The plot of Into Thin Air is about the quest to reach the peak of Everest, the tallest mountain in the world. Of course, no one can plan for everything that will happen in the future, and that is how the quote “It is the unforeseen struggle in every journey that teaches us what it is to be human” is illustrated in the story. Hall’s clients paid a lot of money to be taken to the top of Everest safely and make it back down. As a very experienced guide, he tried to plan for everything that could go wrong. He had extra tanks of oxygen brought to all the camps as well as acclimatization exercises that prepared his clients for the thin air higher in the atmosphere. What he hadn’t prepared for was the adverse weather. In all of his climbing experience, …show more content…
To survive in the literally thin air at the top of Everest, which is at a lower atmospheric pressure than sea level because of the higher elevation, the Adventure Consultant guides and clients used bottled oxygen to provide a simulated lower pressure and give more oxygen to its user. The clients and guides all trekked up Everest into air with less oxygen by choice, but it affected everyone in ways almost insane to ordinary people breathing ordinary air. Few, if none of them realized that more than half of them who went up wouldn’t come down. Some causes of the disaster were multiple kinds of altitude sickness and lowered oxygen that impaired judgement, which was a chain reaction that lead to the deaths of even more people. But it was also arrogance and the overconfident, zealous manner that the mountain was approached and climbed that lead to the disaster as well. Fischer even said he had “built a yellow brick road to the summit”, causing the reader to believe he was most likely very arrogant about his guiding and climbing skills. No matter the cause of the disaster, just like a plane will eventually fail in thin air, so will climbers, and that is exactly what happened in the book Into Thin Air. The title of the book literally and figuratively stands for what the book is about and hints at the unfortunate outcome of the