Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 99

Krakauer’s Into Thin Air

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as anyone, and I was there for reasons that, professional duties
aside, were no less suspect than anyone else’s. I wanted to climb
it; that’s why I was there. Sure, I thought there was an interesting,
even important story to be told about what was happening to
Everest. But I wouldn’t have taken the w riting assignment if I
wasn’t utterly motivated to get to that summit.
Krakauer not only deflects any possible charge of being a climbing mercenary, but
also models his ideal of climbing on the idea of the authentic desires of a Sherpa,
representative of a group long conferred the status of load-bearing servants to elite
Westerners. Krakauer mixes poetic and social justice in honoring the servant class
in the Himalayas for their possession of a fundamentally pure desire — a desire for
climbing that is reinforced by religious belief in the deities of the mountain range.
Through its religious underpinnings, Sherpa faith in mountain climbing is seen as
transcending the social divisions of the West.
In developing the Everest climbing story as a social morality tale, the
U.S. media took its cue from Krakauer. In a book review. Time Magazine writer
John Sko commented that the Everest disaster of 1996 revealed how
Mountaineering was in danger of becoming an extreme sport for
the rich, with gaudy adventure-travel stunts such as being guided
up the highest mountain on each continent. A New York society
woman named Sandy Hill Pittman was on hand to complete this
cycle, along with masses of electronic equipment lugged by
Sherpas, including a satellite phone with which she intended to
file Internet dispatches from Camp Four, at 26,000 ft. Did she de
serve to be mocked for her pretensions or admired for her pluck?
(Pittman did reach the top, “short-roped” or dragged there by a
Sherpa, and got back down, after collapsing and being revived by
an emergency steroid injection.)
Like Krakauer, Time magazine casts climbing as raw material for narratives about
moral lessons. Sandy Pittman’s moral right to ascend peaks representing social
and moral ascendance, is the main point this key passage addresses: “Did she
deserve to be mocked for her pretensions or admired for her pluck?” Hubristically
inclined to publicize her endeavors on the Internet, recipient of a steroid injection
and of the direct aid of the Sherpa who short-roped her, the “New York society
woman” is presented for critical scrutiny by an audience highly ambivalent about
the social elite she represents. In thus presenting Sandy Pittman as an unregener
ate character, the Time writer merely played on a theme already provided in Into