Into Thin Air By Jon Krakauer

Mount Everest is known as the tallest point on Earth. It is a climb that every climber yearns for. In 1996, a group of experienced climbers attempted to climb Everest, ultimately ending with 8 people dead. This incident became known as the 1996 Mount Everest Disaster. Jon Krakauer, one of the survivors of this climb wrote the memoir, Into Thin Air, in which he expresses that life is unpredictable and that when feeling in doubt one should never give up.
Krakauer visioned the climb to be fun, fulfilling, and challenging; however, he soon realized that it was excruciatingly painful. He expressed early in his memoir, ”Secretly, I dreamed of ascending Everest myself one day; for more than a decade it remained a burning ambition” (Krakauer 23). As

Krakauer had been with his group for the whole climb, but a storm suddenly hits and splits him up from them. At this point, he does not know if he will survive. He expresses, “For the first time I had a sense of how wasted I really was: I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life” (Krakauer 203). He is soon reunited with the group, but the realization of being close to death still haunts him. The thought of being close to death allows him to keep on fighting because he knows that he does not want to die. As the dreadful climb progresses the conditions only worsen: Temperature dropping, oxygen levels lowering, and physical and mental fatigue sets in. Eight people are dead, and the remaining survivors do not know if they will make it out or not, but a spark of hope arrives when they see a helicopter flying in the air. Krakauer declares, with a devastated tone, “The magnitude of this calamity was so far beyond anything I’d ever imagined that my brain simply shorted out and went dark” (Krakauer 276). He never gave up; even when he thought that he wasn’t going to make it; he kept on