The YouTuber on a Mission to Trash My Book: Chapter Five
A refutation of Michael Tracy’s deceitful campaign to impugn the veracity of “Into Thin Air” and spread misinformation about the 1996 Everest disaster
In this chapter I will refute multiple claims by Michael Tracy, in multiple videos, that I didn’t help fix the ropes on the Hillary Step. Eighteen minutes into the video Tracy posted on May 13, 2024, he falsely asserts:
Boukreev had fixed the rope up the Hillary Step, and no ropes were fixed between South Summit and Hillary Step…. As such the only ropes to be fixed were above the Hillary Step, and Krakauer writes in his book that he opted out of fixing the ropes and headed to the summit directly.
Twenty-six minutes into the video posted on May 21, 2024, Tracy states that I “falsely claimed to have been fixing the ropes” in an interview I did with Outside Online. Here is what I actually said in this interview:
We all got to the south summit, quite a large number of us, and we sat there for an hour waiting for this hypoxic rumor, that the Sherpa were going to fix the final section of the summit ridge and the south summit to the summit — which didn’t have any fixed rope, or not much: a few bits were coming out of the snow, old rope…. We took it upon ourselves to finally say “Well, fuck, we’ll do it. What’s the problem? Who’s got the rope?” Some Sherpa coughed some up, and other people coughed some up, and I was basically carrying rope. But Anatoli led it out and Neal was belaying him.
Tracy’s allegations that I didn’t participate in fixing ropes are demonstrably false. When I was at the South Summit, I grabbed a 100-meter-long coil of 11-millimeter static rope from Ang Dorje that weighed 17 pounds. I carried it across the exposed traverse to the base of the Hillary Step, and then continued carrying it up to the top of the Step. Hauling heavy coils of rope up to the place where they will be fixed is an essential part of any rope-fixing operation.
Below is an excerpt from a transcript of the tape-recorded debriefing session held by Fischer’s team at Basecamp on May 15, 1996, which was published in the paperback edition of Anatoli Boukreev’s book, The Climb. It confirms my role in fixing the ropes. The excerpt begins with Boukreev speaking about what he saw when he arrived on the South Summit:
BOUKREEV: I didn’t see [fixed ropes]… Scott told me maybe Sherpas will fix line…. But I didn’t see nothing, [no] initiative from nobody. I told Neal, “You will belay me and I go to forwards.” Then I saw some two guides from Rob Hall expedition go behind me with long rope.
BEIDLEMAN: Actually,… Andy Harris [was a guide], and the other [was] a client, Jon Krakauer.
BOUKREEV: Yeah, but strong climbers, I think.
BEIDLEMAN: Yes….
BOUKREEV: And after Hillary Step is one also little steep place, but with crampon, with ice ax, not so difficult. Our ropes is finished. We go to summit and….
BEIDLEMAN: Actually, from there, Anatoli, I stopped and got the rope from Jon Krakauer, because I wanted to fix that section because of the wind…. Andy and Jon asked if they could go around me because their oxygen was low. I said, “Fine.” I uncoiled the rope. It was very long, maybe a hundred meters. Martin was below me. I asked Martin if he would help me pay out the rope and tie the end to [an] anchor, which he did. I started up. I made it maybe twenty or thirty feet, until the rope caught in the rocks. I had to come back a little bit and wait. Martin finally helped me untangle the rope from the rock. I continued up to a snow stake, tied off the rope. There, the remaining forty or fifty meters, I walked up further to fix. I didn’t find another anchor. We didn’t have anchors with us because we thought that the Sherpas would…. I got to the end of the rope and I didn’t want to leave my ice ax because it was still steep and I wanted to [be able to] self-arrest. I threw the end of the rope off, the remaining forty meters, into Tibet so no one would grab the rope and think it was fixed…. And then I continued up to the summit and arrived there about 1:25 to 1:30.
Twelve minutes into the video Tracy posted on September 4, 2024, titled, “South Summit on the Ascent,” he makes more false statements about what happened after I gave my coil of rope to Beidleman. After pointing out that Boukreev was climbing without oxygen, and Beidleman wasn’t waiting on the Sherpas to bring up his third bottle because he had already received a third bottle, Tracy says:
Thus Boukreev and Beidleman could have headed out at any time to go fix the ropes. So why didn’t they do this until noon? Simple: Because they are not stupid. None of their clients had oxygen to continue the climb. Had they fixed the rope, there were only two people who were willing to run out of oxygen above the Hillary Step and thus climb up it: Harris and Krakauer. As Mountain Madness guides did not wish to fix the ropes so that Adventure Consultants climbers could beat them to the summit, they waited until their own clients had the oxygen brought up and then fixed the ropes so that the mountain Madness clients could use it.
Once at the top of the Hillary Step, Krakauer and Harris tried to pass the rope-fixing team and tag the summit first. Boukreev knows what is going on and he beats them to the summit by 5 minutes. Now, nowhere did Jon Krakauer write, “Oh yes, I wanted to get to the summit first so I could puff up Adventure Consultants in my paid promotional piece, nor did Boukreev ever say, “Oh yes, I was in a pissing contest with Krakauer to get to the summit first and guess what: I won.”
The allegations by Tracy above are nonsense. He either misunderstands or is misrepresenting the nature of the rivalry between Hall’s team and Fischer’s team. The competition between Hall and Fischer was real, without question. But it was all about getting more of one’s own clients to the summit than the other guy did, because this was an important statistic for promoting their respective guiding services. Neither Hall nor Fischer cared whether their clients got to the summit before clients from the other team, because such information wasn’t useful for marketing. The advertisement below, which appeared in various publications in 1995, confirms this.
Additionally, when I interviewed both Boukreev and Beidleman in the aftermath of the disaster, neither guide gave any indication that they wanted to delay fixing the ropes on the Hillary Step because they were concerned Rob Hall’s guides or clients might beat them to the summit.
To the contrary, they said it was extremely important for ropes on the Hillary Step and everywhere else to be fixed in advance to minimize inevitable delays. When they saw no ropes had been fixed, they were surprised and dismayed. As Beidleman explained to me,
I looked at Anatoli and said, “We have to do this or it ain’t gonna happen. These guys are not doing it.” Ang Dorje and Lopsang, with one Sherpa each from each group, were supposed to go up way before everybody else and have it fixed. It didn’t happen and I don’t know why. I had one piece of orange Perlon [rope] left…. You came behind us. You had a coil. We didn’t know you had it, or we would have probably fixed it on that dangerous first part of the traverse…. Toli and I weren’t really prepared to fix. We didn’t have any ice screws, no pickets, no nothing. Thank god I grabbed that coil of rope from Lopsang when I passed him at the Southeast Ridge. Toli found one non-essential stake on the traverse [to the bottom of the Hillary Step] and chopped it out. He [took it with him] and ended up placing it at the top of the Step to reinforce the existing anchor to that rock up there.
In his book, The Climb, Boukreev confirmed what Beidleman told me:
After waiting almost an hour on the South Summit I began to understand that nobody was going to take any action, so I spoke with Neal, and we decided that we would work together to fix the ropes to the summit.
At the 13:42 mark in this video Tracy elaborates on his unsubstantiated speculation that Harris and I were angling to beat Boukreev and Beidleman to the summit:
It is rather obvious that Krakauer and Harris did not want the Mountain Madness clients passing them and thus reaching the summit prior to them, especially given that the Mountain Madness clients had left the South Col well after the Adventure Consultants group….
At the 14:11 mark Tracy says:
Rob Hall was below South Summit and never instructed anyone to leave with nearly empty oxygen bottles when waiting 20 minutes would have allowed their Sherpa to arrive with fresh bottles. Of course 20 minutes would mean that Sandy Pittman would be back in front of Krakauer, and when Pittman had passed Krakauer earlier that morning at the Balcony, it really annoyed Krakauer. Krakauer would rather risk running out of oxygen rather than experience what he himself had referred to as his quote “frustration and anger at having been passed
by Fischer’s group earlier that morning”…. Here we see that Krakauer exhibited classic hazardous attitudes that put his life at risk, and that of the guy who was assisting him to the summit.
Tracy makes numerous dishonest and misleading statements in the nearly four minutes of video that the excerpts above were taken from. For example, Tracy deliberately misquotes what I wrote in Chapter 12 of Into Thin Air when he says:
Krakauer would rather risk running out of oxygen rather than experience what he himself had referred to as his quote “frustration and anger at having been passed by Fischer’s group earlier that morning….”
Here’s what I actually wrote:
Around 4:15 A.M., Mike [Groom] gave us the go-ahead to resume our ascent, and Ang Dorje and I started climbing as fast as we could in order to warm ourselves…. Taking turns breaking trail through the calf-deep powder, Ang Dorje and I reached the crest of the Southeast Ridge at 5:30, just as the sun edged into the sky…. My altimeter read 27,600 feet.
Hall had made it very clear that I was to climb no higher until the whole group had gathered at this balconylike roost, so I sat down on my pack to wait. When Rob and Beck finally arrived at the back of the herd, I’d been sitting for more than ninety minutes. As I waited, both Fischer’s group and the Taiwanese team caught and passed me. I felt frustrated about wasting so much time and peeved at falling behind everybody else. But I understood Hall’s rationale, so I kept a tight lid on my anger.
My frustration had nothing to do with Pittman. It was about wasting 90 minutes of my limited oxygen supply sitting on my backpack going nowhere, and then ending up near the back of the line for good measure, making it highly likely I would get stuck in one or more traffic jams at bottlenecks above.
Tracy’s claim that Andy Harris and I followed Boukreev and Beidleman when they headed out from the South Summit because we hoped to beat them to the summit is also nonsense. But Tracy is right about me wanting to stay near the front of the queue and arrive on the summit as soon as possible, because I was concerned that I might not to get up to the top and back down to our tents before the three bottles of oxygen allotted to me were empty.
Before our ascent, Rob Hall repeatedly emphasized to every client on his team, and at least a few people on Fischer’s team, the importance of adhering to a timeline to ensure we got up and back down before our oxygen ran out. He said we would start climbing from the South Col (elevation 25, 938 feet) by 11:00 or 11:30 P.M., after which we needed to set a fast enough pace to reach the Balcony (27,600 feet) by daybreak; arrive at the South Summit (28,704 feet) no later than 10:00 A.M.; and be on the summit (29,032 feet) by 11:00 A.M.
Hall also told me the third oxygen bottle that Sherpas would cache for each of us at the South Summit was intended to be used for our descent: “If you need to start using it before you’re on the summit, you’re looking for trouble, mate.”
When I arrived on the South Summit it was already 11:00 AM. By the time Boukreev started climbing the Hillary Step to start fixing ropes there, another hour had passed, so I believed it was imperative for me to remain close enough the front of the pack to avoid getting stuck in another traffic jam that might delay me even more. That’s why I put that heavy, 100-meter coil of rope over my shoulder and followed Boukreev and Beidleman up the Hillary Step to help with the rope fixing.
In Chapter 13 of Into Thin Air, I wrote the following about what was going through my mind when I shot the photo below:
With Beidleman paying out the rope, Boukreev did a masterful job of leading the pitch. But it was a slow process, and as he painstakingly ascended toward the crest of the Step, I nervously studied my watch and wondered whether I might run out of oxygen. My first canister had expired at 7:00 A.M. on the Balcony, after lasting about seven hours. Using this as a benchmark, at the South Summit I’d calculated that my second canister would expire around 2:00 P.M., which I’d stupidly assumed would allow plenty of time to reach the summit and return to the South Summit to retrieve my third oxygen bottle. But now it was already after 1:00, and I was beginning to have serious doubts.
Plainly, my decision to keep heading for the summit before picking up my third oxygen bottle was reckless, irresponsible, and incredibly stupid. I needlessly endangered not only myself, but other people on the mountain, too. Tracy is right about this.
I also need to acknowledge another one of the genuine errors Tracy identified in my book. He found it in the final sentence excerpted above, in which I wrote “But now it was already after 1:00….” At the 6:26 mark in his video, Tracy says:
In Krakauer’s book he claims to have climbed from the bottom of the Hillary Step to the summit in less than 12 minutes…. So either Krakauer climbed that section four times faster than some of the best climbers in the world or he is inventing his climb to push his narrative.
I’m grateful to Tracy for pointing out this error. Clearly, I could not have ascended the from the base of the Hillary Step to the summit in twelve minutes. But he is mistaken when he suggests that I ever claimed to have done so in my book or anywhere else to advance a narrative. The confusion was the result of an inadvertent typo. When I typed “1:00” in the sentence above as I was writing the manuscript for my book, I had meant to type “12:00,” which was the correct time, but I accidentally dropped the “2.” This typo resulted in the time being erroneously published as “1:00.” I have no excuse for not catching this embarrassing blunder until Tracy discovered it.
And while I’m acknowledging genuine errors Tracy has identified in Into Thin Air, here are three more:
· In Chapter Two I wrote, “In 1924 [George] Mallory was thirty-eight [years old when he died attempting to reach the summit of Everest]….” This is incorrect. Mallory was born on June 18, 1886, and probably died on June 8 or June 9, 1924. He therefore perished at least nine days before he reached the age of 38.
· In Chapter Thirteen I wrote, “The Montenegrins, who’d gotten even higher [than Göran Kropp, the Swedish Soloist who ascended to within 350 feet of the top on May 3], had installed some fixed line [on May 9], but in their inexperience they’d used all they had in the first 1,400 feet above the South Col, wasting it on relatively gentle slopes where it wasn’t really needed.” I should not have written this. It was presumptuous of me to speculate they’d “wasted” all of their fixed line by installing it well below the Southeast Ridge and Hillary Step. It’s likely they were still carrying enough rope to fix the Hillary Step when they turned around below it because of high wind. Furthermore, I was very grateful for the rope they’d fixed as I descended from the Balcony to the South Col into the rapidly intensifying storm on May 10, when I was exhausted and out of bottled oxygen.
· In Chapter Seventeen I wrote, “Both Ang Dorje and Lhakpa [Chhiri] were cold and wasted from climbing to the summit and back just the day before [when they headed up from the South Col on May 11 to attempt to rescue Rob Hall from the South Summit].” This is incorrect. Although Ang Dorje reached the top on May 10, Lhakpa Chhiri turned around at the South Summit.
I owe thanks to Michael Tracy for pointing out all of the errors above. I will correct them in the next edition of Into Thin Air.
