The YouTuber on a Mission to Trash My Book: Chapter Six
A refutation of Michael Tracy’s deceitful campaign to impugn the veracity of “Into Thin Air” and spread misinformation about the 1996 Everest disaster
This chapter is primarily a discussion about a single photograph, and the relationship of this photograph to an error I need to correct in to the next edition of Into Thin Air. Michael Tracy called out this error in a video he posted on April 25, 2024, titled, “Analysis of Into Thin Air Photo on Page 11.”
The photo under discussion is displayed above as it appears on the cover of Everest: Mountain Without Mercy, a book by Broughton Coburn. The photo was shot by Neal Beidleman shortly after he began descending from the summit of Everest with four of Scott Fischer’s clients on May 10, 1996. The block of text introducing this video on Tracy’s YouTube channel asserts:
This video looks at a photograph taken by Neal Beidleman along the summit ridge to see that the account of the Summit Ridge decent [sic] of the Mountain Madness team, as told in Into Thin Air, is not accurate. Looks at Krakauer’s “MO” of picking and choosing from multiple different versions and using things that support his narrative that any reasonable person would know where [sic] not accurate.
The same photo appears as a black and white image on page 11 of Into Thin Air: The Illustrated Edition. Here’s the caption I wrote for my book:
Doug Hansen approaching the summit around 3:20 P.M. Sandy Pittman, descending, is the climber immediately behind Hansen. Storm Clouds billow over Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain, in the upper half of the photo; the South Summit of Everest, (distinguished by a large black rock) appears directly in front of Lhotse. The Lone climber barely visible near the crest of the South Summit is Anatoli Boukreev on his way down to Camp Four.
Ten minutes before Beidleman shot this photo he was waiting anxiously on the summit for Scott Fischer to appear. Four of Fischer’s clients were with him: Sandy Pittman, Tim Madsen, Charlotte Fox, and Lene Gammelgaard. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 15 of Into Thin Air that described what happened next.
At 3:10 Friday afternoon Fischer still hadn’t arrived on top, says Beidleman, adding, “I decided it was time to get the hell out of there, even though Scott hadn’t showed up yet.” He gathered up Pittman, Gammelgaard, Fox, and Madsen and started leading them down the summit ridge. Twenty minutes later, just above the Hillary Step, they ran into Fischer. “I didn’t really say anything to him,” Beidleman recalls. “He just sort of raised his hand. He looked like he was having a hard time, but he was Scott, so I wasn’t particularly worried. I figured he’d tag the summit and catch up to us pretty quick to help bring the clients down.”
Beidleman’s primary concern at the time was Pittman: “Everybody was pretty messed up by that point, but Sandy looked especially shaky. I thought that if I didn’t keep real close tabs on her, there was a good chance she’d peel right off the ridge. So I made sure she was clipped into the fixed line, and in the places where there was no rope I grabbed her harness from behind and kept a tight hold on her until she could clip into the next section of rope. She was so out of it that I’m not sure she even knew I was there.”
The screen grab above, which was annotated by Michael Tracy, appears at the start of his video. Nine minutes into the video, Tracy points out, correctly:
It’s not clear how Beidleman could have been leading Pittman and the others down from the summit while Pittman is by herself roughly 50 ft in front of Beidleman. Beidleman is not grabbing her by the harness in that photo and it does not appear she is clipped into the fixed rope either…. It appears that none of the statements that Beidleman made in Into Thin Air are correct…. I don’t blame Beidleman for any of this…. The account he provided to Krakauer looks like it was just confused for a nearly identical account Beidleman provided for the events below the South Summit…. Krakauer should have spotted that in the months he was working on the book.
Tracy is right: I should have been able to figure out from Beidleman’s photo that he was mistaken when he told me the events described in the excerpt above occurred above the Hillary Step instead of below the Hillary Step, where they actually occurred. I will correct this error in all future editions of Into Thin Air.
But my mistake, which was inadvertent and made in good faith, does not justify the disingenuous claim Tracy makes several minutes later in his video, when he falsely claims that my failure to correct Beidleman’s error was deliberate. Tracy ends this video by claiming “any reasonable person would know” that what Beidleman told me was incorrect, but I tried to pass it off as the truth in order to invent a nefarious narrative, which he alleges was something I did repeatedly throughout my book.
Tracy then declares:
While it is fine to give someone the benefit of the doubt,… as soon as you know that Krakauer is just inventing things that tell a story, his whole book makes sense. I will get into more of the major inventions of Krakauer in upcoming videos, and then get into what really happened, and why Krakauer could never tell the real story.
As you consider Tracy’s obsession with disparaging me, keep in mind that several minutes earlier in the same video, Tracy acknowledged that the account in my book “is nearly identical” to the correct account. The only difference is that my book reported the events occurred above the Hillary Step, when they actually occurred below the Hillary step.
Incorrectly reporting the location of an event based on what Neal Beidleman incorrectly told me is a far cry from inventing a narrative to intentionally mislead readers.
Having acknowledged my error, I need to point out some errors Tracy made concerning the same photo and the same events: Two of Tracy’s annotations in the screen grab below, which also opens his video, are wrong.
Here, for comparison, is Beidleman’s photo with annotations by me that correct Tracy’s errors:
When I examined a high-resolution print of Beidleman’s photo with magnification, Tracy’s errors were obvious. Andy Harris is indeed visible where Tracy’s red arrow indicates he is. But I am nowhere near where Tracy says I am in the screen grab, nor are there any other people visible anywhere on the South Summit. I don’t think Tracy made these incorrect annotations intentionally to advance his agenda, but they are nevertheless wrong and need to be corrected.
Although I’m not where Tracy says I am in this photo, I believe I am visible elsewhere in the photo. It’s highly likely my head and torso are at the location indicated by me. It’s not apparent in these low-resolution images, but if one examines a high-resolution print one can discern that the figure labeled “Krakauer” is a person wearing a red down suit like mine, and this person appears to be in the act of descending the corniced ridge between the bottom of the Hillary Step and the South Summit.
I believe Beidleman unknowingly photographed me as I was haltingly attempting to make my way from the bottom of the Step to the safety of the South Summit. I had run out of oxygen approximately 85 minutes earlier while waiting on top of the Hillary Step with Andy Harris for the traffic jam to clear. If this is indeed me in the photo, it was a few minutes before I freaked out slightly lower on the corniced ridge where there was no fixed rope. In my debilitated condition, I didn’t think I could cross this part of the ridge without falling to my death, and lost my nerve. I planted my ice ax into the ridge crest and slumped over it, too afraid to move until Michael Groom descended from the Hillary Step and gave me his oxygen bottle.
If that is me, it means Martin Adams, Klev Schoening, Yasuko Namba, and Groom are hidden behind the convoluted topography of the summit ridge as they are descending between Pittman and me. Although I don’t remember it, Boukreev must have passed me on the ridge before Beidleman took the photo.
Adams told me that when he encountered me, I was “kind of punched out on the cornice itself, out of gas, so I passed you, I believe…. Harris was over there on the South Summit clanging oxygen bottles together, looking for a bottle to bring back to you.”
When Schoening came by me on the ridge shortly after Adams, he recalled, “You were sitting there with somebody. I just remember you saying, ‘I’m fucked! I’m fucked!’.”
The person I was sitting with was almost certainly Michael Groom, who was in the process of saving my bacon by giving me his oxygen bottle, for which I will be forever grateful.
In the introduction to a video Michael Tracy posted on January 28, 2025, titled “State of the Mountain,” he writes:
Turning to the 1996 disaster, significant developments emerged when an old interview surfaced in which Jon Krakauer admitted to fabricating parts of his famous book, Into Thin Air.
This claim is a shameless lie. Tracy tries to prop up the lie with two pieces of evidence. The first is a recording of the “old interview” he refers to, which was an event at Colorado College on April 20, 2016, in which Mark Bryant interviewed me for more than an hour in front of a large audience. Bryant was the editor of Outside who assigned me to write the article about the 1996 Everest disaster.
The second piece of evidence is an article about this interview titled, “The True Nature of Journalism: Through the eyes of Jon Krakauer,” which was published in The Catalyst on April 29, 2016. The Catalyst is the independent student newspaper of Colorado College. The article about the interview was written by a student named Becca Stine. Referring to Into Thin Air, Stine wrote this:
Krakauer talked about a kind of anger that overcame him after the accident, which remained for some time after the book was published. He spoke of how the intensity of this anger and emotion associated with the accident was what allowed him to write the book in just three months. He went on to speak of a kind of regret he experienced after publishing the book, as his intention was to write the truth, and instead he — in his words — “publicly falsified the story.” Krakauer believes that this anger that carried through into his writing brought people to read the story in the opposite way — his fans suddenly wanted to climb Everest, when Jon was attempting to express the issues associated with the mountain as a tourist attraction.
When Tracy dishonestly claims in the introduction to his video that Krakauer “admitted to fabricating parts of his book, Into Thin Air,” he is basing his allegation entirely on Stine’s statement that Krakauer’s “intention was to write the truth, and instead he — in his words — ‘publicly falsified the story.’”
There is an insurmountable problem with what Stein published, however: It is categorically false. If you listen to all 66 minutes and 23 seconds of the interview, you will discover that nowhere in this interview do I say that I “publicly falsified the story.” Nor do I say anything remotely similar to this. Although the recording was apparently edited to remove dead air and make it move along faster, nothing said by me or Mark Bryant was deleted.
I don’t know whether Becca Stine simply misunderstood what I said, or misquoted me. I’m guessing she was trying to convey that I thought my book would deter inexperienced climbers from attempting to climb Everest, but it turned out to have the opposite effect.
What I do know is this: Tracy’s allegation that I confessed to fabricating parts of my book is absolutely false. And Tracy has listened closely to the recorded interview, so he, too, knows the interview contains nothing like what he claims it does.
Michael Tracy presents himself in his videos as a dedicated seeker of the truth. But the mendacity on display in his January 28 video and in so many other videos establishes that he doesn’t give a fig about the objective truth when it comes to his own published work.
On January 31, 2025, the post below from Tracy appeared on his Discord server. I assume he meant it as a criticism of others, but his post accurately identifies deceitful techniques that Tracy, himself, employs frequently in his videos:
