this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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On May 10, 1996, 43 climbers attempted to reach the summit of Mount Everest. By the following day, five of them were dead. The tragedy—occurring at a time when the commercial guiding business was ramping up on the mountain and the dream of summiting Everest seemed suddenly available to anyone able to afford the $68,000 price tag—electrified the public. The most celebrated account of the disaster came from journalist Jon Krakauer, first as a barn-burning feature in Outside magazine, which had commissioned him to cover the climb as a participant, and later as the bestselling book Into Thin Air.

People have been arguing about the catastrophe ever since, from the 1997 book The Climb, by Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian-Kazakhstani guide who felt he’d been unfairly portrayed in Into Thin Air, to a present-day YouTube campaign against Krakauer. The latter, conducted by a lawyer in Irvine, California, named Michael Tracy, was purportedly triggered by a rash of recent YouTube videos from various creators, all excoriating another climber who was on the mountain that day, Sandy Hill Pittman. One of the most viewed of these—titled “Ungrateful Socialite Endangers Climbers on Deadly Mount Everest Excursion” and narrated by a creepily soft-voiced therapist who makes videos about famous true crimes and seems to have a sideline in “analyzing” the women climbers he blames for various mountaineering disasters—gives a pretty good sense of the tenor of these debates. For his part, Krakauer has long shown himself ready to return fire to his critics.

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[–] Zoop 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

This was a great article, thank you for sharing it with us here, Alyaza!

I especially appreciated this bit at the ending:

Why do people still feel compelled to argue about the Everest 1996 tragedy nearly 30 years after the event? Because, as Krakauer writes, this disaster was “the result of multiple, complex, interrelated factors,” and because many key facts can never be established, as the witnesses to them died on the mountain. At our worst, human beings rebel against such situations. We want to believe that clear-cut blame can be determined because it brings the terrifying forces that sometimes crush us under our control. Also, as the internet demonstrates over and over again, we just love picking a villain, then doubling down on the choice until we’ve transformed them into an absurd caricature of wickedness. Whatever need this impulse serves, it’s never a desire to know the truth.

This way of thinking/behaving that humans so often do has long super bothered me. They cope with complicated situations by coming up with their own version of 'reality' that's simpler for them, that they could have had some control over, rather than accepting the unfair clusterfuck that is life. I have family members who are very prone to this and it weighs heavily on me...and makes me so sad.