How Everest Has Changed Since Into Thin Air

Climbing Mount Everest is a lot safer than it used to be, according to Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air, a book that chronicled the disastrous 1996 climbing season, during which eight people died. Krakauer attributes the improvement to the “dramatic increase in the number of expedition services owned and run by Nepalis,” and the fact that the sherpas are in charge, maintaining ever-shifting pathways up the mountain for those who want to buy their way to the top.

Developments over the past 30 years have wrought a different kind of degradation as well. Climbing to the highest point on Earth is still an adventure that entails considerable risk and typically requires weeks of immense effort. But the commodification of the mountain has stripped away much of what once made climbing Everest such a uniquely profound experience. As the journalist Carl Hoffman mused in a review of a recent book about the Everest guiding industry, these companies perform an admirable service by providing expertise and assistance that now enables almost anyone to climb Everest. Nevertheless, he writes, “it’s hard not to look at those pictures of clients stacked on the side of the mountain in long lines, clutching their handrails and not think: Gross. That something fundamental to exploration and adventure and the human experience of it has been lost, is lost; that the thing they’ve purchased is a thing so vastly different from its very idea as to render it meaningless.”