Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer Read Free Book Online

contrail, it occurred to me that the top of Everest was precisely the same height as the pressurized jet bearing me through the heavens. That I proposed to climb to the cruising altitude of an Airbus 300 jetliner struck me, at that moment, as preposterous, or worse. My palms felt clammy.
    Forty minutes later I was on the ground in Kathmandu. As I walked into the airport lobby after clearing customs, a big-boned, clean-shaven young man took note of my two huge duffels and approached. “Would you be Jon, then?” he inquired in a lilting New Zealand accent, glancing at a sheet of photocopied passport photos depicting Rob Hall’s clients. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Andy Harris, one of Hall’s guides, come to deliver me to our hotel.
    Harris, who was thirty-one, said there was supposed to be another client arriving on the same flight from Bangkok, a fifty-three-year-old attorney from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, named Lou Kasischke. It ended up taking an hour for Kasischke to locate his bags, so while we waited Andy and I compared notes on some hard climbs we’d both survived in western Canada and discussed the merits of skiing versus snowboarding. Andy’s palpable hunger for climbing, his unalloyed enthusiasm for the mountains, made me wistful for the period in my own life when climbing was the most important thing imaginable, when I charted the course of my existence in terms of mountains I’d ascended and those I hoped one day to ascend.
    Just before Kasischke—a tall, athletic, silver-haired man with patrician reserve—emerged from the airport customs queue, I asked Andy how many times he’d been on Everest. “Actually,” he confessed cheerfully, “this will be my first time, same as you. It should be interesting to see how I do up there.”
    Hall had booked us at the Garuda Hotel, a friendly, funky establishment in the heart of Thamel, Kathmandu’s frenetic tourist district, on a narrow avenue choked with cycle rickshas and street hustlers. The Garuda has long been popular with expeditions bound for the Himalaya, and its walls were covered with signed photographs of famous alpinists who’d slept there over the years: Reinhold Messner, Peter Habeler, Kitty Calhoun, John Roskelley, Jeff Lowe. Ascending the stairs to my room I passed a large four-color poster titled “Himalayan Trilogy,” depicting Everest, K2, and Lhotse—the planet’s highest, second-highest, and fourth-highest mountains, respectively. Superimposed against the images of these peaks, the poster showed a grinning, bearded man in full alpine regalia. A caption identified this climber as Rob Hall; the poster, intended to drum up business for Hall’s guiding company, Adventure Consultants, commemorated his rather impressive feat of ascending all three peaks during two months in 1994.
    An hour later I met Hall in the flesh. He stood six foot three or four and was skinny as a pole. There was something cherubic about his face, yet he looked older than his thirty-five years—perhaps it was the sharply etched creases at the corners of his eyes, or the air of authority he projected. He was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and faded Levis patched on one knee with an embroidered yin-yang symbol. An unruly thatch of brown hair corkscrewed across his forehead. His shrublike beard was in need of a trim.
    Gregarious by nature, Hall proved to be a skillful raconteur with a caustic Kiwi wit. Launching into a long story involving a French tourist, a Buddhist monk, and a particularly shaggy yak, Hall delivered the punch line with an impish squint, paused a beat for effect, then threw his head back in a booming, contagious laugh, unable to contain his delight in his own yarn. I liked him immediately.
    Hall was born into a working-class Catholic family in Christ church, New Zealand, the youngest of nine children. Although he had a quick, scientific mind, at the age of fifteen he dropped out of school after butting heads with an especially autocratic