The 1996 Everest Disaster unfolded on May 10; after the events, Anatoli Boukreev wrote The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Mount Everest. This analysis covers the events as written in Boukreev’s book. Another analysis of Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster” by Jon Krakauer, which is a rival to Boukreev’s version of events, was also written.

The 1996 Everest Disaster

May 10, 1996, was Summit Bid Day on Mount Everest for four expeditions – an expedition led by Rob Hall of Adventure Consultants, one by Scott Fisher of Mountain Madness, an Indo-Tibetan Border Police team and a Taiwanese expedition.

What unfolded over the course of two days became the single most devastating tragedy in mountaineering history. Eight climbers died after a blizzard above Camp 4 ravaged climbers above. The accounts have remained controversial and conflicting in their beliefs of what and who was to blame.

About This Book’s Quality

Fearful, I am, that this book did not meet the expectations I set for it. Instead of telling the tale of a harrowing tragedy, it sets out to sell itself as a prolonged press release, elevating Anatoli Boukreev and his “friends” as “mountain extraordinaires”! That is my first impression of The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Mount Everest.

While we don’t like to speak ill of the deceased, we do, however, expect a certain level of honesty to be present when authoring a nonfiction book based on a true story, of which many accounts exist.

From the beginning, the author sets the scene for the entrance of a mountain guru/highly accomplished guide, Anatoli Boukreev. All of this is true, but in the context of the book he’s writing about (a disaster that killed 8 people in 1996), it’s a bit inappropriate. And it leaves one thinking about whether or not this is an attempt to clear his name of the claims made by Jon Krakauer in “Into Thin Air”, or a memoir about a man’s life and his experiences.

“Right from chapter one, the author is opening the scene for a play in which he alone is the star act and his co-author, the cheering one-man audience, egging him on.”

He does the same when describing his friends. For example, on page eight, he makes one of his first mentions of Scott Fischer. Fischer was his boss and the leader of the Mountain Madness commercial expedition guiding company.

Boukreev sets about to make a note to extend the reader’s knowledge of who Scott Fischer was. However, the note reads more like a post-mortem expertise resume than a note. It’s almost as if he’s trying to do damage control regarding mistakes Fischer may have made back in 1996, which may have contributed to the disaster. Right from chapter one, the author is opening the scene for a play in which he alone is the star act, and his co-author, the cheering one-man audience, egging him on.

Analysis of The Climb by Anatoli Bookreev

It appears that Boukreev’s whole reason for being in Nepal was to revitalize his prowess as a mountaineer, as his native Kazakhstan had all but abandoned the efforts of sponsoring summit bids for home-town mountaineers. He, in fact, was broke.

He was looking to find work and found it in Scott Fischer, but not before overbidding his wage-price by almost double what anyone else would pay. Effectively, you could say he was taking advantage of a newcomer to the mountain, who was desperately trying to make a dent in the industry and needed an expert climber.

Boukreev’s Role as a Guide

Boukreev was brought on to the Mountain Madness team to be a guide for Fischer. However, he neither acted like one nor did he even attempt to aide his clients in getting to the top. He climbed alone, without oxygen and descended alone, without clients. His defense for this is that he was from the “old school,” a person who believed that those willing to climb a mountain, should be able to do so without assistance or coddling.

This would be fine by normal standards. But when you’re taking on a PAID job as a guide for paying clients, whom you know have limited experience of high altitude climbing, you are almost obligated to act as an assisting guide. Otherwise, you shouldn’t take the money or the job. You know what type of clients you’re getting and the extra help they’ll need.

In my opinion, Boukreev was looking for fast money to hold him over and a “sponsor” to get him another Everest summit notch on his belt. Unfortunately, his refusal to help Fischer with many of the tasks required contributed to Fischer’s death. Fischer eventually found himself exhausted to the point he could not withstand the summit and descent.

Boukreev makes a defense that he descended quickly because he was climbing without oxygen, and was not supposed to expose himself for long without it at such altitudes. He said that it’d be better if he went to high camp and was refreshed in case he was needed in the event of a disaster.

Disaster Strikes

His logic was not wrong. A climber without supplemental oxygen should not be at high altitudes for longer than necessary. And he would have been better equipped to help in the event of a disaster. But that wasn’t the real issue here.

By the end of the night, he was needed. Boukreev’s decision to ascend and descend alone allowed him to have a lot of strength to later help his clients. But then again, if he had been a responsible guide and summited with oxygen, or even a tank in reserve, and with his clients, he may have been able to assist his team in descending much faster, avoiding the brunt of the storm.

Final Thoughts

Later on, more descriptive and less “all about me” writing takes place. However, when compared to other books about the same experience, this one lacks descriptive merit, creative wording and sheer authoring talent. There is no eloquence here, there is no satisfaction of expectation. This book is simply one man’s “I might as well since everyone else will” attempt at telling the story of a tragic event he happened to experience as well.

I CANNOT discount Anatoli Boukreev’s final acts of courage and endurance. He saved lives. He went back out into a monster storm to bring back the barely living (of his own group). I am not saying he wasn’t a damn good mountaineer; I’m saying he’s not a good author, and neither was the partnership between him and his co-author.

There are a few books out there that recount the events of May 10, 1996, with honest writing and descriptive, respectful text. Those authors who made the inner evaluation of whether or not they should write their accounts, and proceeded in the name of honesty and bearing their soul, did so in a way that can only classify the retelling as ART. This is especially true for Beck Weather’s Left for Dead.

If you’d like to take a crack at understanding the 1996 Everest Disaster, I highly recommend the following books:

• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
• Left for Dead by Beck Weathers

Films and Episodes of Interest

 

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