The YouTuber on a Mission to Trash My Book: Chapter One
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 August 2024, I began to receive comments in my Instagram feed warning me that a YouTuber named Michael Tracy had been aggressively maligning my book, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster. One commenter observed that Tracy’s defamatory statements were “getting out of hand. The man really has an agenda against you, and most people just don’t question it.”
Michael Lion Tracy, I learned, is a middle-aged lawyer based in Irvine, California. He’s posted more than 100 videos on his YouTube channel, which has 130,000 subscribers. He gained approximately 30,000 of these subscribers after he started posting inflammatory videos about my book.
In April 2024, Tracy posted the first of at least sixteen videos (thus far) claiming to have identified numerous errors in my book about the 1996 Everest disaster, most of which he claims are lies intended to promote a deliberately false narrative.
Almost all of Tracy’s allegations are demonstrably untrue, and the sheer volume of prevarication in his videos is astounding. Although he holds me and others he criticizes to the highest standards of accuracy — as he absolutely should — he fails to hold himself to the same exacting standards. His videos don’t adhere to any standard of truth whatsoever.
Before going any further, however, I want to acknowledge up front that Tracy has identified a number of genuine errors in Into Thin Air, and I am grateful to him for pointing them out. I will enumerate these errors throughout my commentary as they come up, and correct them in all future editions of Into Thin Air.
It’s no secret that controversy and outrage boost attention and juice revenue on the Internet, of course, and perhaps this explains Tracy’s dishonest campaign to discredit me. But many of his attacks on my integrity are delivered with a degree of grievance and invective that suggests he is seeking to do more than just troll me. Tracy’s denunciations seem to be motivated by something deeper and more personal.
In most of his videos about my book, Tracy seems to be trying to do what the MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon famously called “flooding the zone with shit” — spewing forth such an overwhelming torrent of misinformation that it creates lasting doubt about what’s true and what isn’t. Tracy’s videos about me include dozens of deceitful statements, and he continues to post additional misleading videos on an intermittent basis — which for all practical purposes renders any attempt to refute every spurious claim in his videos an exercise in futility.
There’s an axiom about online discourse known as the “Bullshit Asymmetry Principle” that accurately asserts, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” Given the damage Tracy is attempting to inflict on my reputation, and his irresponsible misrepresentations of what happened on Everest in 1996, I feel the need to debunk as much of his bullshit as possible, despite the magnitude of the effort required to do so, even if it proves to be largely ineffective.
Twelve people perished on Everest in 1996, and it’s important to have an accurate understanding of what led to the loss of so many lives — both out of respect to those who died, and to help prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future. Although climbing Everest is now significantly safer than it was in 1996 (in terms of the number of deaths compared to the number of climbers attempting the ascent), it remains an incredibly dangerous endeavor — and many, many more people are trying to reach the summit these days. In 2024, nine people died on the mountain. In 2023, there were eighteen deaths.
Tracy’s obsessive campaign to discredit me goes well beyond denigrating my book on his YouTube channel. Tracy acolytes can pay $50 per month to become his “Yeti Apprentices” and thereby assist his campaign.
His most devoted followers receive invitations to join Tracy’s inner circle: a confidential Discord server where Tracy and his minions share misinformation. Here’s one of Tracy’s Discord posts:
In 2013, Tracy climbed Mt. Everest from the Chinese side of the mountain as a paying client on a commercial expedition. In August 2017, he posted the first of many videos about Everest, and announced his intent to “locate Andrew Irvine and document the 1924 climb of Mallory & Irvine.”
Andrew “Sandy” Irvine was the English climber who famously disappeared with George Mallory while attempting to make the first ascent of Everest. Mallory’s body had been discovered in 1999 by Conrad Anker some 2,300 vertical feet below the summit. The discovery included personal effects that offered tantalizing clues about Mallory’s demise, including a short length of climbing rope tied around his waist, suggesting that he and Irvine probably perished while climbing or descending together on the same rope. The rope appeared to have broken or been severed during a fall from higher on the peak. Anker and his expedition teammates, however, found no sign of Sandy Irvine.
In 2018, Tracy returned to the north side of Everest to search for Irvine’s remains. But Tracy has never set foot on the south side of Everest — the Nepal side of the mountain, where most of the events described in Into Thin Air took place. Nor, to my knowledge, has he ever interviewed a single person who was directly involved in the 1996 disaster. Nevertheless, in 2024 he began presenting himself as an authority on the 1996 Everest disaster and making deceitful claims about the veracity of my book. This treatise will focus on refuting some of Tracy’s most egregious false allegations.
This is the first of what will be eight separate chapters of commentary. I intend to the post a new chapter every day or so going forward.
As the person who alerted me to Michael Tracy’s smear campaign observed, he has an agenda and it’s not subtle. The narration in his videos is often delivered with a mix of derision, disdain, and snark. Occasionally he includes childish memes such as the two examples below for shits and giggles. Tracy’s videos are not posted in any discernable order, nor are they always easy to follow. He jumps around a lot and sometimes contradicts himself. Frequently he repeats the same allegations in multiple videos. Thus my commentary will necessarily jump around, too.
I’ll begin my effort to refute Michael Tracy’s most outrageous allegations by debunking his claim that there were no significant delays on the Nepal side of Everest on May 10, 1996. Concurrently, I will also refute his related claim that any delays that did occur had little or nothing to do with the failure to fix ropes in advance on sections of the climbing route where such ropes were typically installed to safeguard clients.
Early in our 1996 expedition, Rob Hall, the leader of the guided team I was on, decided that if the weather forecast was favorable, we would attempt to reach the summit on May 10. Hall encouraged Scott Fischer, the leader of another guided group, to have his team go for the summit on the same day, and Fischer agreed to this plan, even though traffic jams at places on the route where fixed ropes would be necessary were anticipated to be a potential problem, given that so many climbers would be going for the top at the same time. As I wrote in Chapter 13 of Into Thin Air:
Hall, who had climbed Everest four times previously, understood as well as anybody the need to get up and down quickly. Recognizing that the basic climbing skills of some of his clients were highly suspect, Hall intended to rely on fixed lines to safeguard and expedite both our group and Fischer’s group over the most difficult ground. The fact that no expedition had been to the top yet this year concerned him, therefore, because it meant that ropes had not been installed over much of this terrain…. Anticipating this possibility, before leaving Base Camp, Hall and Fischer convened a meeting of guides from both teams, during which they agreed that each expedition would dispatch two Sherpas — including the climbing sirdars, Ang Dorje and Lopsang [Jangbu] — from Camp Four ninety minutes ahead of the main groups. This would give the Sherpas time to install fixed lines on the most exposed sections of the upper mountain before the clients arrived. “Rob made it very clear how important it was to do this,” recalls [Neal] Beidleman [one of Fischer’s guides]. “He wanted to avoid a time-consuming bottleneck at all costs.”
Hall and Fischer agreed that Ang Dorje and Lopsang Jangbu would depart from Camp Four at 26,000 feet on the South Col around 10:00 P.M. on May 9 to fix the ropes. Hall’s team would then start up at 11:30, followed by Fischer’s team at midnight. For some unknown reason, however, no Sherpas left the South Col ahead of us on the night of May 9. Therefore no new ropes were fixed in advance, which caused major delays at two bottlenecks where climbers were forced to wait for fixed ropes to be installed.
On May 13, 2024, Michael Tracy posted a video on his YouTube channel titled, “Analysis of Scott Fischer’s photo from South Summit,” in which he claims that delays at these bottlenecks were minimal or nonexistent, and the delays that did occur had little or nothing to do with the failure to fix ropes ahead of time. Tracy’s video is prefaced with a block of text explaining that it analyzes
a photo taken by Scott Fischer to determine what happened on the upper part of Mount Everest on May 10, 1996. Looks at various accounts from Jon Krakauer and determines they do not match up with photographs taken that day.
The photo in question, shown below, appears on page 240 of Into Thin Air: The Illustrated Edition, a special edition of the book that is no longer in print. The summit of Everest isn’t visible in Fischer’s photo. I’ve added the annotations in red for this commentary.
Tracy claims in his video that this photo, and others in my book, prove there were no bottlenecks causing noteworthy delays at the fixed ropes, contrary to what I wrote. In the comment he posted on Discord on April 17, 2024, Tracy says:
You will see that the “rope fixing” issue is an invention of Krakauer to explain his slow climbing time…. Once you realize that everything people think they know about this was a story fabricated to make Jon Krakauer look better than he was, the whole thing makes sense. There are no mysteries about what happened.
Tracy is wrong. Photos, videos, and statements from numerous climbers who encountered the bottlenecks confirm that there were indeed significant delays at fixed ropes installed to safeguard climbers, and that those delays were exacerbated by the undisputed fact that ropes were not fixed in advance as intended.
In the center of Fischer’s photo is the notorious Hillary Step, which is almost always ascended with the aid of approximately 80 feet of fixed rope anchored at the top of the Step. This pitch would be trivial if it were on a mountain in Colorado or New Hampshire, but because it’s situated nearly 29,000 feet above sea level and includes the steepest, most problematic terrain above the South Col, it’s a notorious bottleneck.
Fischer shot the photo at approximately 1:00 P.M. from the South Summit, at an elevation of 28,700 feet. Neal Beidleman and Martin Adams (one of Fischer’s clients) are visible at the top of the Hillary Step. Klev Schoening (another Fischer client) is about to arrive there. Anatoli Boukreev (Fischer’s Head Guide), Andy Harris (a guide on Rob Hall’s team), and me are out of sight above the Step. Boukreev had just arrived on the summit of Everest when Fischer took the photo, and Harris and I were less than twenty minutes below the top.
Twenty-six seconds into his May 13 video, Tracy states that 16 or possibly 17 climbers are visible in the photo.
Tracy is wrong. Careful study of the image reveals that it’s likely 18 climbers are visible.
Two minutes and six seconds in, Tracy says, “At this point in time… six [climbers] are above the Hillary Step and one is just at the top of the Hillary Step. That’s Sandy Pittman.”
Tracy is wrong about Pittman being on top of the Step. She’s actually less than halfway up. The top of the Hillary Step is located where Adams is crouching next to the anchor for the fixed rope (not visible in the photo) that terminates near the crest of the Step. Adams is paying out rope to Beidleman, who is fixing a final 330-foot length of rope across hazardous terrain that eventually leads to the summit of Everest.
At the 2:24 mark in the video, Tracy alleges the photo proves there is no “huge bottleneck at the Hillary Step at this time.”
At the 4:05 mark Tracy claims, “Krakauer invented the story” of this bottleneck despite knowing Fischer’s photo and other “photos contradicted his invented version. He even puts those photos in his book.”
At the 4:48 mark Tracy claims that Fischer’s “photo depicts the busiest the Hillary Step would be that day. There is no throng of climbers waiting to come up. This is it: the massive bottleneck Krakauer wrote about.”
All of these allegations by Tracy are false. Fischer’s photo shows two climbers above the Hillary Step, two climbers ascending the Step, and 14 climbers lined up below the Step waiting to ascend it. Contrary to Tracy’s assertions, this photo documents a problematic bottleneck that was already delaying climbers.
In 2013 Michael Tracy climbed Everest from China, the other side of the mountain. He has never set foot on this side of Everest, the Nepal side, which is reflected in his erroneous statements about the Hillary Step and many other matters.
The photo also shows Klev Schoening ascending toward the anchor at the top of the Step as Sandy Pittman is ascending well below him, while 14 additional climbers are queued up along the ridge below them.
The bottleneck is also apparent in the image below, which is a photo Scott Fischer shot from the bottom of the Hillary Step at approximately 2:10 P.M. The climber in the green pants is a Sherpa standing at approximately the same place Sandy Pittman is standing in the photo Fischer took at 1:00 P.M. Immediately below him is Ang Dorje, Hall’s most trusted Sherpa. The lowest climber, wearing a red and black down suit, is Doug Hansen, a client of Hall’s who perished near the South Summit.
Below is a sequence of screen grabs from the PBS documentary, “Storm Over Everest,” in which “Makalu” Gau Ming-Ho, a Taiwanese climber, and Nima Gombu, one of three Sherpas on Gau’s team, confirm the bottleneck. Gau unexpectedly launched his summit attempt on May 10, which came as an unwelcome surprise to Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, because Gau was not very strong or competent, and his team worsened the congestion at the fixed ropes.
The bottleneck at the Hillary Step wasn’t the only place a traffic jam occurred on May 10. Approximately 400 feet below the South Summit, an earlier bottleneck, below the ropes Neal Beidleman and Ang Dorje Sherpa fixed on the upper Southeast Ridge, caused significant delays, too, compounding the subsequent delays at the Hillary Step.
In Chapter 14 of The Climb, a book about the 1996 disaster co-authored by Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt, DeWalt wrote this concerning the bottleneck below the South Summit:
At 9:58 A.M. Beidleman made it to the South Summit, and thirty minutes later, by his recollection, he was followed by Martin Adams…. For an hour and a half to two hours, Adams recalled, he and Beidleman sat at the South Summit alone. “Basically, the problem was that everybody behind us was jammed up on the fixed ropes. Somehow, I think, some of Rob Hall’s slower clients had gotten in front of our group and they couldn’t pass.… [They] were staggered between the Balcony and just below the South Summit, jumbled among all of Fischer’s clients… and the Taiwanese climbers…. The Sherpas carrying the extra oxygen, like the clients, were also strung between the South Summit and the Balcony. It was, said one of Fischer’s clients, “a jungle fuck.”
As I explained in Chapter 13 of Into Thin Air:
Above 27,400 feet, no ropes had been fixed ahead of time…. As a consequence, I ran smack into the first bottleneck ninety minutes after moving beyond the Balcony,… where the intermingled teams encountered a series of massive rock steps that required ropes for safe passage. Clients huddled restlessly at the base of the rock for nearly an hour while Beidleman… laboriously ran the rope out….
The traffic jam at the ropes grew with each arriving climber, so those at the rear of the scrum fell farther and farther behind. By late morning, three of Hall’s clients — Stuart Hutchison, John Taske, and Lou Kasischke, climbing near the back with Hall — were becoming quite worried about the lagging pace. Immediately in front of them was the Taiwanese team, moving especially sluggishly. “They were climbing in a peculiar style, really close together,” says Hutchison, “almost like slices in a loaf of bread, one behind the other, which meant it was nearly impossible to pass them. We spent a lot of time waiting for them to move up the ropes.”
Despite a consensus among almost everyone who was present that bottlenecks below the South Summit and on the Hillary Step created significant delays on May 10, Tracy insists repeatedly, in multiple videos, that these delays were inconsequential, and had nothing to do with the fact that ropes weren’t fixed ahead of time.
I shot the photo above at approximately 8:30 A.M. I was looking down the Southeast Ridge towards the Balcony at the time, while I waited for Neal Beidleman and Ang Dorje, who were directly above me, to start fixing the first of multiple ropes on the Southeast Ridge. Note the throng of climbers below who are ascending towards the bottom of the fixed ropes. Anticipating a delay at the obvious bottleneck ahead, some of them have already stopped at a less steep section of the Southeast Ridge to wait for the crowd to thin.
Below is a screen grab from the 10:47 mark in Tracy’s video, when he says:
In this photo that is Jon Krakauer looking down towards the Balcony where he claimed to have waited for an entire hour and a half. You can see that no ropes are fixed. There was no need to fix the ropes. No one fixed them and people were not falling off the mountain, even though there was a violent storm on the descent.
Although Michael Tracy has never been on this side of Everest, he apparently considers himself more qualified to determine whether there was a need for fixed ropes on the Southeast Ridge than the guides Neal Beidleman and Michael Groom. Unlike Tracy, Beidleman and Groom were highly accomplished Himalayan climbers who were actually present on May 10, and both of them believed ropes were necessary above this point to safeguard their clients, some of whom were not highly skilled mountaineers.
The photo in the screen grab was shot by Klev Schoening from the same place where I shot the previous photo above, but approximately ten minutes later. That’s Anatoli Boukreev on the left, Groom below him in the yellow down suit, me in the red suit, and just behind me is Andy Harris in the blue suit. You can see that the line of climbers who were well below us in the earlier photo have now arrived at the base of the fixed ropes, too, and are about to start waiting along with us.
Tracy is correct when he says, “You can see that no ropes are fixed.” But that’s because Schoening’s camera was pointed down when he snapped the photo. Beidleman and Ang Dorje were fixing ropes immediately above us at the time, which explains why almost everyone in this photo is standing around instead of moving upward. The photo, in other words, documents the early moments of a major bottleneck.
In a video Tracy posted on December 30, 2024, he estimated the rate of ascent, measured in vertical feet per hour, for me, Rob Hall, Neal Beidleman, and Doug Hansen as we climbed from the South Col to the Balcony, from the Balcony to the South Summit, and finally from the South Summit to the summit of Everest in 1996. He then compared this with the estimated climbing rate of Hansen and Hall on Everest in 1995, and used this data — shown in the screen grab below — to arrive at the conclusion there was “no evidence of delays at fixed ropes.”
Tracy’s conclusion is wrong, however, because his methodology was flawed and it was based on incorrect data Tracy obtained from the Himalayan Database. (As Tracy himself has acknowledged, expedition reports in the Himalayan Database filed during the 1990s often included erroneous information.) Additionally, when Tracy compared climbing rates in 1995 to those of 1996, he failed to account for the fact that in 1995, unusually deep snow was a significant impediment that slowed the climbers’ rate of ascent considerably, so his comparison was meaningless.
Tracy is correct that a small number of slow climbers contributed significantly to delays on the fixed ropes, but he is wrong to attribute the delays entirely to the lagging pace of these individuals. The delays resulted from the combination of slow climbers and the failure to fix ropes in advance, and these two factors in tandem had an adverse impact that was significantly greater than the sum of their parts. Rob Hall and Scott Fischer knew long before May 10 that some clients were likely to be quite slow; this is why they were so adamant that it was crucial for the ropes to be fixed ahead of time.
To accurately determine how much time was lost because ropes were not fixed in advance, one needs to consider how the delay at the ropes installed on the Southeast Ridge contributed to the delay at the ropes installed on the Hillary Step. There is a simple way to do this: Determine how many minutes the first client to ascend the fixed ropes on the Southeast Ridge had to wait before he could start ascending these ropes, and then add this to the number of minutes the first client to ascend the fixed ropes on the Hillary Step had to wait before he could start ascending these ropes.
Beidleman and Ang Dorje started fixing ropes up the Southeast Ridge at approximately 8:30 A.M. on May 10. Beidleman didn’t finish fixing the last of the new rope, and then pulling an old rope out of the snow above it, until approximately 9:50, even though he climbed remarkably fast.
The first client to go up the fixed ropes on the Southeast Ridge was Martin Adams, who waited more than 45 minutes at the base of the ropes before he could start ascending them. On the Hillary Step, after Boukreev fixed a rope to the top, I was the first client to ascend it. I waited from approximately 11:00 A.M., when I arrived on top of the South Summit, until approximately 12:30 P.M., when I started ascending the rope up the Step. If you subtract 20 minutes to account for the time I spent traversing the corniced ridge between the South Summit and the base of the Hillary Step, I was delayed approximately 70 minutes.
The delay attributable to not fixing both sets of ropes was therefore 115 minutes. On a day when a matter of minutes determined who got down to the tents before the storm turned into a deadly hurricane and who did not, that’s a lot of minutes.
At the 13:42 mark in his May 13 video Tracy alleges,
We need to look just briefly at the issue of why people were waiting at South Summit [below the Hillary Step]. The reason people were waiting had nothing to do with fixing ropes…. The reason for the delays at the South Summit was bringing up the oxygen.
Tracy claims it didn’t matter that fixing ropes on the Hillary Step didn’t begin until after the Sherpas bringing up cannisters of oxygen arrived on the South Summit, because the clients had to wait, regardless, to receive their third oxygen cannisters before continuing to the summit.
Tracy is wrong. He conspicuously fails to mention the obvious reason Sherpas were slow to arrive at the South Summit with the oxygen cannisters: They were delayed by the traffic jam on the fixed ropes below the South Summit — a traffic jam that was irrefutably made worse by the failure to fix those ropes in advance.
The Hillary Step is known to be the most problematic bottleneck on the upper mountain. Fixing ropes here should have been initiated at the earliest possible moment to minimize inevitable delays above the South Summit, but this didn’t happen. As a consequence, fixing ropes on the Hillary Step used up a significant chunk of very precious time, during which no client was be able to start ascending the Step, even after receiving their third oxygen cannister. Charlotte Fox mentioned this delay in an article she wrote for the 1997 American Alpine Journal:
After waiting for more than an hour the oxygen bottles finally arrived and someone produced just enough rope for Anatoli to fix the Step…. After more waiting for Anatoli and the Rob Hall “client,” Jon Krakauer, to fix the line, the rest of us slowly moved off the South Summit.
Absolutely nobody, not even Michael Tracy, disputes that Rob Hall and Scott Fischer agreed it was important to fix ropes in advance of their clients’ arrival at the upper Southeast Ridge and the Hillary Step, and they announced a firm plan to do this. But for reasons that have never been adequately explained, their plan wasn’t carried out.
Tracy either misunderstands or misrepresents the profound impact that failing to adhere to this plan had on the delays on the Southeast Ridge and at the Hillary Step. After Boukreev and Beidleman belatedly mobilized to fix ropes on the Step, and then traversed one at a time from the South Summit along the corniced ridge to arrive at the base of the Step, it took Boukreev only about 20 minutes to fix a rope to the top of the Step, after which climbers immediately started ascending that rope. But bottlenecks on Everest are like bottlenecks at traffic lights during rush hour: When 20 cars are stacked up behind a red light, all 20 vehicles don’t simultaneously start to move forward at full speed the moment the light turns green. It takes a while for traffic jams to dissipate, whether they occur in crowded cities or on Mount Everest, inevitably extending any delays. And when delays from traffic jams occur above 26,000 feet in the Everest Death Zone, the consequences can be deadly.
