Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 103

Krakauer’s Into Thin Air

97

do enough of the actual work: Sherpas set up camp, Sherpas did
the cooking. We didn’t have to cooperate and work out who was
going to haul this load or who was going to cook or do the dishes
or chop the ice for water. Which contributed to the fact that we
never coalesced as a team, which in turn contributed to the trag
edy: We were all in it for ourselves when we should have been in
it for each other. When I should have been there for others, I wasn’t.
I was a client and my teammates were clients, and we all counted
on the guides to take care of anyone who got into trouble. But the
guides couldn’t, because they were dead or dying, and there weren’t
enough of them.
The callous individualism associated with a self-interested elite is here flailed for
the public good. Krakauer is perhaps the perfect medium for the articulation of a
class-bound social critique of climbing because he is a home-grown climber from
Corvallis, Oregon: like some other northwestern climbers, his experience is as
much a product of geography as it is social ly privileged access to the sport of
mountaineering.
Krakauer’s own climbing heroes included Willie Unsoeld, who died while
climbing the north face of Mount Rainier in Washington State; John Gill, who
developed “bouldering,” a kind of rock climbing focused on the nearly mathematical
surmounting of smooth bare faces on short climbs gamering little prestige; Yvon
Chouinard, the premier ice-climber of the 1960s who, though he made good with
his invention and sales of climbing equipment and clothing, at times lived on cat
food in order to sustain his climbing habits (Eiger 33); and the lusty working-class
Yorkshire lads Alan and Adrian Burgess (Eiger 130-62). In climbing circles, these
are homespun heroes, purist counter-cultural climbing bums. Interestingly,
Krakauer constructs the finished pantheon of this sort of pure and unpretentious
climber in his 1990 book Eiger Dreams long before the events at Everest invited
further review of the unpalatable excess of the richest climbing set. Not simply
judgments about climbing, these essays are also social judgments that resonate
morally in Krakauer’s very choice of metaphors. In his description of a climb of
McKinley published in Eiger Dreams, for example, he portrays the small hamlet
of tents at a base camp as divided by “seedier neighborhoods” — one of which is
located next to the busy communal latrine — and, at the opposite end of camp,
there lies “the high-rent district” (Eiger 1\). With the 1996 death of five climbers
on Everest and the emergence of his own feelings of culpability for their fate,
Krakauer’s democratic credo of meritocracy has returned with a vengeance, and
there has been little indication that it will abate. In the recent National Geographic
production Explorer portraying his ascent of a 2000-foot peak in Antarctica with