Nicholas’s Reviews > Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster > Status Update

I’m just gonna say it, Anatoli was just a typical stubborn Russian who would never dare back down after feeling slighted. It sucks how things turned out between the author and Toli, but that’s pretty much par for the course if you try telling an Eastern European that they made a mistake. Either way, Anatoli was a badass mountaineer, shit happens. He, quite obviously, was only “guiding” as a means to an end.

Well, that escalated quickly. It’s wild how there’s zero margin for error when you’re in the “death zone.” Storm, miscommunication, mistaken identities and timelines due to hypoxia. Like David Robert’s quote from pg 152 says, “much of the appeal of mountaineering lies in its simplification of interpersonal relationships… adolescent refusal to take seriously aging, frailty of others…”

Vicious.

My reading “climb” continues for Into Thin Air. The author has just made it to camp 3 for his “acclimatization” and returns to base camp. Concerns are expressed about having an author along on the expedition, regarding unnecessary pressures from being written about. Pretty fascinating when you consider what Rob Hall was risking, business wise, if the climb was a failure. Makes ya think! 😬

Author is at Camp 2. He encountered his first two dead bodies, well, one and a half. His recollection of the IMAX Expedition and Sandy Hill Pittman was a fascinating anecdote. The fate of the Sherpa HAPE was also wild, after all that work to help him rapidly descend, he ends up dead anyway. Brutal.