Three Trips Into the Storm, and the Book Behind Them

On the night of May 10-11, 1996, while a brutal storm was trapping climbers above Camp IV on Mount Everest, Anatoli Boukreev - a Russian-Kazakhstani guide working for Scott Fischer's Mountain Madness expedition - went out alone. He went out a second time. He went out a third. He brought back, in succession, Sandy Pittman, Charlotte Fox, and Tim Madsen, all of them clients of his team, all of them dying. He found Yasuko Namba and Beck Weathers - clients of Rob Hall's competing Adventure Consultants expedition - and assessed them as un-savable; he had to leave them and choose his own clients. (Weathers, in one of mountaineering's most extraordinary acts of self-resurrection, somehow stood up later and walked back to camp on his own.) Eight people died on the mountain that day and the next. Without Boukreev's three trips into the storm, more would have.

The Climb, published in 1997 in the same year and into the same conversation as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, is Boukreev's account, co-written with the journalist G. Weston DeWalt because Boukreev's English was limited and the structure required someone who could pull together his testimony with interviews of other team members. It is a 5.0 for me - not because it is a more polished book than Into Thin Air (it isn't), but because it is the necessary corrective to it, and because the man at its center, by every record outside of the most contested judgments of one writer, did the work of a hero in the worst conditions a guide on that mountain has ever faced.

Two Books, One Disaster

Krakauer was a client on Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants team and survived the storm. Into Thin Air is one of the great pieces of disaster reportage in the language. It also leveled specific charges at Boukreev: that his decision to descend ahead of his clients on summit day amounted to abandoning them, that his choice to climb without supplemental oxygen "compromised his client's safety to achieve his own ambitions" and "endangered them by making the exhausting climb without the aid of bottled oxygen." Those charges are, even Krakauer has acknowledged, sitting next to a separate fact: that Boukreev "performed heroically when disaster struck" and "saved the lives of Sandy Pittman and Charlotte Fox, at considerable risk to his own safety." The two judgments don't necessarily contradict each other in Krakauer's framing - he argues that earlier-in-the-day decisions can be questioned even if the night-of rescues cannot - but the cumulative effect of Into Thin Air on Boukreev's reputation was severe. The Climb exists to put the rest of the testimony into the record.

What this book does, methodically, is reconstruct the Mountain Madness expedition from inside it. Scott Fischer's leadership, his physical state on summit day, the logistics above Camp IV that several reviewers have noted were genuinely poorly organized, Boukreev's understanding of his role as a guide rather than a babysitter, the calculated pre-trip strategy of acclimatizing without oxygen so that he would have more reserve when the crisis came - all of it gets laid out, calmly, with the tone of a man who has spent his career at altitudes that don't tolerate ego. The book is a defense, but it isn't a defensive book.

The Oxygen Question, and Why a Working Guide Made the Call

The supplemental-oxygen question is where most readers' opinion of Boukreev settles. Boukreev's argument - and it is consistent with how high-altitude Russian and Kazakhstani climbing tradition operated - was that climbing on bottled oxygen masks the body's actual altitude tolerance, and that a guide who acclimatizes hard and climbs without it builds the reserves needed for exactly the kind of emergency that hit on May 10. The night of the storm bears the strategy out. While other guides were incapacitated by exhaustion and altitude sickness, Boukreev was the one strong enough to repeatedly leave a tent and find dying clients in zero visibility. The question Krakauer raises is whether Boukreev's choice was justified earlier in the day, when no one yet knew the storm was coming; the answer Boukreev gives is that the choice was made precisely with that contingency in mind, and that on the night when contingency arrived, his choice was the reason any of those rescues happened at all. Both can be true. It is hard to argue, after reading this book and Into Thin Air together, that the verdict goes against him.

The technical mountaineering material is one of the book's quiet strengths. Boukreev (through DeWalt) explains the physiology of altitude, the calculations a guide actually makes, the logic of his climbing style, with the matter-of-fact authority of a man who has summited multiple eight-thousand-meter peaks and isn't trying to impress anyone. This is what expertise sounds like before it is run through a writer's polish: spare, specific, unsentimental.

The Three Rescues, and the Two He Couldn't

The night-of chapters are where the book's emotional gravity sits. The storm is in. Climbers are scattered on the South Col, freezing, hypoxic, immobile. Boukreev sets out the first time and finds nothing in the whiteout; the trip nearly kills him. He goes back to camp. He sets out again. He finds Pittman, Fox, and Madsen huddled together in the worst of it, brings them back one and two at a time, with tea and oxygen and the kind of physical work that a man at altitude on no rest should not have been capable of. He has to leave Yasuko Namba, whom he assessed as too far gone. He has to leave Beck Weathers, whom every record says was, by any reasonable medical judgment, dead. (Weathers walked back into camp the next morning with frostbite that would cost him his nose and parts of both hands and went on to live another three decades. The mountain did not get him.) Boukreev's clients lived. He went out again. The understatement with which he tells it - this is not melodrama, it is what needed to be done - is what makes the chapters land.

The Sowles Award and Annapurna

In 1997, the American Alpine Club gave Boukreev the David A. Sowles Memorial Award, the AAC's highest honor for valor in mountaineering rescue, for his work on Everest the year before. Three weeks later, on Christmas Day 1997, Boukreev was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna's south face while attempting a winter ascent with the Italian climber Simone Moro and the Kazakh cinematographer Dimitri Sobolev. He was repairing ropes in a couloir at around 5,700 meters when a cornice broke off the Western Wall above him and ran an 800-meter chute. Moro survived; Sobolev did not. Boukreev's body was never recovered.

That sequence - the public recognition, then the mountain, three weeks - is part of what makes this book read the way it does. The Climb was published months before he died. He never got to see how the long argument with Into Thin Air would settle, and to a degree it has not, but more readers now read both books together, and the dual record makes for a fuller, fairer picture of what happened on Everest on the worst day in its commercial-climbing history. A 5.0 here is for the testimony, the work, and the man behind both. If you've read Krakauer, this is not optional.

Rating: 5.0/5 ⭐

Perfect for: Anyone who's read Into Thin Air and wants the other half of the record, mountaineering readers, anyone interested in the ethics of high-altitude guiding, readers who want a quiet, expert voice rather than literary virtuosity.

Skip if: You've decided in advance whose side you're on in the Krakauer-Boukreev debate, or you don't have any interest in Himalayan mountaineering as a subject.