into thin air

For my book report I have chosen "Into Thin Air: A personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster". This non-fiction book is written by Jon Krauker, who is a journalist. In this book, Krauker talks about the events which led him to participate in an expedition to Mt. Everest and what happens during this expedition. This expedition to Everest of 1996 is considered to be one of the deadliest season in history and Krauker tells the story of it. Krauker is a writer and a climber who is put on an assigment for Outside magazine to report on the growing commercialization on Mount Everest. Krauker decides that he wants to climb the mountain and therefore, accept the magazine's offer. He joins the Adventure Consultants, the climbing service, led by Rob Hall who is one of the most respected high-altitute guide in the world. Hall is a 35 year old guy from New Zealander and had climbed the Mount Everest many times. Another expedition team that was climbing the Everest during the same time as Krauker's group was a group led by Scott Fischer. Fischer is a 40 year old courageous guy who had variety of experience with the mountain. He even climbed the peak without supplemental oxygen in 1994. Some people Kreuker talks in the book and was climbing with are Andy Harris, Sandy Pittman, Beck Weathers and Doug Hansen. The expedition is structured into five camps which are the Base Camp, Camp One, Camp Two, Camp Three, and Camp Four. The climbing teams first spend a couple of weeks on Base Camp and start traveling to the other four camps. Each of these camps are about 2,000 feet higher than the previous one, and climbers bring food, water, and oxygen to each camp. All these gears make the expedition even harder for the climbers because of the extra weight that they have to carry and extra energy that they have to spend to do so.

Most of the horrible and deadly events occurred after Krauker and his team reached the summit. On May 10, 1996, Krauker and only a few other climbers made