Updated May 13, 2026 at 3:14 PM EDT
This week marks thirty years since a blizzard on Mount Everest caused the death of eight climbers from three climbing parties: Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants, Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness, and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition.
Both Hall and Fischer died. The volume of climbers attempting to summit the mountain also contributed to the disaster.
Jon Krakauer, a journalist and a member of Hall’s climbing team, wrote about the catastrophe in his 1997 book “Into Thin Air.”
8 questions with Jon Krakauer
A year after the disaster, you wrote in “Into Thin Air” that the shadow cast by Everest seemed to recede very little with the passage of time. That was a year later. Now it’s been 30. How are you doing?
“Definitely a lot better than I was. I have a different perspective, but I had really bad [post-traumatic stress disorder]. I didn’t even admit I had it until several years after the disaster. I was persuaded that I had a problem by some veterans I’d met in Afghanistan while reporting a book there who twisted my arm to join their group therapy. And that’s what started helping me.
“So it took a toll. I regret ever having gone on that trip. It’s one of the few regrets I have in my life. I was a skilled climber, but I’d never been above 17,000 feet. And altitude, as I learned, is a totally different thing.”
Can we talk about the altitude? On Everest, you were dependent on bottles of oxygen and there weren’t enough. And without the oxygen at that altitude, there’s disorientation. You have people wandering around like zombies in the middle of this unbelievable storm, some blinded, some just sitting down. And it was 100 degrees below zero?
“The wind chill was at least that cold., It froze your skin instantly. [The wind] was blowing like a sand blaster. That’s why people got lost on this relatively flat plateau. It was nighttime. They couldn’t wear goggles. They didn’t have oxygen masks on anymore. And so the wind would just blind them, so they were turned to the side. And that’s what led them to the edge of this precipice, this 7,000 foot precipice where they had to spend the night.
“And I was stupid. I ran out of oxygen because I thought I would get to the top on two bottles and get back down to where I had a third bottle stashed. I hadn’t counted on the traffic jams. So as I was about to rappel down on the rope, there was a parade of 20 or 30 climbers coming up, and I spent 90 minutes at 29,000 feet without supplemental oxygen. I have no idea how many millions of brain cells I lost, but for the rest of that day I was not thinking or acting well.”
In addition to the storm, there were other factors that led to the disaster. What were they?
“There were a series of bad decisions, small but very bad decisions. So, it wasn’t one thing or two things or five things, it was this cascade of bad decisions that added up to disaster. One of them was, Hall had this rule. Anyone who wasn’t at the summit by 1 or 2 o’clock, you had to turn around. And Rob ignored that.
“He himself escorted one of his clients, Doug Hansen, to the top at 4o’clock. And I think that was because Rob was the most successful guide in the short history of guiding Everest. I think he had hubris. I think he was a little too overconfident. But this year he had a rival, an American rival, Scott Fischer. And so Rob felt competitive. And I feel responsible in large part, because I was there as a journalist, and Rob had an incentive to get as many clients to the top as possible.”
It’s also heartbreaking. What was it like to lose a respected and beloved guide like Hall?
“It was horrible. Three days above 26,000 feet. Two of our three guides on my team, Rob’s team, were killed: Rob and Andy Harris, a junior guide. It was a nightmare. It didn’t seem real.
“When I woke up the morning after, I learned that 19 people are still missing and all these people are probably dead. And I kind of just went into numb mode and just figured, ‘What do I got to do to survive and what do you got to do to help other people stay alive?’ And that’s what happens. That’s why you get PTSD: you just turn off all that and get through it, and then you get down and realize what’s happened.
“That’s why I wrote this book. It’s just ironic. You know, my editor asked me to write this article for Outside magazine. And so when I got back [I] said, ‘OK, I’m going to write this. people aren’t going to like it. The guides aren’t going to like it. I’m going to tell the truth.’ And I did that. And to my shock, it actually turned out to be, as one of the [Mount Everest] guides put it, the best thing that ever happened to his business. My book made people go to Everest, as I put it, like gamblers to a slot machine. That just blows my mind. I was the 621st person in 1996, 30 years later, 13,000 people have climbed.
Your book is also credited with changing climbing. And there’s been changes throughout the climbing industry, including better working conditions and more respect for Sherpa guides. What are some of the other changes that have been made?
“Everest is much safer now. Last year, 2025 was statistically the safest ever on Everest. Only five people died; 846 made the summit. That’s a ratio of one death for every 200 climbers. When I climbed, it was one death for every six climbers who reached the summit. There’s a lot more Sherpas. When I went, each climber got three bottles of oxygen. And because we were slow, because we had slow climbers and traffic jams, that wasn’t enough. And almost everyone ran out of oxygen. So nowadays, if you’re willing to pay for it, you can have as many bottles as you want. And now that there’s new regulations in Nepal, where each climber needs his own private guide and many have two Sherpa guides, that’s what’s made it safer.
“But these crowds scare me because there have been a couple of mass casualty events on Everest. In 2014, there was a huge avalanche, these ice blocks as big as Beverly Hills mansions tumbling down. And they killed 16 Nepalis, mostly Sherpa high-altitude workers. There was the [2015] earthquake that killed 22 people at base camp.
“There’s going to be more of that because of global warming. You know, all this ice that covers the Everest massif is melting, becoming more unstable. So, you may think it’s not as risky as it was, but I’m almost certain there’s going to be another mass casualty event. And this time, with the crowds, instead of being 16 climbers, it could be 100 climbers who die, literally. Because there’s 100 climbers stacked up in the icefall and they’re underneath these Beverly Hills mansions of ice that are unstable. Everest is never going to be safe. It’s a lot safer now.”
You’re talking about the safety concerns, but others have said that climbing Everest isn’t the romantic notion of climbing that it was.
“It’s not. Everest has changed. The mountain is no longer what it once was. It’s been reduced in stature, if not height, but because it is still the highest, people line up to climb it. And the experience has been degraded. There’s a lot more trash, a lot more human waste. The government of Nepal has been so dysfunctional it hasn’t been able to come up with solutions Yet [it’s] still Everest, and it still requires a lot of effort and a lot of suffering, even with all the help you get.”
Are there other people still trying to shake off the 1996 disaster as you are?
“I think so. I mean, there were. Last time I checked, marriages were destroyed, there was a lot of depression, mostly because of the experience. And then a lot of people are angry at me for writing the book. Fischer’s sister wrote me a very angry letter, [saying] ‘how dare I, a survivor, judge those who were killed.’ And I felt terrible and I still feel terrible for that. But my job was to report the facts, report the truth. That was my duty. And that’s what I did.”
Do you feel guilty about the success of the book?
“Oh, of course. I mean, that’s what made the PTSD so much worse. It would have been bad enough if I just survived and these people died. But ‘Into Thin Air’ was out of control. It was the No. 1 bestseller for a long [time], and I got rich off of it. And I felt awful.
“Luckily, I came upon the American Himalayan Foundation, and it gave me an outlet. I became really involved with them. I gave them a ton of money. I still do. I’m currently the board chair and that’s what kind of saved my life, literally, was being able to turn this grief and guilt and shame into something positive for the people of Nepal. Not that it erased it, but I literally don’t know if I didn’t have that, what would have happened to me because I was in bad shape when I got home.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
____
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2026 WBUR