The YouTuber on a Mission to Trash My Book: Chapter Three
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 a barrage of defamatory allegations made by Michael Tracy in a video he posted on YouTube on May 21, 2004, titled “Sheer Will vs Into Thin Air: Analysis of Jon Krakauer and Yasuko Namba’s locations after 3:30 P.M.”
Sheer Will is a memoir written by Michael Groom, an accomplished Australian high-altitude climber who was one of the three guides on Rob Hall’s team in 1996. His book was published in Australia in 1997.
Tracy accuses me in his video of being responsible for the death of Yasuko Namba. She was a client on Rob Hall’s team who became the second Japanese woman to climb the so-called “Seven Summits” when she reached the top of Everest around 2:15 P.M. on May 10, 1996. The video’s narration begins with this statement by Tracy:
In this video we’ll examine discrepancies between Jon Krakauer’s book and Michael Groom’s book Sheer Will. Although there are numerous differences between the two, this video will focus on a specific 4-hour period from 3:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on May 10th 1996.
At 3:30 both accounts agree that Mike Groom, Yasuko Namba, and Jon Krakauer were on the South Summit about to descend. By 7:30 Jon Krakauer was safely in his tent. Yasuko and Groom were still hundreds of feet above fighting for their lives. During this 4-Hour period the details between the two accounts diverge significantly. First I will outline the major discrepancies between the two accounts and then show how Krakauer fabricated his version to avoid admitting that he had abandoned Yasuko Namba on the descent when he was specifically sent down together with her by Mike Groom….
It’s important to note that in 1999, [in] the Postscript to Into Thin Air, Krakauer himself acknowledged that Groom’s account was accurate. It is also important to note that much of Into Thin Air is not Krakauer’s personal recollection. For much of this four-hour period Krakauer tells a story that could only have come to him from Mike Groom. That is, if Krakauer is writing about an event where he claims Groom and Namba are the only ones present, that is obviously not coming from Krakauer’s memory, it has to have come from Groom…. In this video I will demonstrate that Krakauer’s account contradicts the version of events from Sheer Will which he claims was accurate in his 1999 postscript…. However, Krakauer had forgotten that not only did he not include Groom’s account in his own book, but he provided a completely different version of events. As inevitably happens when you invent so much of a story over time you forget which parts you invented and you get the truth confused with your own fiction
Tracy’s claim that I “abandoned” Namba is based largely on four flagrantly dishonest allegations he makes in the narration excerpted above:
1. The false claim that I “was specifically sent down together with her by Mike Groom.”
I will address this soon enough, but Tracy’s bullshit flows so thick and fast in this video that I need to go deep into the weeds to debunk this particular claim, which validates the profound truth of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
2. The false claim that I “acknowledged that Groom’s account was accurate” in the Postscript published in the 1999 paperback and digital editions of Into Thin Air.
Tracy first makes this allegation 55 seconds into the video, then keeps repeating variations of it throughout the video to flood the zone with misinformation and generate doubt about my credibility. For example, at the 5:01 mark in his video Tracy says, “Krakauer did not write anywhere that Groom’s book was full of errors.” This is true. But at the 7:46 mark, this true statement has been transformed by Tracy into this plainly false statement: “Krakauer specifically references Groom’s account as being accurate.” Anyone with access to the paperback or digital editions of my book can read my Postscript and immediately see that nowhere in the Postscript do I state or even suggest that Groom’s account is accurate. Most of Groom’s book is indeed accurate, but not all of it.
3. The false claim that “For much of this four-hour period Krakauer tells a story that could only have come to him from Mike Groom.”
This, too, is categorically untrue. When I wrote about our descent from the South Summit of Everest in Into Thin Air, my research did indeed rely on two extensive, tape-recorded interviews with Groom, but I also relied on tape-recorded interviews and published statements from Martin Adams, Guy Cotter, Klev Schoening, Beck Weathers, Neal Beidleman, Charlotte Fox, and Tim Madsen. Furthermore, I will point out yet again that, as far as I know, Michael Tracy has never spoken with any of the people who were directly involved in the 1996 Everest disaster, nor has he ever been on the Nepal side of Everest.
4. The false claim that “Krakauer’s account contradicts the version of events from Sheer Will…. However, Krakauer had forgotten that he provided a completely different version of events.”
This, too, is categorically untrue. Although our accounts differ occasionally on minor points, they align on the important issues.
At the 3:43 mark in his video, Michael Tracy says:
So let’s look at what Krakauer wrote in the 1999 postscript: “In his book Sheer Will Michael Groom described the moment when he, Namba, and I encountered Adams as we made our way down towards 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 in and in no hurry to regain it.’”
If one compares the 1999 Postscript to the text of the original 1997 edition of Into Thin Air, according to Tracy:
In Into Thin Air there is no encounter where Groom and Namba and Krakauer see Adams tumble down the mountain. There couldn’t be. Krakauer has him and Namba far apart at that point in time.
In Into Thin Air, Adams was found off the route by Groom but only Yasuko Namba is with him, Krakauer being well below in Krakauer’s version…. For Into Thin Air to not be simply an invention of Krakauer’s you have to accept that Michael Groom told Jon Krakauer one thing and then immediately published the exact opposite in his book and Krakauer somehow had to not notice this even though he clearly had read Groom’s book.
Krakauer did not write anywhere that Groom’s book was full of errors and that it was completely different from what Groom had told him originally. This leads us to the conclusion that Michael Groom told Jon Krakauer the exact same thing he would write in his book and Krakauer simply invented his own version. Krakauer essentially confirms this when he quotes that section of Sheer Will and claims it is accurate. There is no way it is accurate if events took place the way they are described in Into Thin Air.
Tracy is wrong about almost all of this. But he is correct that in the first edition of my book, which was published in April 1997, I made no mention of seeing Adams when I was descending in proximity to Groom and Namba. And that is because this information seemed insignificant compared to what happened next in my account: Not long after Groom told me to proceed down ahead of him during our descent, I was alarmed to encounter Beck Weathers waiting alone on the Balcony, nearly blind and shivering uncontrollably.
By 1999, however, our encounter with Martin Adams was no longer insignificant. It had become quite pertinent thanks to the controversy that erupted after the first edition of Anatoli Boukreev’s book, The Climb, was published in November 1997, seven months after the publication of Into Thin Air.
Martin Adams had confirmed in an interview with me on July 10, 1996 that at approximately 2:45 P.M. on May 10, 1996, Boukreev — Scott Fischer’s head guide — told Fischer that he would “go down with Martin” when Boukreev, Fischer, Adams, and I happened to cross paths on top of the Hillary Step. At that moment, Fischer was ascending toward the summit and Boukreev, Adams, and I — who had already summited — were waiting for the fixed ropes to clear so we could continue down to the South Col.
Just minutes later, however, Boukreev rushed down alone to the South Col without waiting for Adams. And not long after that, Adams, descending alone, took a wrong turn and nearly blundered off the edge of the Kangshung Face.
In Boukreev’s book he denied that he told Fischer he would go down with Adams. Hence my decision to write about our encounter with Adams in my 1999 Postscript, which was published as a rebuttal to falsehoods published in The Climb.
Fourteen minutes into his video, Tracy claims that the encounter between Groom, Namba, Adams, and I could not have occurred as I described it in the Postscript of my book because I’d written in Chapter 14 that Namba and I were far apart when the encounter happened. This claim is obviously false if one takes the time to read the accounts of our encounter that appear in my book and Groom’s book. Contrary to what Tracy claims, there are no major discrepancies between the two accounts showing that “Krakauer fabricated his version to avoid admitting that he had abandoned Yasuko Namba on the descent when he was specifically sent down together with her by Mike Groom.”
Below is an excerpt from Chapter 14 of Into Thin Air which, according to Tracy, proves I fabricated my account of encountering Martin Adams. To the contrary, it actually proves the accuracy of my account.
In this excerpt I wrote that I left the South Summit ahead of Groom and Yasuko Namba. In Groom’s account he wrote that Namba and I followed him off the South Summit. This is one of the details about which Groom and I disagree, because we remember it differently, but both of our accounts confirm that Groom, Namba, and I descended in close proximity to one another on the upper Southeast Ridge:
Around 3:30 P.M. I left the South Summit ahead of Mike, Yasuko, and Andy [Harris] and almost immediately descended into a dense layer of clouds….
At the bottom of the [fixed ropes] on the Southeast Ridge I stopped with Mike to wait for Yasuko, who was having difficulty negotiating the fixed ropes. He attempted to call Rob on the radio, but Mike’s transmitter was working only intermittently and he couldn’t raise anybody. With Mike looking after Yasuko, and both Rob and Andy accompanying Doug Hansen — the only other client still above us — I assumed the situation was under control. So as Yasuko caught up to us, I asked Mike’s permission to continue down alone. “Fine,” he replied. “Just don’t walk off any cornices.”
About 4:45 P.M., when I reached the Balcony — the promontory at 27,600 feet on the Southeast Ridge, where I’d sat watching the sunrise with Ang Dorje — I was shocked to encounter Beck Weathers, standing alone in the snow, shivering violently. I’d assumed that he’d descended to Camp Four hours earlier. “Beck!” I exclaimed, “what the fuck are you still doing up here?”
Although I wrote nothing in this passage about what occurred between when I went down ahead of Namba and Groom and when I encountered Beck on the Balcony, Tracy was mistaken when he assumed this meant I wasn’t in close proximity to Namba and Groom.
By the time I got to the bottom of the fixed ropes on the Southeast Ridge, where Groom and I waited for Namba, I was exhausted, severely dehydrated, and still feeling the impact of going without supplemental oxygen for at least 80 minutes above the South Summit. As a consequence, I was moving slowly. Because Namba was descending at a similar pace — which Tracy confirms in his video — we were seldom very far apart. Here is how Groom describes this section of our descent in his book:
Yasuko and Jon followed me off the South Summit and we lost height quickly…. Just 70 metres above the point on the South East Ridge [the Balcony] where we had exited from gullies that dropped to Camp 4, the radio inside my climbing-suit came to life with Rob’s voice. I let Jon and Yasuko continue while I listened intently. He wanted to know where the spare oxygen bottles had been left on the South Summit. Before I could transmit, Andy, from wherever he was at the time, replied that there were none left on the South Summit…. Repeated transmissions failed, only Andy’s and Rob’s confusing conversations could be heard….
After more calls Caroline at Base Camp picked up my signal and said she would pass on my message on her clear line of transmission to Rob. Content that everything was under control, I caught up to Yasuko and Jon and we continued descending with one of the Americans from Fischer’s team, who was trying an unorthodox passing move in and uncontrolled tumble off to our left.
From where I stood he looked out of control and in no hurry to regain it, preferring instead to slide happily towards the edge and into Tibet. He stopped abruptly in an explosion of white from a thick bed of snow 30 metres below us with no sign of injury. Jon was anxious to keep moving, so I told him and Yasuko to go ahead while I helped the American [Martin Adams].
This is the moment when Michael Groom told Yasuko Namba and me to continue down the mountain ahead of him — the third of three separate occasions when Groom told us to descend ahead of him since we’d left the South Summit. Every time he told us to go ahead, it’s important to emphasize that he had no qualms about letting us do this, because everything seemed to be under control at the time, and he was confident each of us was doing well enough to descend on our own. On each occasion, he also made it clear that he intended to catch up to us before we got very far ahead.
From Groom’s account, it’s obvious that by this time he, Namba, and I had descended for a while in the company of Martin Adams. Adams confirmed this when I interviewed him on July 10, 1996:
I descended as far as I could on the fixed ropes. At the bottom of the fixed ropes… I saw you coming down with Mike Groom and someone else and we walked a very short distance together.
It is also obvious from Groom’s account that he, Namba, and I were still some distance above the Balcony when Groom told us to go down ahead for the third and final time. I don’t know the precise time, but it was approximately 4:15. If we’d been farther down at the Balcony then, we would have already encountered Beck Weathers, because Beck had been waiting at the Balcony since early in the morning for Rob Hall to return from the summit.
Groom never told me explicitly or even suggested that he wanted me to stay close to Namba during our descent. Groom was the guide. He understood better than anyone that it was his responsibility to escort her up and down the mountain. It was not the responsibility of another client. As Groom told me when I interviewed him on May 26, 1996, “My charge on May 10 was Yasuko. Rob asked to look after her.”
It’s important to understand that when Groom told us to proceed down ahead of him, there wasn’t a compelling reason for Groom to tell me to stay close to Namba. Neither Groom, Namba, nor I had any idea that a catastrophe was imminent at that time:
- As Groom reported in his book, after a radio call at approximately 4:00 P.M. with our expedition doctor, Caroline Mackenzie, he was “content that everything was under control.”
- Although the weather had been deteriorating throughout the afternoon, at 4:15 it was still relatively good.
- As Groom reported in his book, Namba had received a full bottle of oxygen at the South Summit and, except for briefly getting tangled in a fixed rope on the Southeast Ridge, had performed well on her descent from there.
- None of us had a clue that Beck Weathers was a short distance away at the time, anxiously waiting for Rob Hall to short-rope him down.
When Groom told Namba and me to go down ahead, in other words, he had no reason to be concerned about our well-being. In the tape-recorded interview I did with Groom on May 26, 1996, he told me he was confident I’d be able to find the route down and break trail for Namba, and that she would be able to safely follow me at her own pace, just as she had done since the three of us left the South Summit. Groom also assured Namba and me that he would catch up to us when he continued his descent, as he had done earlier that afternoon.
Perhaps most significantly, Groom told Namba and me to go down before he received a radio call from Rob Hall at 4:30 asking Groom to climb back up to the South Summit to bring him oxygen. Here is how the account in Groom’s book continues after he tells us to go down the final time:
They [Namba and Krakauer] had only just left on their way down the gullies [below the Balcony] to Camp 4, when on my way over to the stunned American [Martin Adams], I picked up Rob’s call again for oxygen…. I once again repeated the position of the oxygen bottles. I reassured him they were there. He begged for help and I replied that I was on my way back up. It would take hours to get to him. I yelled over to the American that the trail he needed to be on was over near me and then started to climb. It was 4:30 P.M.
Fifteen minutes into his video Tracy plays a clip from a 1997 television interview I did with ABC News in which I say, “We have the first radio call from just below the summit: Rob asking for help saying, ‘Doug and I have run out of oxygen. Doug’s in trouble we need help.’” In this interview I was simply reporting what Rob said to Groom at 4:30. But Tracy turns this into an attack on my credibility by insisting I was claiming to have personally heard the call myself, because I used the words “We have the first radio call….”
This is an example of Tracy stuffing his videos with misinformation to instill doubt about my credibility. I was already below the Balcony, nowhere close to Groom, when that radio conversation occurred, as I plainly wrote in Chapter 17 of Into Thin Air.
A detailed Base Camp radio log indicates that during a subsequent radio call at 4:55, Groom finally had a clear transmission with Rob Hall, during which Groom was able to convey to Hall precisely where to find two full bottles of oxygen stashed on the South Summit. Upon hearing this, according to Groom, Rob sounded as though he was feeling less stressed, “and his immediate problem seemed to be solved…. If Rob knew where the cylinders were, I saw no sense in continuing up.” So at this point Groom immediately turned around and headed back down the mountain to catch up with Namba and me. As he descended the Southeast Ridge, according to Groom’s book,
The American [Martin Adams] who had passed us with such haste was amazingly just getting to his feet after all this time and moving again, 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 into 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…. 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….
With the American now following me closely, we continued down the ridge a little way until we reached [the Balcony], the exit point into the gullies that led down to Camp 4. “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 edge in such a haphazard manner, I wondered whether he cared if he lived or died. Concerned about his judgement, I decided to stick with him. All this time Beck Weathers had gone unnoticed standing beside me.
“Is that you, Mike?”
The Texan startled me. Beck was camouflaged perfectly in a light sprinkling of fresh snow. He must have been standing still for some time, judging by the amount of snow that had settled on him. He looked like a tarty scarecrow, his bulky down suit pushing his arms awkwardly out to the sides.
“What are you doing here, Beck? I thought you would have been well and truly back to Camp 4 by now.”
“I can’t see, Mike. I have been waiting for you to come down.” He didn’t have to say more. I knew we were in trouble when I looked into his blank and unfocused eyes.
At least 45 minutes before Groom encountered Beck Weathers, based on the time of the radio calls logged by Guy Cotter, I had already run into Beck at the Balcony. When I first saw Beck, I, too, was aghast. But I incorrectly assumed that by then Groom was well into his descent, had already caught up with Namba, and at any minute both of them would be catching up to me. Here is how I described my encounter with Beck in Into Thin Air:
The previous afternoon as he was ascending from Camp Three to Camp Four, Beck later confessed to me, “my vision had gotten so bad that I couldn’t see more than a few feet. So I just tucked right behind John Taske and when he’d lift a foot I’d place my foot right in his bootprint.”…
Climbing above the South Col through the night, Beck managed to keep up with the group by employing the same strategy he’d used the previous afternoon — stepping in the footsteps of the person directly in front of him. But by the time he reached the Balcony and the sun came up, he realized his vision was worse than ever….
“At that point,” Beck revealed, “one eye was completely blurred over, I could barely see out of the other, and I’d lost all depth perception. I felt that I couldn’t see well enough to climb higher without being a danger to myself or a burden to someone else, so I told Rob what was going on.”
“Sorry pal,” Rob immediately announced, “you’re going down. I’ll send one of the Sherpas down with you.” But Beck wasn’t quite ready to give up his summit hopes: “I explained to Rob that I thought there was a pretty good chance my vision would improve once the sun got higher and my pupils contracted. I said I wanted to wait a little while, and then boogie on up after everybody else if I started seeing more clearly.”
Rob considered Beck’s proposal, then decreed, “O.K., fair enough. I’ll give you half an hour to find out. But I can’t have you going down to Camp Four on your own. If your vision isn’t better in thirty minutes I want you to stay here so I know exactly where you are until I come back from the summit, then we can go down together. I’m very serious about this: either you go down right now, or you promise me you’ll sit right here until I return.”
“So I crossed my heart and hoped to die,” Beck told me good-naturedly as we stood in the blowing snow and waning light. “And I’ve kept my word. Which is why I’m still standing here.”…
Now, however, it was getting dark and conditions were turning grim. “Come down with me,” I implored. “It will be at least another two or three hours before Rob shows up. I’ll be your eyes. I’ll get you down, no problem.” Beck was nearly persuaded to descend with me when I made the mistake of mentioning that Mike Groom was on his way down with Yasuko, a few minutes behind me. In a day of many mistakes, this would turn out to be one of the larger ones.
“Thanks anyway,” Beck said. “I think I’ll just wait for Mike. He’s got a rope; he’ll be able to short-rope me down.”
“O.K., Beck,” I replied. “It’s your call. I guess I’ll see you in camp, then.” Secretly, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to deal with getting Beck down the problematic slopes to come, most of which were not protected by fixed lines. Daylight was waning, the weather was worsening, and my reserves of strength were nearly gone. Yet I still didn’t have any sense that calamity was around the corner….
While Groom was waiting for Adams to climb back up to the ridge, he sent Namba down ahead and busied himself trying to find a camera case he’d left on the way up. As he was looking around, for the first time he noticed another person on the Balcony with him [Beck Weathers].
During a long, tape-recorded interview I did with Beck on May 30, 1996, he confirmed the details of our encounter, and he confirmed them again in his book, Left for Dead, which was published in April, 2000. Beck explained that he’d expected Rob to appear to take him down no later than three o’clock, but three “came and went. As did four and five.”:
I could sense the mountain starting to put itself to bed. The light went flat. It began to get a little colder. The wind picked up. The snow began to move, and I realized I’d stayed too long at the party. I was trapped.
I was beginning to lose it. Although I’d been breathing bottled oxygen and was not hypoxic, I had been standing or sitting for ten hours without moving much. The cold was beginning to act like an anesthetic on my mind. I hallucinated seeing people. They drifted in and out of focus.
I recognize now that I was sinking, cold past shivering, overtaken by a calm apathy, unable to appreciate my peril. The water bottles inside my jacket against the skin of my chest had frozen solid. If I’d been left there, I probably would have slowly frozen to death, without even trying to stir.
Then Jon Krakauer came along and I collected myself. He was plainly exhausted. We spoke for a bit. Jon said that Rob was still up there on the ridge, at least three hours behind him, which meant that all deals were off. There was no way I could wait three more hours. On the other hand, there also was no way now for me to descend unassisted.
Krakauer did the right thing. Although our guide Mike Groom was just twenty minutes behind him on the trail, he offered to help me down. I, in turn, was uncomfortable with inflicting myself on Jon. I declined with thanks, saying I’d wait for Groom. I think Jon heaved a little sigh of gratitude.
Michael Tracy has read Left for Dead, so he knows that Beck has vouched for the accuracy of my account. But this contradicts Tracy’s false claims about what transpired, so at the 18:18 mark in his video he tries to dismiss Beck’s book by griping:
Unfortunately, Beck Weathers was blind, so he couldn’t really tell us anything about who was there in his book, Left for Dead. He has a completely different version than both Krakauer and Groom, but as he was unable to see, I do not consider it to be a reliable account.
Before I go any further with my commentary, I should point out that twenty minutes into his video, Tracy excoriates me for writing this:
While Groom was waiting for Adams to climb back up to the ridge, he sent Namba down ahead and busied himself trying to find a camera case he’d left on the way up.
Here’s what Tracy claims in his video:
Even without reading Groom’s account, a story that has Groom sending Yasuko down alone is ridiculous! A story that has Groom sending Yasuko down alone so that he can look for a camera case is even more ridiculous!
In his video, however, Tracy neglects to mention that when Groom sent Yasuko Namba down ahead of him, she was doing fine and there was no apparent reason for him to be concerned about her, so stopping to search for his camera case was an entirely reasonable thing to do.
Nor did Tracy mention that my statement about Groom trying to find his camera case was based on what Groom himself told me when I interviewed him on July 19, 1996. Here is an extended quote of what Groom said, which I paraphrased in my book:
I was actually waiting for Martin to come up and over [the ridge] so I could guide him down. But when I found Beck there, I immediately turned my attention to him. I didn’t know Beck was there. He was covered in snow when I first saw him, camouflaged a bit. When I first saw him I took him to be one of the Fischer group. So I completely ignored him as I tried to find my camera case and my used [oxygen] cylinder on the crest of the ridge.
As this quote indicates, Groom was sufficiently upbeat about the remainder of our descent that he not only thought it would be fine for him to search for his camera case, he thought it would be fine to look for his empty oxygen bottle while he was at it. The two photographs below provide further evidence that I didn’t invent this anecdote.
I shot the first image just after sunrise at the Balcony. It shows Groom with his camera in his right hand and the grey camera case hanging on his chest. The second photo, which I shot as Groom approached the bottom of the Hillary Step with the South Summit in the background, shows that the camera case is no longer on his chest.
After Michael Groom told Yasuko and me to head down at approximately 4:15, I immediately began my descent, and Namba followed me soon thereafter. Groom arrived at the Balcony around 5:00 or 5:15, whereupon he was surprised to find Beck Weathers standing next to him. After Beck told him, “I can’t see, Mike. I have been waiting for you to come down,” according to Groom:
He didn’t have to say more. I knew we were in trouble when I looked into his blank and unfocused eyes.
Then Groom replied:
“Okay, Beck. We’ll see how you go on this first bit, which is fairly easy. I have a rope if you can’t manage. Follow me if you can.”
Within the first few metres I knew I had a difficult task on my hands to get us both down alive as Beck fell over twice on easy ground. I pulled a rope from my pack and hastily tied it to Beck’s harness because from here on the gully became much steeper and more difficult to negotiate.
When I interviewed Groom on May 26, 1996, he said:
Beck certainly needed a rope. I think if he’d gone down with you, you would have lost him. He was so hopelessly blind that I don’t know how many times I had to catch him on the rope. Every 10 meters, it was a step into thin air. I was worried he was going to pull me off. I had to make sure I had a good ice axe belay and that all my points were clean and sticking into something solid. Yeah, I had to not only be his eyes — go right, step here, step there — but also watch my own step at the same time. It was bloody nerve-wracking.
Groom told me that while was struggling to short-rope Beck down, he could see Yasuko and me descending far below:
You stayed in sight for a good hour…. You were probably down about 100 meters from us, and Yasuko was about 50 meters behind you. I remember this because you both had red North Face suits on. You obviously made better progress than Yasuko. The first part down from [the Balcony] was fairly straight forward. You could basically sit in the snow and slide, which is what I think Yasuko did. Then you got down to the rock slabs, and I think that’s when you made some ground on Yasuko…. Yasuko was very self-contained at that point, and capable of handling the difficulties. It’s just that when her oxygen ran out at the bottom of the gully, on much easier ground where you could actually stand and walk, she really went to pieces. And Beck did too.
From Groom’s comments above, it’s obvious he was unconcerned that I was well ahead of Namba at this point. Based on what Groom said when he told Namba and me to go down ahead of him, I believed that my role was to find a safe route down to the South Col and break trail ahead of Namba, so that’s what I did. Furthermore, because I had no way of knowing that it would be so difficult for Groom to short-rope Beck down, I assumed that Groom and Beck would catch up to Namba soon after they started down, and then catch up to me.
Unfortunately, after Groom saw Namba and me descending below him, things went sideways in a hurry. Several hundred feet below the Balcony the terrain became more problematic, forcing me to zig and zag through outcroppings of shattered rock covered with fresh snow. Descending this confusing, unstable ground in my diminished condition while trying to find the route down demanded total concentration, which was growing increasingly difficult.
The wind and snowfall had erased every trace of those who’d preceded me down. I was terrified that I might go the wrong way and not only put myself in mortal danger, but inadvertently lead the climbers coming down after me to their doom, too. In 1993, Michael Groom’s partner — Lopsang Tshering Bhutia, a skilled Himalayan climber who was a nephew of Tenzing Norgay’s — had taken a wrong turn while descending below the Balcony and fallen to his death.
Because short-roping Beck down turned out to be so fraught, Groom didn’t catch up to Namba until after she’d run out of oxygen and collapsed while descending the lowest fixed rope above the South Col. And Groom never caught up to me at all.
In my book I described who was behind me around this time as I was descending, based on interviews I did after the disaster:
One by one, following the tracks I’d made fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, Beidleman and the remainder of Fischer’s clients filed down through the worsening blizzard. Adams was behind me, ahead of the others; then came Namba, Groom and Weathers, Schoening and Gammelgaard, Beidleman, and finally Pittman, Fox, and Madsen.
Some 27 minutes into his video, Tracy makes the bizarre assertion that when I included this brief passage in Into Thin Air, I was claiming to have personally witnessed
all the other climbers behind Namba in what was a worsening storm. None of them would report seeing Namba until much later. More curious is that at this point in time Krakauer has memorized the climbing colors of all the climbers, and can make out who is who from hundreds of feet away, and keep it all in his memory with perfect recollection. And yet an hour later Krakauer will confuse Martin Adams with Andy Harris when he is standing right in front of Krakauer talking to him.
Of course Krakauer didn’t see that procession of climbers: He made it all up out of thin air. The only climber he could have seen was Yasuko Namba because she was right next to him.
Obviously, I could not and did not write the passage excerpted above based on what I personally saw, because I was never in a place where I could have seen any of it, nor did I ever suggest I saw it. I wrote this passage long after the fact, relying on what I’d learned from interviewing Michael Groom, Beck Weathers, Klev Schoening, Neal Beidleman, Sandy Pittman, Charlotte Fox, and Tim Madsen. And I did not see Namba because she had never been next to me, or even within a few minutes of me, since I’d started down from the Balcony more than two hours earlier.
Here’s what Groom wrote in his book about this stage of his descent with Beck Weathers:
For hours I shouted my instructions to Beck as we weaved our way down through the endless rock and ice gullies. It was just on dark when we stumbled thankfully onto the easy snow slopes that led to Camp 4, but they were still steep enough for Beck to sit and slide while I lowered him. I stopped for a few seconds to get a bearing on Camp 4; we now looked across to it rather than down on top of it. Under normal conditions it would have taken half an hour, but for us it would be at least an hour. Here a few members of the Fischer group caught up with us, the only one I knew being Neal Beidleman.
By now Beck was exhausted. It was still snowing and in the last few minutes of light I got my visual direction on Camp 4. If we kept our bearing we would walk straight into it, but the distractions were many as I shouldered a good deal of Beck’s weight to try to make any sort of progress. The falling snow now had a sting to it brought about by a steadily increasing wind, and with Beck’s regular requests for a rest I soon lost any sense of Camp 4’s position.
A few metres further on we came across Yasuko sitting in the snow. Neal had found her first and was removing her oxygen mask as her supply, like ours, had run out. No amount of persuasion could convince her that she had run out as she persisted in putting her mask back on, which only suffocated her more. Finally we ripped the straps from her mask and shoved it in her pack. Thankfully Neal and his group were able to descend with her, while I continued very slowly with Beck. Visibility was now down to a few metres as high winds lashed the upper slopes of Everest and with it came the energy-sapping cold. I was afraid we would lose sight of the others.
“Come on Beck. We have to keep up with the others,” I yelled.
“Mike, I need to rest. Just a short rest,” he begged.
I relented, silently cursing with every second that passed. Beck was going nowhere without a rest. Meanwhile the others were moving further away from us.
Quickly the situation became critical: We lost sight of Neal’s group and any shouting was carried off by the wind. Beck and I were alone. I had done everything I could to keep up with the others, but our pace was far too slow. I sat Beck down as the 70 to 80-kilometre-per-hour winds threatened to blow us off our feet and snow stung my eyes, temporarily blinding me.
By now my own oxygen was long gone, too. The storm had metastasized into a hurricane, and visibility was near zero. In retrospect, do I wish that I had gone back to determine if Groom, Beck Weathers, and Namba needed assistance, instead of pushing ahead with my descent? Yes, of course. My failure to do so still haunts me. At that moment, though, I was too far gone to do anything more than continue stumbling down to the South Col with the last dregs of my energy. When I finally got there, I was so wasted I couldn’t even remove the crampons from my boots before collapsing into my tent.
The next day, May 11, I learned that Yasuko Namba was dead. She’d perished in the storm after getting stranded on the eastern edge of the South Col with Michael Groom, Beck Weathers, Neal Beidleman, Klev Schoening, Lene Gammelgaard, Charlotte Fox, Tim Madsen, and Sandy Pittman. By the morning of May 12, when those of us on Rob Hall’s team who’d survived were still in shock and disarray at 26,000 feet on the South Col, I learned that Rob Hall, Andy Harris, Doug Hansen, and Scott Fischer were dead, too. It was impossible to comprehend. It felt like we were in a living nightmare.
There is no way to convey how confused and horrified I was, or how much remorse I felt at the time, and continue to feel now. As I wrote in Into Thin Air:
While Yasuko Namba lay dying on the South Col, I was a mere 350 yards away, huddled inside a tent, oblivious to her struggle, concerned only with my own safety. The stain this has left on my psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a few months of grief and guilt-ridden self-reproach.
Michael Tracy spends the final minutes of his video portraying me as a heartless monster who caused Namba’s death by deliberately abandoning her. Here is some of what he says:
Yasuko is dead and Krakauer will never say what really happened. Many Krakauer fans will write this off to just faulty memory or convince himself that Mike Groom got it all wrong, but if you really look at it, it gets into the heart of who Jon Krakauer really is.
No one expected Krakauer to be Superman and head out into the storm and drag stranded climbers back to camp the way Boukreev did, but perhaps he could have been a Clark Kent that showed just a little bit of humanity toward Yasuko Namba. She didn’t need to be short roped. She didn’t need to be pulled or carried, she just needed a strong climber to be out in front to provide a break in the wind and to know the route. That would not have slowed Krakauer down more than a couple of minutes.
Would it have adverted the disaster and saved everyone’s lives? No, certainly not, but it would have saved one life and likely Krakauer would be a completely different person than he is today, and of all the tragedies from 1996 that has to rank up there as one of the larger ones.
Tracy is mistaken when he says that all Namba needed was “a strong climber to be out in front to provide a break in the wind and to know the route.”
When the full force of the storm slammed into us, the wind was far too powerful for anyone to create a “break in the wind” for anyone else. And because Namba followed the trail I broke for her, she was on the correct route when she collapsed, clipped to a fixed rope. What she needed to get safely down from there was a cannister of oxygen, and neither I nor anyone else had one to give her.
To rub salt in my emotional wounds and further impugn my character, near the end of his video Tracy quotes the passage below from Into Thin Air, and asserts that I’m a hypocrite for criticizing Boukreev for doing the same thing I did when I made it safely back to the South Col — even though Boukreev was a guide, and I was not:
Boukreev had come down to the South Col hours in front of anyone else in Fischer’s team. Indeed, by 5:00 P.M., while his teammates were still struggling down through the clouds at 28,000 feet, Boukreev was already in his tent resting and drinking tea.
Tracy then says:
Boukreev headed back out into the storm numerous times to haul his teammates back to safety while Krakauer stayed in his tent listening with callous indifference to the desperate radio calls from his teammate Mike Groom who had selflessly given Krakauer his own oxygen earlier in the day.
Tracy is correct to point out that I stayed in my tent while Boukreev went out into the storm multiple times attempting to rescue missing climbers. And Tracy is also correct when he states in this video (and in other videos) that during an interview I did with the website Outside Online posted on May 20, 1996, I inadvertently made some false statements about that night. At one point the interviewer asked me, “When did you first sense that things were going wrong on the mountain?”
I replied that it was when I was lying in my tent after returning to the South Col on the night of May 10:
When we were getting radio calls from Mike [Groom], we knew he was lost out there. We all had lights on in our tents. We would periodically go out and shine our lights into the sky. Some people had lights mounted straight up. We’d bang pots and pans. None of that had any effect. The sound was lost, you couldn’t talk from one tent to the next. It was real chaotic at Camp IV. Afterwards, partly because two of our three guides were dead, or on their way, they weren’t with us. The third guide was lost. Neal and Scott were both gone. It was just a bunch of climbers, totally whipped, totally exhausted in their tents, not thinking clearly, not enough oxygen. We all could have done more, in retrospect. Why didn’t I go out with Stuart, one of our guys, and look for Yasuko and Beck? Well, because Stuart Hutchinson was doing it, and at the time, I was just trying to get through the night.
This interview took place on the day after I returned home from Everest. I hadn’t even had time to unpack my expedition duffels, let alone to fact-check my hypoxic memories by reviewing the eleven notebooks I’d filled with firsthand observations during the expedition. Nor had I interviewed any of the more than 30 individuals who were involved in the disaster and later provided me with an immense amount of important material for my book.
When I spoke with my interlocuter from Outside Online, I was sleep deprived, severely traumatized, and struggling to make sense of what had just happened on Everest. As a consequence, some statements I made in the interview were incorrect, including my statement that I was one of the people who “had lights on in our tents. We would periodically go out and shine our lights into the sky. Some people had lights mounted straight up. We’d bang pots and pans.”
I did none of those things, which became clear to me on June 5, 1996, when I interviewed Stuart Hutchison, my tentmate during the three nights we spent on the South Col. During this interview I also asked Hutchison why, upon learning the whereabouts of the missing climbers, he didn’t attempt to rouse Frank Fischbeck, Lou Kasischke, John Taske, or me to request our help with the rescue effort. Here’s what he told me:
It was so obvious that all of you were completely exhausted that I didn’t even consider asking. You were so far past the point of ordinary fatigue that I thought if you attempted to help with a rescue you were only going to make the situation worse — that you would get out there and have to be rescued yourself.
As I noted above, in Tracy’s video he quotes a passage from Into Thin Air to portray me as a hypocrite. But Tracy neglected to quote any of the material from my book that followed this passage — material that adds considerable nuance to my criticisms of Boukreev:
Experienced guides would later question [Boukreev’s] decision to descend so far ahead of his clients — extremely unorthodox behavior for a guide. One of the clients from that group has nothing but contempt for Boukreev, insisting that when it mattered most, the guide “cut and ran.”
Anatoli had left the summit around 2:00 P.M. and quickly became entangled in the traffic jam at the Hillary Step. As soon as the mob dispersed he moved very rapidly down the Southeast Ridge without waiting for any clients — despite telling Fischer atop the Step that he would be going down with Martin Adams. Boukreev thereby arrived at Camp Four well before the brunt of the storm….
Boukreev was worried sick about the nineteen climbers who were missing, but because he had no idea where they might be, there was little he could do except warm himself, try to regain some strength, and bide his time. Then, at 12:45 A.M., Beidleman, Groom, Schoening, and Gammelgaard hobbled into camp. “Klev and Neal had lost all power and could barely talk,” Boukreev recalls. “They told me Charlotte, Sandy, and Tim need help, Sandy is close to dying. Then they give me general location where to find them.”…
At this point, Boukreev tried to organize a rescue effort to bring in the climbers who were stranded out on the eastern lip of the South Col, but discovered everyone he managed to rouse was too sick, too exhausted, or too frightened to help him. As I wrote in my book:
So the Russian guide resolved to bring back the group by himself. Overcoming his own crippling exhaustion, he plunged into the maw of the hurricane and searched the Col for nearly an hour. It was an incredible display of strength and courage, but he was unable to find any of the missing climbers.
Boukreev didn’t give up, however. He returned to camp, obtained a more detailed set of directions from Beidleman and Schoening, then went out into the storm again. This time he saw the faint glow of Madsen’s fading headlamp and was thereby able to locate the missing climbers. “They were lying on the ice, without movement,” says Boukreev. “They could not talk.” Madsen was still conscious and largely able to take care of himself, but Pittman, Fox, and Weathers were utterly helpless, and Namba appeared to be dead.
It’s reasonable for people to wonder if I’m responsible for the death of Yasuko Namba. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about this, too. I’ve been trying to process Yasuko’s death, and pondering my role in it, ever since she perished, but as I explained above, my failure to come to her aid was not because I was callous.
Eventually I came to understand that by embedding as a journalist with Rob Hall’s team, I did indeed contribute to Namba’s death, albeit inadvertently. While I was engaged in the day-to-day process of climbing Everest, I failed to recognize how my presence affected the other clients on Hall’s team. Even worse, I failed to foresee how my presence would create intense pressure on Rob Hall to get as many clients as possible to the summit, inducing him to take risks that he absolutely shouldn’t have taken.
If I hadn’t been there on May 10 writing an article for Outside magazine, it seems likely Hall might have turned Hansen around early in the day instead of allowing him to continue to the summit at such an alarmingly late hour — a mistake that resulted in the deaths of Hall, Hansen, and Andy Harris.
And Hall’s failure to turn Hansen around led indirectly to the death of Yasuko Namba, too, because when Hansen collapsed just below the summit, Hall and Harris were compelled to remain high on the mountain to assist him, which meant that neither guide was available to short-rope Beck Weathers down from the Balcony. Michael Groom was thus required to bring Beck down, preventing Groom from descending with Namba as he’d intended. If Groom had been able to guide Yasuko Namba down, I believe it’s likely she would have arrived at the tents before the worst of the storm engulfed the mountain and before she ran out of oxygen — which is what ultimately caused her to collapse a relatively short distance above the tents.
In October 1998, I returned to Everest with my wife; Doug Hansen’s sister; Andy Harris’ parents and girlfriend; my friend Chhongba Sherpa (who was the Base Camp cook on our expedition); and two skilled Sherpa stonemasons to hold an intimate memorial service at the foot of the mountain for Doug, Andy, and Yasuko.
Before arriving in Nepal, I’d learned that Rob Hall’s loved ones had built a large Buddhist chorten to honor him. So with guidance provided by Chhongba-Dai and the stonemasons, next to Hall’s monument we built the beautiful, smaller chorten shown in the photo below as a memorial to Yasuko Namba, Doug Hansen, and Andy Harris. We embedded stone plaques inscribed with their names on three sides of it.
Our visit to Everest in 1998 was a powerful, almost unbearably intense experience. Each of us shared the pain and anger we were struggling to manage. We did a lot of weeping, and spent hours viewing the uppermost reaches of Everest through a high-power spotting scope. But none of this provided a sense of closure. Twenty-nine years after her death, I still think of Yasuko often with grief, remorse, and tremendous sadness.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
On February 11, Michael Tracy posted this message on his YouTube channel:
I have removed the video “Sheer Will vs Thin Air: Analysis of Jon Krakauer and Yasuko Namba’s locations after 3:30PM”
That video presented the significant differences between the events described in Michael Groom’s Sheer Will and those of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Krakauer took issue with attributing these discrepancies to some motive.
Needless to say, I took issue with a lot more than attributing Tracy’s “discrepancies to some motive,” but I am nevertheless glad Tracy has removed the dishonest and defamatory video that was the subject of this chapter.
Comments posted in Tracy’s confidential Discord server indicate that he was persuaded to remove his video by a number of his own supporters who strongly disapproved of it. I am very grateful to them for doing this.
