I've been a lover of extreme climbing stories ever since reading Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, which covered the disastrous loss of life on Mount Everest during the 1996 climbing season. Since then I've read a few similar books (though none quite as exciting) and hiked to the summit of the extinct volcano Rangitoto, which, at only 259 meters above sea level (compared to Everest's 8848) is pleasantly warm in late summer and accessible in around two hours with nothing more than good walking shoes and a willingness to scramble a bit. Since I don't like cold weather or heights and strongly prefer the normal proportion of oxygen in my air, I don't ever expect to ever climb anything much more ambitious than that. But I still like reading about highly-skilled people doing highly-dangerous climbs out of sheer because-it's-there ambition. And I particularly like this kind of book when I'm finding life personally stressful; there's nothing like reading about other people's misery to put things in perspective. So I was pleased while scanning the library bookshelves for something else entirely to come across Krakauer's first book, a collection of his magazine articles entitled Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains
(1990).
The articles run the gamut from profiles of mountaineering personalities and associated adventurers to explorations of related disciplines like freestyle rock climbing and frozen waterfall-climbing and a discussion of a 1987 controversy about whether Everest or K2 was actually the highest mountain in the world. This has since been resolved in Everest's favor, though in the interim both Everest and K2 have been resurveyed and given official heights slightly lower than before. I learned from this article just how difficult it is to survey a mountain.
The highlights for me, however, were the five articles focusing most on mountaineering and on Krakauer's personal experiences. In the title piece, Krakauer and a buddy attempt to scale the north face of the Eiger, a notoriously dangerous route that has claimed many lives. Krakauer has a real gift for communicating the experience of mountaineering:
I suddenly became overwhelmed by the fact that the only things preventing me from flying off into space were two thin steel picks sunk half an inch into a medium that resembled the inside of my freezer when it need to be defrosted. I looked down at the ground more than three thousand feet below and felt dizzy, as if I were about to faint.
Clearly, mountaineers are a very special breed of crazy. I was clinging to my armchair just imagining hanging off a sheer mountain face like that.
Krakauer never summitted on that trip; in a fit of common sense he conceded defeat and went home. I wonder whether he ever went back.
In "Chamonix", Krakauer finds himself in the ritzy French resort town full of climbers, skiiers, and extreme sportsmen and -women of various kinds. The French have an individualist approach to sports and are nonchalantly snobbish about it, as Krakauer describes in an encounter with a French cilmber and paraglider who disparages a difficult climb that Krakuer and his climbing partner had completed with "You did not solo and you did not fly? Did you not find the experience a little -- how you say in English -- banal?" This article also contains a lovely description of summitting the Tour Ronde in the face of falling rocks and more obnoxious French climbers.
"Club Denali" seems prescient in a book that preceded the events of Into Thin Air by six years. Krakauer describes some of the wonderfully eccentric cast of characters, many woefully underequipped and inexperienced, trying to climb Alaska's Mount McKinley (Denali). While the article contains plenty of mountaineering detail and criticism of the tendency of unprepared climbers to take on dangerous peaks (the trend which led in part to the Everest disaster), I most enjoyed the sheer nuttiness of the cast of characters. Adrian "the Romanian" Popovich is now a respected high-altitude skier but back then was something of a crackpot who had to be rescued off the slopes of Denali and stiffed his rescuers on their fees before heading back up again. Even wackier were the four Alaskans who made up the expedition officially titled "Dick Danger and the Throbbing Members", who end up holed up for days without food in a four-foot-high ice cave, where they amuse themselves by singing television theme songs before finally making a successful summit push. This is another peak that Krakauer concedes defeat on in the face of low supplies and unrelenting weather.
"A Bad Summer on K2" is like a compressed version of Into Thin Air: a description of the notorious summer of 1986, when a record twenty-seven people summitted the world's second-highest mountain and thirteen others died in the attempt or on the descent. The story is replete with top-notch cilmbers ending up frostbitten and barely alive or, worse, plummeting into crevasses; falling off cliffs; and vanishing in avalanches. There's also a similar level of controversy over the behavior of some of the climbers who made the hard choice to save themselves while leaving their companions on the mountain to die. It's not a pretty story. And these are some of the most experienced professional climbers in the world, not the collection of amateurs found on Denali. This essay and "Club Denali" give the best background for understanding Everest in 1996.
The final article, written specifically for this volume, is "The Devil's Thumb", which describes the youthful Krakauer's solo trip to that particular Alaskan mountain. At twenty-three, he had graduated college, broken off a relationship, and was working as a carpenter in Boulder before a sudden desire to change his life made him decide to pack up and head for Alaska on a mission to solo-climb the Thumb. I won't spoil the story of Krakauer's time on the Thumb beyond the obvious, that he survived the experience, but three weeks later, he heads back to Colorado, not as transformed as he had hoped by the time spent living on a glacier and making dangerous solo climbs.
While Eiger Dreams doesn't deliver the emotional impact of a full-length tale like Into Thin Air, it's a wonderful varied set of articles on different corners of the high-altitude sports world as it existed in the 1970s and 1980s, just at the beginning of the modern trend of mass scaling of high peaks by relatively inexperienced climbers. I recommend it highly for any fan of mountaineering, outdoor sports, or simply scary survival stories.
Read for yourself:
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