December 03, 2002

Into Thin Air

When I go to pick up the girls from school. I usually have a wait of 10 to 20 minutes. I use this time to catch up on reading. On the way out, I was looking for something new to read, as I had finished the last book I was reading. (Rose Madder by Steven King). I grabbed Jon Krakauer's book, Into Thin Air. This is about the fourth time I've read this book. If you're not familiar with it, it's about a disaster on Mount Everest, in 1996, in which 8 people died. A lot of people got caught up near the summit when a freak storm/blizzard hit. He's a great writer. His description of events are so good, that you will feel yourself shivering from cold when he writes about what happened and what people did to survive. He also talks about the commercialization of Mount Everest. Basically, anybody with $60,000 and in somewhat reasonable shape can get to the summit. This may have been one of the reasons so many people were caught when the storm hit. They were so many people trying to achieve the summit that day, that there was a queue of 60 people waiting to go up a rope near the summit. That, and the fact that a lot of the professional guides were allowing people to summit well after the cut-off time. If you have already read this book, I also recommend that you read Anatoly Boukreev's, The Climb, which is his version of the same incident.

Psssst! Lynne? I looked at the source code from your blog about the Chevy Chase movie. I learned how to put text to the right of the image.

Posted by Valkyre at December 3, 2002 04:42 PM
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