbers who played crucial roles in the tragedy and/or ensuing rescue. Perhaps it’s merely coincidence, but most of the people DeWalt chose not to contact have been critical of Boukreev’s actions on Everest.
Among Boukreev’s harshest critics were several Sherpas who played key roles in the disaster. I have not mentioned this in print until now, and I do so presently only because DeWalt first raised the matter himself in the 1999 edition of The Climb.
DeWalt’s new edition reveals that in 1998 I wrote a letter to Galen Rowell, the well-known mountaineer, in which I reported that many Sherpas “blamed the entire tragedy on Boukreev.” DeWalt then pointed out that Rowell (during a trip to Everest Base Camp in 1998) had “found no Sherpa who blamed the tragedy on Boukreev, nor any Sherpa who knew of anyone who did.”
But Rowell never spoke with Lopsang Jangbu or Ang Dorje (the head climbing Sherpa on Rob Hall’s team). On separate occasions, both Lopsang and Ang Dorje told me, in very strong terms, that they (and virtually all the other Sherpas on their respective teams) did indeed blame Boukreev for the disaster. Their views are documented in notes, recorded interviews, and correspondence.
DeWalt, however, omitted a crucial detail that renders this entire issue moot. He neglected to mention that my letter to Rowell included these two important sentences: “First of all, let me say that I think the Sherpas are absolutely wrong to blame Anatoli, which is why I didn’t mention their point of view in my book. It seemed unfair and inflammatory to even bring it up.” DeWalt’s decision to raise this issue in his book — when no mention of it had been made in mine — is therefore hard to fathom.
DeWalt has argued that he tried to interview two of the aforementioned principals, but was rebuffed. In the case of Klev Schoening, at least, this is accurate. But DeWalt has taken pains not to mention that he didn’t ask Schoening for an interview until after The Climb had been published. “I find it puzzling that you should contact me now,” Schoening wrote to DeWalt upon receiving a request for an interview after the book was already on the shelves of his local bookstore. “You were obviously pursuing your own objectives, which from my perspective did not make a priority of the truth, the facts, acknowledgment or reconciliation.”
Whatever the reason for DeWalt’s reportorial lapses, the result is a badly compromised book. Perhaps it is related to the fact that DeWalt — an amateur filmmaker who first made Boukreev’s acquaintance immediately after the Everest disaster — had no prior knowledge of mountaineering, and has never visited the mountains of Nepal. In any case, Beidleman was sufficiently disenchanted with the book that in December 1997 he wrote a letter to DeWalt stating, “I think that The Climb is a dishonest account of the May tragedy…. [N]either you nor your associates once called to fact-check a single detail with me.”
Owing to DeWalt’s haphazard research, errors abound in The Climb. To cite but one example: Andy Harris’s ice ax — the location of which provides an important clue about how Harris might have died — was not found where DeWalt reported that it was found. This was one of the many errors I pointed out to DeWalt and his editors upon publication of the first edition of The Climb in November 1997, yet it was still incorrect in the paperback edition published some seven months later. Astoundingly, this error remains uncorrected in the new, extensively revised paperback edition published in July 1999 — despite DeWalt’s printed assurances to the contrary. Such indifference is vexing to those of us who were transformed by the disaster, and are still consumed with trying to sort out what really happened up there. Andy Harris’s family certainly does not consider the matter of where his ice ax was found to be an inconsequential detail.
Sadly, some of the errors in The Climb do not appear to be the product of mere carelessness, but rather to be deliberate distortions of the truth intended to discredit my reporting in Into Thin Air. For instance, DeWalt reports in The Climb that important details in my Outside magazine article weren’t fact-checked, even though he was aware that an Outside editor named John Alderman met with Boukreev at length and in person at the magazine’s offices in Santa Fe specifically to confirm the accuracy of my entire manuscript before publication of the magazine. Additionally, I, personally, had several conversations over a period of two months with Boukreev in which I made every effort to discern the truth.
The Boukreev/DeWalt version of events does indeed differ from the version that I found to be true, but Outside published what the editors and I determined to be the factual version, rather than Boukreev’s version. Over the course of my numerous interviews with Anatoli, I discovered that his account of important events changed significantly from one telling to the next, forcing me to doubt the accuracy of his memory. And Anatoli’s versions of certain events were subsequently proven to be untrue by other witnesses, most notably Dale Kruse, Klev Schoening, Lopsang Jangbu, Martin Adams, and Neal Beidleman (among whom DeWalt interviewed only Adams). In short, I found many of Anatoli’s recollections to be singularly unreliable.
In The Climb and elsewhere, DeWalt has suggested that in writing Into Thin Air my intent was to destroy Anatoli Boukreev’s good name. To support this despicable imputation, DeWalt relies on two complaints: 1) I didn’t mention a purported conversation above the Hillary Step between Boukreev and Scott Fischer in which Fischer allegedly gave Boukreev permission to descend ahead of his clients; and 2) I refused to acknowledge that Fischer supposedly had a predetermined plan in place for Boukreev to descend ahead of his clients.
Regarding the first of these complaints, this is what I know to be true about the conversation between Fischer and Boukreev atop the Hillary Step: Boukreev, Martin Adams, Andy Harris, and I were waiting together above the Step when an obviously ailing Fischer arrived on his way to the summit. Fischer first exchanged a few words with Adams, and then had an even shorter conversation with Boukreev. As Adams remembers this latter conversation, Boukreev told Fischer, “I am going down with Martin,” and said nothing more. These six words comprised the full extent of their discussion, after which Fischer spoke briefly with me, then turned his back on all of us and resumed his plod toward the summit. Boukreev later insisted that after Harris, Adams, and I had left the scene, he and Fischer had a second conversation in which Fischer gave him permission to descend ahead of his clients in order to make tea for them and provide “support below.”
In the weeks and months immediately following the Everest disaster, Adams — Boukreev’s close friend and one of his fiercest defenders — told me, Neal Beidleman, and others that he doubted that this second conversation actually occurred. Since then he has revised his position somewhat: Adams’ latest stance it that he has no idea whether or not there was a second conversation between Fischer and Boukreev, because he wasn’t present when it was alleged to have taken place.
Obviously, I wasn’t present, either. So why do I doubt Anatoli’s memory of a second conversation? Partly because the first time Boukreev told me about having a long discussion in which Fischer encouraged him to descend ahead of his clients, Boukreev clearly stated that it occurred when Fischer first arrived atop the Hillary Step — when Adams, Harris, and I were present. Later, after I pointed out that Adams remembered this conversation very differently, Anatoli changed his story: Now he said he’d had a second conversation with Fischer after Adams, Harris, and I had descended.
My main reason for doubting the second conversation, however, comes from what I saw as I began heading down the Hillary Step: As I looked up one last time to check the rappel anchors before descending, I noticed that Fischer had already moved well above the small staging area where Harris, Adams, Boukreev, and I had congregated to clip into the rappel ropes. Am I certain that Boukreev didn’t climb back up to Fischer and have a second conversation with him? No. But Anatoli, like the rest of us, was very cold and tired, and exceedingly anxious to get down. As I rappelled over the lip of the Step, Anatoli was shivering impatiently on the narrow ridge crest immediately above me; it’s hard for me to conceive of what would have prompted him to climb back up and have another discussion with Fischer.
Thus I have reason to be skeptical that a second conversation between Fischer and Boukreev occurred. Nevertheless, in retrospect, to be fair to Boukreev I should have reported his recollection of a second conversation and then explained why I doubted it, rather than making no mention of it at all in my book. I regret the hard feelings and sharp words that have resulted.
I am puzzled, however, as to why DeWalt has expressed such outrage over my decision not to report this disputed second conversation, while at the same time he saw no reason, in The Climb, to report the first conversation between Fischer and Boukreev — a conversation about which there is absolutely no argument: Boukreev told Fischer he was “going down with Martin.” Although Adams has expressed the view that I wasn’t in a position to overhear these words when they were spoken, he has never disputed that this brief declaration is precisely what Anatoli said. But in the version of events presented by DeWalt in The Climb, this conversation simply didn’t occur. It should be noted, moreover, that Boukreev’s failure to stay with Adams during the descent, as he told Fischer he would, nearly cost Adams his life.
In his book, Sheer Will, Michael Groom described the moment when he, Yasuko Namba, and I encountered Adams as we made our way down toward the Balcony at 27,600 feet. Adams, according to Groom, “was in an uncontrolled tumble off to our left. From where I stood he looked out of control and in no hurry to regain it.” Groom met up with Adams again lower down, after his tumble had somehow ended. Adams was
only just getting to his feet… veering dangerously close to the wrong side of the mountain in a series of drunken flops into the snow, one of which could end up over the edge in Tibet. I detoured off my path to get close enough to speak with him. I could see that his oxygen mask had slipped off beneath his chin and clumps of ice hung from his eyebrows and chin. Lying half-buried in the snow, he was giggling — — the result of oxygen debt to the brain. I told him to pull his oxygen mask over his mouth. In a fatherly sort of manner I then coaxed him closer and closer to the ridge crest…. ‘Now, see those two climbers down there in red? Just follow them,’ I said pointing to Jon and Yasuko still visible in the gully below.
He stepped off the ridge in such a haphazard manner, I wondered whether he cared if he lived or died. Concerned about his judgment, I decided to stick with him.
If Groom hadn’t happened upon Adams — who was completely disoriented after being left behind by Boukreev — it seems likely that Adams would have continued down the wrong side of the mountain and died. Yet none of this is reported in The Climb.
Perhaps the most disturbing misrepresentation in The Climb concerns a conversation between Scott Fischer and Jane Bromet (Fischer’s publicist and confidant, who accompanied him to Base Camp). Bromet, offering her memory of this conversation, is quoted by DeWalt in a manner intended to convince readers that Fischer had a predetermined plan in place for Boukreev to descend quickly after reaching the summit, ahead of his clients. This edited quote forms the basis of DeWalt’s second major allegation: that my failure to mention the purported plan in Into Thin Air was a nefarious “assassination of character for which, after the fact, I do not believe there is a justifiable defense.”
Actually, I didn’t mention this so-called plan because I found compelling evidence that no such plan existed. Beidleman — who is widely respected for his quiet humility, his honesty, and his strength and experience as a mountaineer — told me that if such a plan were in place, he definitely wasn’t aware of it when the Mountain Madness team went to the summit on May 10, and he is certain that Boukreev wasn’t aware of it either. During the year immediately following the tragedy, Boukreev explained his decision to descend ahead of his clients numerous times — on television, on the Internet, in magazine and newspaper interviews. Yet never during any of those opportunities did he ever indicate that he had followed a pre-determined plan. Indeed, in the summer of 1996, Boukreev himself stated during a videotaped interview for ABC News that there was no plan. As he explained to correspondent Forrest Sawyer, until arriving on the summit, Boukreev “didn’t know how, what is my plan. I need to see the situation and then make…. Because we didn’t make this plan.”
Apparently failing to comprehend Boukreev, a minute later Sawyer asked, “So your plan, then, once you passed everybody, was, you were waiting on the summit for everybody to come up as a group.”
Boukreev scoffed, and reiterated that nothing had been determined ahead of time: “It, it wasn’t exactly a plan. We didn’t make plan. But I need to see the situation. Then I will make my plan.”
In the 1999 edition of The Climb even DeWalt admits, belatedly, “Boukreev has never said that he knew of Fischer’s plan in advance of summit day.” DeWalt also admits that the only evidence to support his conjecture about a predetermined plan was Bromet’s recollection of a single conversation with Fischer. Yet Bromet emphasized to both DeWalt and me before publication of our respective books that it would be wrong to assume that Fischer’s comments indicated that he had anything resembling an actual plan in place. In 1997, immediately before The Climb was published, Bromet sent a letter to DeWalt and St. Martin’s Press complaining that DeWalt had edited her quote in a way that significantly changed its meaning. She pointed out that he doctored her words in order to make it appear as though the relevant conversation between Bromet and Fischer had occurred several days before the summit assault, when in fact it occurred more than three weeks before the summit assault. This is not a minor discrepancy.
As Bromet stated in her letter to DeWalt and his publisher, the edited version of her quote that appears in The Climb is
absolutely wrong! The distortion will mislead readers into a false conclusion concerning many of the most important factors that led to the accident. Because of the distortion… the reader may be misled into believing that Boukreev’s descent [ahead of his clients] was a firm plan….
As this quote is written, it runs the risk of coming across as [part of] a calculated and distorted analysis of the accident whose sole purpose is to absolve Anatoli Boukreev of fault by attempting to lay blame on others….
Too much credit was given to this quote in constructing the events of the accident…. Scott never once mentioned this plan again. Moreover, Scott was a very communicative person. If it were Scott’s ‘plan’ he would have talked it over with Neal and Anatoli. (In subsequent conversations with Neal, he told me that Scott communicated no such plan). I feel this quotation as stated is grossly misleading.
DeWalt wrote in the 1999 edition of The Climb, “I was not concerned about specifying an exact date, because I felt that Fischer’s statement to Bromet would not have been any less significant or relevant if it had been made on March 25 in Kathmandu or on April 2 during the trek to the Everest Base Camp.”
But Fischer’s opinion of Boukreev underwent a profound and well-documented transformation over the latter weeks of the expedition. The notorious conversation betwen Bromet and Fischer occurred on or around April 15, barely a week after Fischer’s team arrived at Base Camp. At that time, Fischer still had nothing but praise for his chief guide. Three weeks later, however, by the time the Mountain Madness team launched their summit assault, Fischer had grown extremely disenchanted with Boukreev’s guiding methods, and was frequently angry with him. The actual date of Fischer’s conversation with Bromet — and DeWalt’s attempt in The Climb to fudge that date by three weeks — is thus extremely relevant. For many days immediately preceding his team’s summit assault, Fischer had complained bitterly to his closest confidant that, despite his repeated admonishments to Boukreev, he couldn’t persuade Boukreev to stay close to his clients. It therefore strains belief to suggest that on May 10, upon reaching the summit ridge, Fischer decided that he wanted Boukreev to descend alone, ahead of everybody.
As the squabble between DeWalt and me hardened into something resembling trench warfare, he desperately tried to explain away the clear, unambiguous meaning of the letter cited above — primarily through prodigious feats of obfuscation, and by intricately parsing Bromet’s quotes. Throughout the ongoing dispute, however, Bromet has unflinchingly stood her ground. “It’s ridiculous for DeWalt to say that he knows my mind better than I do,” she explains. “The letter I sent to him in October 1997 accurately states how I feel, despite his attempts to twist my words and claim that it doesn’t.”
When Bromet steadfastly refused to back down about the accuracy of her letter, DeWalt attacked her credibility in the 1999 edition of his book. Which is a curious tactic, because he constructed his theory about Fischer’s so-called plan entirely from his interpretation of Bromet’s statements, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. If DeWalt doesn’t think Bromet is believable, I’m not sure what he is left with.
Boukreev’s extraordinary strength, courage, and experience were highly valued by Fischer — nobody disputes this. Nor does anybody dispute that, in the end, Fischer’s confidence in Boukreev’s abilities turned out to be warranted: Anatoli saved two lives that most certainly would have been lost otherwise. But for DeWalt to insist that Fischer planned for Boukreev to descend from the summit ahead of his clients on May 10 is manifestly not supported by the facts. And it is outrageous for DeWalt to further insist that I tried to assassinate Anatoli’s character by declining to mention a plan that did not exist.
The matter of whether or not Fischer gave Boukreev permission to descend ahead of his clients was obviously very important to Anatoli after the fact. But the debate raging over this tangential question has flared beyond all proportion, obscuring the larger issue: the prudence of guiding Everest without supplemental oxygen. And nobody — not even DeWalt — has ever disputed the crucial facts underlying this larger issue: Anatoli elected not to use supplemental oxygen on summit day, and after reaching the summit he went down alone many hours ahead of his clients, defying the standard practices of professional mountain guides the world over. What has largely been lost amid the bickering over whether Boukreev acted with or without Fischer’s approval is that the moment Anatoli decided, early in the expedition, to guide without bottled oxygen, it probably preordained his subsequent decision to leave his clients on the summit ridge and descend quickly. Having elected to climb without gas, Anatoli had painted himself into a corner. Lacking bottled oxygen, his only reasonable choice was to get down fast on summit day — whatever Fischer did or didn’t give him permission to do.
The crux of the matter wasn’t fatigue, moreover: it was the cold. The importance of bottled oxygen in warding off exhaustion, altitude sickness, and murky thinking at extreme altitudes is generally understood. What is much less widely known is that oxygen plays an equally important role in staving off the crippling effects of cold at high altitude.
By the time Anatoli began his descent from the South Summit ahead of everybody else on May 10, he’d spent between three and four hours above 28,700 feet without breathing supplemental oxygen. For much of that time he was sitting and waiting in a bitter sub-zero wind, growing increasingly cold, as any climber would in his situation. As Anatoli himself explained to Men’s Journal, in a quote he approved before publication,
I stayed [on the summit] for about an hour….. It is very cold, naturally, it takes your strength….. My position was that I would not be good if I stood around freezing, waiting….. If you are immobile at that altitude you lose strength in the cold, and then you are unable to do anything.
Becoming dangerously chilled, courting frostbite and hypothermia, Boukreev was compelled to descend not by fatigue, but by the profound cold.
For perspective on how the deadly wind-chill at high altitude is exacerbated when a climber isn’t using supplemental oxygen, consider what happened to Ed Viesturs thirteen days after the 1996 disaster, when Viesturs summitted with the IMAX team.
Viesturs departed from Camp Four for the summit early on May 23, some twenty or thirty minutes ahead of his teammates. He left camp ahead of everyone else because like Boukreev he was not using gas (Viesturs was starring in the IMAX film that year instead of guiding), and he was concerned this would prevent him from keeping up with the film crew — all of whom were using bottled oxygen.
Viesturs was so strong, however, that nobody could come close to matching his pace, even though he was out in front breaking trail through thigh-deep snow. Because he knew that it was crucial for David Breashears to get footage of him during the summit push, every so often Viesturs stopped and waited as long as possible for the film crew to catch up to him. But whenever he stopped moving he immediately felt the effects of the debilitating cold — even though May 23 was a much warmer day than May 10 had been. Afraid of getting frostbite or worse, on each occasion he was forced to resume his ascent before his teammates were able to get close enough to film him. “Ed is at least as strong as Anatoli,” explains Breashears, “yet without gas, whenever he stopped to wait for us he got cold.” As a result, Breashears ended up with no IMAX footage of Viesturs above Camp Four (the “summit day” footage of Viesturs that appears in the movie was actually shot at a later date). The point I’m trying to make here is that Boukreev had to keep moving for the same reason Viesturs did: to keep from freezing.
Breashears insists,
I’m sorry, but it was incredibly irresponsible for Anatoli to climb without gas. No matter how strong you are, you are right at your limit when you climb Everest without oxygen. You aren’t in a position to help your clients. Anatoli is dissembling when he says the reason he went down is that Scott sent him down to make tea. There were Sherpas waiting at the South Col to make tea. The only place an Everest guide should be is either with his clients or right behind them, breathing bottled oxygen, ready to provide assistance.
Make no mistake: There is a strong consensus among the most respected high-altitude guides, as well as the preeminent experts in the esoteric field of high-altitude medicine/physiology, that it is exceedingly risky for a guide to lead clients on Everest without using bottled oxygen. As it happens, while researching his book, DeWalt instructed an assistant to call Peter Hackett M.D., one of the world’s foremost authorities on the debilitating effects of extreme altitude, in order to solicit the doctor’s professional opinion about the oxygen issue. Dr. Hackett — who reached the summit of Everest with a medical research expedition in 1981 — replied unequivocally that in his view it was dangerous and ill advised to guide Everest without using oxygen, even for someone as strong as Boukreev. Significantly, after seeking and receiving Hackett’s opinion, DeWalt deliberately made no mention of it in The Climb, and has continued to insist that not using bottled oxygen somehow made Boukreev a more capable guide in 1996.
On numerous occasions while promoting their book, Boukreev and DeWalt asserted that Reinhold Messner — the most accomplished and respected mountaineer of the modern era — endorsed Boukreev’s actions on Everest, including his decision not to use bottled oxygen. In a face-to-face conversation I had with Anatoli in November 1997, he told me, “Messner says I did right thing on Everest.” In The Climb, referring to my criticisms of his behavior on Everest, DeWalt quotes Boukreev as saying,
I felt fairly well maligned by the few voices that had captured the imagination of the American press. Had it not been for the support of European colleagues like… Reinhold Messner, I would have been depressed by the American perspective of what I had to offer my profession.
Lamentably, like other assertions in The Climb, the Boukreev/DeWalt claim about Messner’s endorsement has turned out to be untrue.
In February 1998, during a meeting with me in New York, Messner stated into a tape recorder, without equivocation, that he thought Anatoli was wrong to descend ahead of his clients. Messner speculated on the record that had Anatoli remained with his clients the outcome of the tragedy might have been quite different. Messner declared that “No one should guide Everest without using bottled oxygen,” and that Anatoli was mistaken if he thought Messner endorsed Anatoli’s actions on Everest.
Messner isn’t the only respected mountaineer whose views have been misrepresented by DeWalt in his efforts to discredit me. He has also quoted David Breashears, who, in an interview published in 1997 in The Improper Bostonian, took issue with my portrayal of Sandy Hill Pittman, a close friend of his. I admire Breashears’ loyalty to Pittman. Breashears is known for speaking his mind in a sometimes brutally honest fashion, and I admire that quality, too, even when his criticisms are directed at me. It turns out that Breashears has also been very frank in his assessments of DeWalt and The Climb. The following is an excerpt from an e-mail Breashears sent me, unsolicited, in July 1998:
In my opinion [DeWalt] has no real credibility having been 10,000 miles away from the event. I’m sure you agree that you could never have accurately written about high altitude without having been there, despite all your years of climbing experience. Contrary to what DeWalt states regarding climbing without oxygen, most experienced high-altitude climbers disagree with his conclusion… ALL evidence and all logic (oxygen = fuel = energy = warmth, strength, etc.) firmly dispute DeWalt’s claims…. Anatoli descended allegedly to be in position to provide assistance. But he never did find his clients, they were freezing to death across the Col. It was up to them to stagger into camp with the information so vital to their rescue…. Anatoli was sitting in his tent unable to assist anyone, until informed of the lost climbers’ position. Enough! It’s a pity Anatoli isn’t here to continue the dialogue. I stand by my conviction that he descended because he was cold and weary and couldn’t possibly remain (relatively motionless) on the summit waiting for clients…. Finally, why the continued debate about your book? Where’s the outrage about the real issues?… You just had the guts to put it all in writing.
Many of us who were on Everest in 1996 made mistakes. As I indicated earlier in these pages, my own actions may have contributed to the deaths of two of my teammates. I have no doubt that Boukreev’s intentions were good on summit day. I am absolutely certain that he meant well. What disturbs me, though, was Anatoli’s refusal to acknowledge the possibility that he made even a single poor decision.
DeWalt has written that my criticisms of Boukreev in Into Thin Air were motivated by my “desire to keep the spotlight from settling on a question that began to loom in the weeks after the Everest tragedy of 1996: Did Krakauer’s presence on the Adventure Consultants expedition [as a writer for Outside magazine] contribute to the tragedy that unfolded?” In truth, I remain quite troubled by the possibility that my presence as a journalist, and Sandy Hill Pittman’s, may indeed have directly contributed to the disaster. Contrary to DeWalt’s cynical assertion, however, I have never tried to steer the debate away from this topic. Indeed, I’ve raised the subject myself in numerous interviews, and I explictly discuss my culpability in my book. I have not shied away from admitting the errors I made on Everest, however painful it has been to do so. I only wish that others had presented their versions of the calamity with equal candor.
Even though I have written critically about some of Anatoli’s actions, I have always emphasized that he performed heroically when disaster struck in the pre-dawn hours of May 11. There is no question that Anatoli saved the lives of Sandy Hill Pittman and Charlotte Fox, at considerable personal risk — I have said as much on many occasions, in many places. I admire Anatoli immensely for going out alone in the storm, when the rest of us were lying helpless in our tents, and bringing in the lost climbers. But some of the decisions he made earlier in the day and earlier in the expedition are nevertheless troubling, and simply could not be ignored by a journalist committed to writing a full and honest account of the disaster.
As it happens, much of what I witnessed on Everest was troubling, and would have been troubling even if there had been no calamity. I was sent to Nepal by Outside magazine specifically to write about guided expeditions on the world’s highest mountain. My assignment was to assess the qualifications of the guides and clients, and to provide the reading public with a discriminating, first-hand look at the reality of how guided Everest climbs are conducted.
I also believe quite strongly that I had a duty — to the other survivors, to the grieving families, to the historical record, and to my companions who did not come home — to provide a full report of what happened on Everest in 1996, regardless of how that report would be received. And that’s what I did, relying on my extensive experience as a journalist and a mountaineer to provide the most accurate, honest account possible.
The debate over what happened on Everest in 1996 took a terrible turn on Christmas Day 1997, six weeks after publication of The Climb, when Anatoli Nikoliavich Boukreev was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna, the world’s tenth highest mountain. His loss was mourned around the world. Thirty-nine at the time of his death, he was a magnificent athlete who possessed tremendous courage. By all accounts he was a remarkable, very complicated man.
Boukreev had been raised in a dirt-poor mining town in the southern Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union. According to British journalist Peter Gillman, writing in the London Mail on Sunday,
when Anatoli was a boy his father had eked out a living making shoes and mending watches. There were five children, in a cramped wooden house with no plumbing…. Boukreev was dreaming of escaping. The mountains gave him his chance.
Boukreev learned to climb as a nine-year-old, and his uncommon physical gifts quickly came to the fore. At 16 he earned a coveted slot at a Soviet mountaineering camp in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan. At 24 he was selected to become a member of the elite national climbing team, which brought him a financial stipend, great prestige, and other benefits both tangible and intangible. In 1989 he climbed Kanchenjunga, the world’s third-highest peak, as part of a Soviet expedition, and upon returning to his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, was honored as a Soviet Master of Sport by President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Due to the upheavals that accompanied the New World Order, this rosy situation was not to last long, however. As Gillman explains,
The Soviet Union was breaking up. Two years later Gorbachev quit, and Boukreev — who had recently completed his own ascent of Everest — found his status and privileges vanishing. ‘There was nothing,’ he told [Linda] Wylie [his American girlfriend]. ‘No money — you were in bread lines.’… Boukreev resolved not to succumb. If the communist order had disappeared, he must adapt to the new world of private enterprise, using his assets of a mountaineer’s skills and determination.
In a remembrance of Anatoli posted on the Internet in early 1997, his friend Fran Distefano-Arsentiev recalled,
Those were desperate times [for Boukreev]; just to be able to pay for food was a luxury…. [T]he only chance a Soviet climber had to go to the Himalaya was to compete within the system and win that privilege.
Having the freedom to just go to the Himalaya, whether or not you are competent enough as a climber, was never an option. It was a dream…. Before Buka became famous there was a time when nothing came easily for him. But he pursued his dreams tenaciously with a vigor unlike anyone I have ever known.
Boukreev became something of a global nomad in pursuit of both mountains and money to make ends meet. In order to scrape together a living, he hired on as a guide in the Himalaya, Alaska, and Kazakhstan; gave slide shows in American climbing shops; and occasionally resorted to common labor. But all the while he continued to tally an extraordinary record of high-altitude ascents.
Although he loved climbing, and loved being in the mountains, Boukreev never pretended to enjoy guiding. In The Climb he spoke very candidly about this:
I wish with all my power there were other opportunities for me to make a living…. It is too late for me to find another way to finance my personal objectives; yet it is with great reservation that I work to bring inexperienced men and women into this world [of dangerous high-altitude mountaineering].
Thus he continued to take novice climbers to the high peaks, even after experiencing the horrors and controversies of the 1996 disaster.
In the spring of 1997, one year later, Boukreev agreed to lead a team of Indonesian Army officers hoping to become the first members of their island nation to climb Everest — despite the fact that none of the Indonesians had any prior mountaineering experience, or, indeed, had even seen snow before. To assist him with his neophyte clients, Boukreev employed two highly accomplished Russian mountaineers, Vladimir Bashkirov and Evgeny Vinogradski, and Apa Sherpa, who had climbed Everest seven times. Moreover, in 1997, unlike in ’96, everyone on the team relied on bottled oxygen for the summit assault, including Boukreev — notwithstanding his insistence that it was safer for him “to climb without oxygen in order to avoid the sudden loss of acclimatization that occurs when supplementary oxygen supplies are depleted.” In 1997, it also bears noting, Anatoli was never more than a few paces from his Indonesian clients on summit day.
The team departed the South Col for the top just after midnight on April 26. Around noon Apa Sherpa, in the lead, arrived at the Hillary Step, where he encountered the body of Bruce Herrod dangling from an old fixed rope. Clambering over the deceased British photographer, Apa, Anatoli, and the rest of the Indonesian team labored slowly toward the summit.
It was already 3:30 P.M. when the first Indonesian, Asmujiono Prajurit, followed Boukreev to the top. They stayed on the summit only ten minutes before heading down, whereupon Boukreev compelled the two other Indonesians to turn around, even though one of them was within 100 feet of the top. The team made it down only as far as the Balcony that night, where they endured a miserable bivouac at 27,600 feet, but thanks to Boukreev’s leadership and a rare night without wind, everyone descended safely to the South Col on April 27. “We were lucky,” Anatoli allowed.
Boukreev and Vinogradski paused during their descent to Camp Four to cover Scott Fischer’s body with rocks and snow at 27,200 feet. “This last respect was for a man I feel was the best and brightest expression of the American persona,” Boukreev mused in The Climb. “I think often of his brilliant smile and positive manner. I am a difficult man and I hope to remember him always by living a little more by his example.” A day later Boukreev traveled across the South Col to the edge of the Kangshung Face, where he located the body of Yasuko Namba, covered her with stones as best he could, and collected some of her possessions to give to her family.
A month after climbing Everest with the Indonesians, Boukreev attempted a speed traverse of Lhotse and Everest with a brilliant 30-year-old Italian climber named Simone Moro. Boukreev and Moro set out for the top of Lhotse on May 26. That same day, eight members of a separate Russian team — including Boukreev’s friend Vladimir Bashkirov, who had helped guide the Indonesians up Everest — also started up Lhotse. None of the ten climbers was using supplemental oxygen.
Moro reached the summit at 1 P.M. Boukreev arrived twenty-five minutes later, but he was feeling ill and started down after spending only a few minutes on top. Moro stayed on the summit for perhaps another forty minutes, and then headed down himself. During his descent he encountered Bashkirov, who was also feeling sick but nevertheless still pushing upward. Late that afternoon Bashkirov and the rest of the Russians reached the summit.
Not long after the last of the Russians topped out, Moro and Boukreev arrived back at their tent and went to sleep. Upon waking the next morning, Moro turned on his radio and happened to overhear a transmission from some Italian friends who were in the process of ascending Lhotse. The Italians reported with alarm that, high on the peak, they had encountered the body of a climber dressed in a green down suit and yellow boots. “In that moment,” Moro says, “I realized that it could be Bashkirov.” He immediately woke Boukreev, who made a radio call to the Russian team. The Russians reported that Bashkirov had indeed died during the night from an altitude-related illness on his way down from the summit.
Although Boukreev had lost yet one more friend to the heights, he did not let it dampen his passion for climbing the world’s highest mountains. On July 7, 1997, six weeks after Bashkirov perished, Boukreev made a solo ascent of Broad Peak in Pakistan. And exactly one week later he completed a speed ascent of nearby Gasherbrum II. Although Moro says that climbing all fourteen of the 8,000-meter peaks wasn’t particularly important to Boukreev, he had now ascended eleven of the fourteen: only Nanga Parbat, Hidden Peak, and Annapurna I remained.
Later that summer Anatoli invited Reinhold Messner to join him in the Tian Shan for some recreational climbing. During Messner’s visit, Boukreev asked the legendary Italian alpinist for advice about his climbing career. Since first visiting the Himalaya in 1989, Boukreev had accumulated an amazing record of high-altitude ascents. All but two of these climbs, however, had followed traditional, relatively oft-traveled routes with few technical challenges. Messner pointed out that if Boukreev wanted to be considered among the world’s truly great mountaineers, he would need to shift his focus to steeper, very difficult, previously unclimbed lines.
Anatoli took this advice to heart. In fact, even before consulting with Messner, Boukreev and Moro had decided to attempt Annapurna I via a notoriously difficult route on the mountain’s immense south face that had been climbed by a strong Anglo-American team in 1970. And to increase the challenge, Boukreev and Moro decided to make their attempt on Annapurna in winter. It would be an exceedingly ambitious and dangerous undertaking, involving extreme technical climbing at high altitude in unimaginable wind and cold. Even when ascended by its easiest aspects, Annapurna — 26,454 feet high — is regarded as one of the deadliest mountains in the world: for every two climbers who have reached its summit, one has died. If Boukreev and Moro were to succeed, it would be one of the boldest ascents in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.
In late November 1997, soon after publication of The Climb, Boukreev and Moro traveled to Nepal and helicoptered to Annapurna Base Camp, accompanied by a Kazakh cinematographer named Dimitri Sobolev. It had been an unusually early winter, however. They were hit by frequent storms that dumped prodigious quantities of snow and sent giant avalanches thundering down their intended route. As a consequence, a month into the expedition they decided to abandon their original plan and instead attempt a different route at the eastern margin of Annapurna’s south face. It was a route that had been attempted several times by accomplished climbers, without success. The difficulties would be extreme — Boukreev’s team would have to ascend a formidable satellite peak called the Fang on their way to the summit — but the avalanche danger appeared to be significantly lower on this new route.
Having erected Camp One at 17,000 feet below the first of the new route’s steep terrain, Boukreev, Moro, and Sobolev embarked from their tent at sunrise on Christmas Day, intending to establish a line of fixed ropes up a broad gully to a ridge that towered some 2,700 feet above their camp. Moro, in the lead, had climbed to within 200 feet of the ridge crest by noon. At 12:27 P.M., as he stopped to pull something from his backpack, he heard a sharp boom. When he looked up he saw an avalanche of massive ice blocks hurtling directly toward him. He managed to scream out a warning to Boukreev and Sobolev, who were ascending the gully some 700 feet below, just before the wall of snow and ice plowed him from his stance and carried him down the mountain.
For a moment Moro tried to arrest his slide by clutching the fixed rope, burning deep gouges into his fingers and palms, but it was to no avail. He tumbled approximately 2,600 feet with the cascading ice and was knocked cold. When the mass of frozen rubble came to rest on a gentle slope slightly above Camp One, however, by chance Moro happened to be on top of the avalanche debris. Upon regaining consciousness he looked frantically for his companions, but could find no trace of them. Searches by air and ground over the ensuing week proved futile. Boukreev and Sobolev were presumed to be dead.
After meeting Boukreev in 1997, Moro had become one of his closest friends. “I loved and love (like friend, of course) Anatoli Boukreev so much,” Moro told me, “that after I met him I changed my life, my projects, my dreams. Probably only his mother and his girlfriend, Linda, loved him more.” Moro emphatically disagrees with my portrayal of Boukreev in this book. “You didn’t understand who Anatoli really was,” Moro explained:
You are American; he was Russian. You were new to 8000-meter peaks; he was the best of all time at these altitudes (nobody else had climbed 21 times to a summit over 8000 meters). You are a normal alpinist; he was a fantastic athlete and survival’s animal. You are economically sure; he knew hunger…. In my opinion you are like a man who, after reading a book about medicine, pretends to teach one of the world’s most famous and capable surgeons how to be a doctor…. When judging the decisions made by Anatoli in 1996 you must remember this: no clients on his team died.
News of Anatoli’s death was greeted with shock and disbelief on several continents. He traveled prodigiously and had friends around the world. Many, many people were devastated by his passing, not least of them being the woman with whom he’d been sharing his life, Linda Wylie of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Anatoli’s death was extremely upsetting to me, as well, for a host of complicated reasons. In the wake of the accident on Annapurna, the debate over what happened on Everest in 1996 took on a different light. I pondered how things between Anatoli and me had come to such a state. Because both of us were stubborn and proud and loath to back down from a fight, our disagreement had escalated vastly out of proportion, diminishing both of us in the process. And if I’m being honest with myself, I have to accept as much responsibility for this as Boukreev.
So do I wish I had portrayed Anatoli differently in writing this book? No, I don’t think so. Nothing I’ve learned since the publication of Into Thin Air or The Climb leads me to believe I got things wrong. What I do wish, perhaps, is that I’d been a little less strident in a notorious exchange of letters between Anatoli and me that was posted on the Internet shortly after my original Everest article was published in Outside magazine in September 1996. This online spat established an unfortunate tone that intensified over the following months and thoroughly polarized the discussion.
Although the criticisms I leveled at Boukreev in my Outside article and in my book were measured, and balanced by sincere praise, Anatoli was nevertheless hurt and outraged by them. He and DeWalt responded by attacking my character, and presenting some disingenuous interpretations of the facts. To defend my honesty, I was forced to present some damaging material that I had previously withheld to avoid hurting Boukreev unnecessarily. Boukreev, DeWalt, and St. Martin’s Press responded by intensifying their ad hominem attacks on me, and the tenor of the discussion only deteriorated over the period that followed. Perhaps, as DeWalt wrote in The Climb, there “is an advantage to an open and ongoing debate” over what happened on Everest in 1996. It has certainly helped sell copies of his book — and mine, no doubt. But for all the bitterness that’s flowed, I’m not sure much of lasting importance has been illuminated.
The dispute reached its nadir in early November 1997 at the annual Banff Mountain Book Festival. Boukreev was a panelist at a forum of eminent mountaineers. I had declined an invitation to participate as a panelist, fearing that the event might turn into a shouting match, but I made the mistake of attending as a member of the audience. When it was Anatoli’s turn to speak, he had Linda Wylie (acting as his interpreter) read a prepared statement that began with a declaration that most of what had written about him was “bullshit.” The upshot was that I rose to Anatoli’s bait and some ill-advised, very heated words were exchanged across the crowded auditorium.
I regretted my outburst immediately. After the forum concluded and the crowd dispersed I hurried outside, searched for Anatoli, and found him walking with Wylie across the grounds of the Banff Centre. I told them that I thought we needed to have a few words together in private and attempt to clear the air. Initially Anatoli balked at this suggestion, protesting that he was late to another Book Festival event. But I persisted, and eventually he agreed to grant me a few minutes. For the next half-hour he and Wylie and I stood outside in the cold Canadian morning and spoke frankly but calmly about our differences.
At one point Anatoli put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I am not angry with you, Jon, but you do not understand.” By the time the discussion ended and we went our separate ways, we had come to the conclusion that both Anatoli and I needed to make an effort to moderate the tone of the debate. We concurred that there was no need for the atmosphere between us to be so emotionally charged and confrontational. We agreed to disagree about certain points — primarily the wisdom of guiding Everest without bottled oxygen, and what was said between Boukreev and Fischer during their final conversation atop the Hillary Step — but both of us came to realize that we saw eye to eye on almost everything else of importance.
Although Boukreev’s co-author, Mr. DeWalt (who wasn’t present during the aforementioned meeting), continued to fan the flames of the dispute with gusto, I came away from my encounter with Anatoli in Banff somewhat hopeful of patching things up with him. Perhaps I was being overly optimistic, but I foresaw an end to the imbroglio. Seven weeks later, however, Anatoli was killed on Annapurna, and I realized that I’d begun my conciliatory efforts much too late.
This piece was originally published in 1999 as a postscript to the second paperback edition of Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster.
