The YouTuber on a Mission to Trash My Book: Chapter Seven
A refutation of Michael Tracy’s deceitful campaign to impugn the veracity of “Into Thin Air” and spread misinformation about the 1996 Everest disaster
Twenty-one minutes and 13 seconds into the video Michael Tracy posted on September 4, 2024, titled “South Summit on the Ascent,” he announces that he wants to:
address the way Krakauer changes times to fit his narrative. For Krakauer’s narrative of events above South Summit, there are two key pieces of information he fabricates. The first is the time of day that Rob Hall turned Doug Hansen around the previous year [1995]. In his book Krakauer states it was 2:30 P.M. That is not close to accurate, as the Himalayan Database records all the times that day for different events, and reports the decision to turn around was taken at 1:00 P.M. Indeed, Rob Hall had set 1:00 p.m. as the turnaround for Jon Krakauer’s team [in 1996] but Krakauer needs to push the time to 2:00 P.M. because he didn’t make it to the summit by the 1:00 P.M. original turnaround time.
So Krakauer also invented the 2:30 turnaround time in 1995 to make it seem like Rob Hall used a different turnaround time in 1995. Krakauer was not there in 1995, so this is not his faulty memory. He had access to the Expedition reports maintained in Elizabeth Hawley’s Himalayan Database, and these would be the most accurate descriptions of what took place that day.
Almost everything Tracy alleges in the excerpt above is false.
As I mentioned in the first chapter of this treatise, expedition reports in the Himalayan Database filed during the 1990s often contained numerous errors. Contrary to Tracy’s assertion, the Himalayan Database does not provide the most accurate data about what happened on Rob Hall’s expeditions to Everest in 1995 and 1996.
Instead of relying on the Himalayan Database as my primary source, as Tracy does, after I returned home from Nepal I interviewed more than 30 individuals who were present on Everest in 1995 and 1996 and actually witnessed what occurred.
Tracy has never been on the Nepal side of Everest, nor to my knowledge has he ever interviewed anyone who was a member of Rob Hall’s or Scott Fischer’s Everest expeditions. Instead of relying on sources with first-hand knowledge of the relevant events, as I did, in this video Tracy seems to have relied on little more than speculation based on incorrect or misinterpreted data to make false allegations intended to discredit me.
Tracy’s claim that I “invented the 2:30 turnaround time in 1995” appears to have been in reaction to what I wrote in this long passage from Chapter 17 of Into Thin Air:
Scott Fischer ascended to the summit around 3:40 on the afternoon of May 10 [1996] to find his devoted friend and sirdar, Lopsang Jangbu, waiting for him. The Sherpa pulled his radio from inside his down jacket, made contact with Ingrid Hunt at Base Camp, then handed the walkie-talkie to Fischer. “We all made it,” Fischer told Hunt, 11,400 feet below. “God, I’m tired.”
Around this time two Sherpas on the Taiwanese team arrived, followed soon thereafter by Makalu Gau. Rob Hall was there, too, waiting impatiently for Doug Hansen to appear as a rising tide of cloud lapped ominously at the summit ridge.
According to Lopsang, during the fifteen or twenty minutes Fischer spent on the summit, he complained repeatedly that he wasn’t feeling well — something the congenitally stoic guide almost never did. “Scott tell to me, ‘I am too tired. I am sick, also, need medicine for stomach,’” the Sherpa recalls. “I gave him tea, but he drank just a little bit, just half cup. So I tell to him, ‘Scott, please, we go fast down.’ So we come down then.”
Fischer started down first, about 3:55. Lopsang reports that although Scott had used supplemental oxygen during the entire ascent and his third canister was more than three-quarters full when he left the summit, for some reason he took his mask off and stopped using it.
Shortly after Fischer left the top, Gau and his Sherpas departed as well, and finally Lopsang headed down — leaving Hall alone on the summit awaiting Hansen. A moment after Lopsang started down, about 4:00, Hansen at last appeared, toughing it out, moving painfully slowly over the last bump on the ridge. As soon as he saw Hansen, Hall hurried down to meet him.
Hall’s obligatory turn-around time had come and gone a full two hours earlier. Given the guide’s conservative, exceedingly methodical nature, many of his colleagues have expressed puzzlement at this uncharacteristic lapse of judgment. Why, they wondered, didn’t he turn Hansen around much lower on the mountain, as soon as it became obvious that the American climber was running late.
Exactly one year earlier [1995], Hall had turned Hansen around on the South Summit at 2:30 P.M., and to be denied so close to the top was a crushing disappointment to Hansen. He told me several times that he’d returned to Everest in 1996 largely as a result of Hall’s advocacy — he said Rob had called him from New Zealand “a dozen times” urging him to give it another shot — and this time Doug was absolutely determined to bag the top. “I want to get this thing done and out of my life,” he’d told me three days earlier at Camp Two. “I don’t want to have to come back here. I’m getting too old for this shit.”
When I wrote that Rob Hall turned Hansen around at 2:30 P.M. in 1995, I based that statement on tape-recorded interviews I did with three individuals who were working for Hall on Everest at the time: Ed Viesturs and Guy Cotter, who were employed by Hall as guides on the 1995 expedition; and Lopsang Jangbu, who was working for Hall that year, and was the lead climbing Sherpa for their summit bid. In an interview I did with Viesturs in June 1996, he told me this about the 1995 expedition:
We got to the South Summit at 1:30. The snow was deep. We’d been climbing since 11:00 or 12:00 A.M. It was cold and windy. We knew it was going to take at least 2 hours from the South Summit to the summit. I remember, Rob and I looked at each other when we first got there and we both shook our heads. We knew we were going to turn around right then and there.
[First, however,] we tried forcing a trail across the ridge [above the South Summit] but realized, no, it’s too late, we won’t have enough time to get down. Also, Guy started kicking steps with Lopsang across the traverse and they kicked off a slab avalanche down the Kangshung Face. The combination of the deep snow, the wind, and the lateness of the day — there was no question [about what we should do]. Plus the route wasn’t fixed.
Around 2:30 Rob told everybody, “Hey, we’re turning around, sorry.”… So we all turned around, [but] Lobsang kept going on his own, and relatively quickly went to the summit. He should have turned around. We needed him: When we turned around, Chantal collapsed at the South Summit [client Chantal Mauduit was a famous French alpinist who was trying to climb Everest without bottled oxygen]. We spent the rest of the day dragging her off the mountain; meanwhile Lopsang was fooling around on the summit. I chewed him out a little.
This interview with Viesturs, which was corroborated by my interviews with Cotter and Lopsang, makes it clear why I believe Hall turned his team around at 2:30, rather than 1:00 P.M., as the Himalayan Database incorrectly reported.
Regarding Lopsang’s unauthorized trip to the summit when everyone else headed down, it created a serious problem for Hall, Viesturs, and Cotter, because Chantal Mauduit wasn’t the only client on Hall’s team to collapse that day in 1995. As Viesturs told me, Doug Hansen collapsed on the South Summit, too:
He was fine during the ascent, but as soon as he started down he lost it mentally and physically: He turned into a zombie, like he’d used everything up. He was very tired — not even grabbing the fixed rope as he was staggering down. I remember yelling at him — I’d lost my voice so I’d have to get right in his face and scream at him, and he could still barely hear me: “Doug! You gotta wake up! You gotta grab the rope! Use the rope!” Later, just below the Southeast Ridge, he started running out of oxygen, so I gave him my bottle; after that he was able to get down with Guy’s help.
Viesturs thinks a similar thing happened to Hansen in 1996:
I think he just pushed himself to the max to get to the top, and when he got there he was totally out of gas.
Viesturs believes that Hall’s desire to put clients on the summit was a significant factor in his failure to turn Hansen around in 1996 when he obviously should have. “The competition between Hall and Scott Fischer to get as many clients as possible to the top was real,” Viesturs told me, “and Rob’s major market was the United States. If you’re successful this year, you’re going to get clients next year.”
Earlier in this chapter I mentioned Tracy’s reliance on incorrect data from the Himalayan Database to support his false claims. Another false allegation by Tracy derived from erroneous data in the Himalayan Database occurs 23 minutes into this same video, when he refers to the second of the “two key pieces of information” he claims I “fabricated” earlier in the video, at the 21:13 mark:
The second piece that Krakauer fabricated is the time the Taiwanese summited. The Himalayan database and the Taiwan team in an interview with Jane Bromet both listed their summit time at around 3:00 P.M., and the Himalayan Database specifically states Gau got there prior to Scott Fischer. As Jane Bromet spoke Mandarin Chinese, it is unlikely something was lost in translation. It is not clear where Krakauer got his 3:45 summit time. Some other climbing times reported by Krakauer, such as those of Goran Kropp, match with the Himalayan Database report, but for an unexplained reason Krakauer simply pushed Makalu Gau’s summit time back 45 minutes without explaining that Gau’s own account differed significantly. As Krakauer was nowhere near the summit at 3:45 and could not see the summit at 3:45, this is not a case of Krakauer’s faulty memory. He had to get the time from someone else, and few people on the summit at 3:45 survived, much less would have had accurate memories of exactly what time everything happened.
I wrote that Makalu Gau and two Sherpas on his team, Mingma Tshering and Nima Gombu, reached the summit at approximately 3:45 P.M. To substantiate this, I relied on a radio call Scott Fischer made to basecamp when he reached the summit; a long, detailed interview I conducted with Lopsang in July 1996; and, crucially, the photo that appears on page 293 of Into Thin Air: The Illustrated Edition.
This photo, which was taken by Fischer, shows Lopsang and one of Makalu Gau’s Sherpas posing on the summit (I don’t know whether it’s Mingma Tshering or Nima Gombu). The photo proves Gau was at the summit with Fischer, because Lopsang told me Gau was never far from these two Sherpas on May 10 until he collapsed during his descent approximately 300 vertical feet below the Balcony, and was too weak to descend any further. At that point Mingma Tshering and Nima Gombu left Gau on a snow-covered ledge and continued down to the South Col without him.
We know that Fischer arrived on top of Everest around 3:40, because that’s when he spoke on the radio to his expedition doctor at Basecamp, Ingrid Hunt, to announce he was on the summit.
When I interviewed Lopsang, he told me he arrived on the summit about 2:15, remained there until about 4:00, and was on top when Gau’s team arrived. Although Lopsang didn’t say the precise time Gau reached the summit, he did say that Mingma Tshering and Nima Gombu arrived on the summit shortly after Fischer got there at 3:40, and Gau arrived soon thereafter. Moreover, all three members of Gau’s team were on top before Fischer started to descend around 3:55, according to Lopsang.
So we know that Fischer was on the summit at 3:40. And we also know that Scott Fischer, Lopsang Jangbu, Makalu Gau, Mingma Tshering, and Nima Gombu were all on top at the same time, because Fischer took the photo published on page 293 of my book.
As Tracy correctly noted, “few people on the summit at 3:45 survived, much less would have had accurate memories of exactly what time everything happened.”
But the photo above, which was developed from the film recovered with Scott Fischer’s camera, confirms that Gau’s team arrived on the summit during the span of time between when Fischer arrived at approximately 3:40 and when Fischer headed down at approximately 3:55.
This is why I reported that Makalu Gau reached the summit of Everest around 3:45 P.M. in Into Thin Air.
The Himalayan Database was an outgrowth of the voluminous expedition archives created and maintained by the deservedly famous Kathmandu-based historian, Elizabeth Hawley. Despite the errors I’ve pointed out in the Himalayan Database, it is an extraordinary resource.
When I was writing Into Thin Air in 1996 and early 1997, however, the Database was much less accurate than it is today. As Tracy points out in a video titled “Correcting the Record on Krakauer’s Statistics,” posted on August 19, 2024:
[In 1996 and 1997], the Himalayan Database as we know today did not exist. The data was being maintained by Elizabeth Hawley and consisted of her numerous notes of interviews with various expedition members, and notes about climbing permits.
A single Nepali data entry clerk had been working for 3 years entering the data and by 1996 the database was starting to take shape, but it would take almost eight more years and a total of 11,000 hours of work to get the database into the form we use today.
During that period computer programmer Richard Salisbury worked on getting the data into a workable database, and in 2003 he and co-author Raymond Huey published an analysis of the data in the American Alpine Journal. Shortly after that, copies of the database were sold to the public, and every year an updated version is released documenting the summits, deaths, and other key statistics. Today the entire database is available for free online.
So when Jon Krakauer got the data from Elizabeth Hawley back in 1996 or early ’97 it was the best that was available, but the data set would not be ready for proper analysis for another 7 years. Not surprisingly, the analysis it provided was completely wrong: garbage in garbage out, as they say.
I unwittingly relied on this “completely wrong” analysis when I wrote the following in Chapter 21 of Into Thin Air:
In fact, the murderous outcome of 1996 was in many ways simply business as usual. Although a record number of people died in the spring climbing season on Everest, the 12 fatalities amounted to only 3 percent of the 398 climbers who ascended higher than Base Camp — which is actually slightly below the historical fatality rate of 3.3 percent. Or here’s another way to look at it: between 1921 and May 1996, 144 people died and the peak was climbed some 630 times — a ratio of one in four. Last spring, 12 climbers died and 84 reached the summit — a ratio of one in seven. Compared to these historical standards, 1996 was actually a safer-than-average year.
Until Tracy pointed out that the data I relied on for the excerpt above was incorrect, I was unaware that 1996 was actually “an extremely deadly year” on Everest, rather than “safer than the average year,” as I wrote. This is a huge error on my part. I should have noticed earlier, and I am grateful Tracy made me aware of it. I will correct the error in all future editions of Into Thin Air.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Researching, writing, and creating videos for these chapters has been a tiresome, exceedingly unpleasant task. It has consumed months of my life, without any guarantee the outcome would be more helpful than hurtful. But as a direct result of my Medium posts and YouTube videos, on February 11, 2025, Michael Tracy announced on his YouTube channel that he has removed what is probably his most deceitful and defamatory video — the one blaming me for the death of Yasuko Namba, which I debunked in Chapter Three of my commentary.
Tracy removed his video reluctantly, after yielding to intense criticism from his own followers. And he did so without apology or admitting his video was dishonest. But he took the video down. I am very grateful to Tracy’s followers who stood up for the truth.
