Into Thin Air is an adventure tale that is based on a true story of the author’s (Jon Krakauer) extremely disastrous ascent of 29,028 foot Mount Everest in 1996. Krakauer was hired by Outdoor Magazine to do an article on Everest so he decided to actually go and climb it with a group of people who were led by experienced climber Rob Hall, a guide for a company called Adventure Consultants.
After the climbing group reached base camp, they began acclimating. To do this, they would climb partway up the mountain to get used to the limited oxygen and then bac down to base camp. It wasn’t until May 6th that the team finally began their first ascent of the mountain. When doing this they set a turnaround time that everyone was supposed to adhere to, whether they reached the summit or not. On their multiple attempts to summit many things went wrong. One of the guides, Andy Harris got hit with a rock while climbing and narrowly escaped death. A climber on another team slipped and fell 70 feet headfirst into a crevasse when he went out to go to the bathroom in the morning. Several of the team members also suffered from altitude sickness. As the teams climbed on, the conditions kept getting more dangerous.
On May 10th, many of the climbers reached the summit. However, in doing this many of them ignored the turnaround time. Because of this the team got caught in a deadly storm. Conditions deteriorated, and this was when disaster struck.
This is a very adventurous, exciting, and suspenseful account of a disastrous expedition. This book gave a brief synopsis of what happened in the first couple of chapters, so the reader would be hooked quickly. If you like to read about action and adventure, then this book is just for you.