This one beats you up and then beats you up again. Like one of those old disaster movies where you get to know all the characters and you also know a handful of them will die in the end. These are real people. I mean quite a few were spoiled and rich but still no one deserves that kind of icy, painful, frightening end. For some it was a job, for some a difficult adventure requiring months of their normal lives. If they had normal lives. My life would have ended soon after I announced to my wife I needed 70 large to go climb a mountain.

I had forgotten or never actually considered that occasionally the jet stream blasted against the top of Everest. It sticks up into where the jets fly, where the jet stream sometimes wanders. I have been in very cold weather. But nothing like what happened atop Everest in 1996. And this thing was written as though you were going along on the trip. Krakauer was there for a magazine at reduced costs to the magazine. But he was right in it. They put a real writer in the midst of it. Who wanted to report back with honesty. We have to trust that he did. He spent quite a bit of time making sure of the details. Some of them could not be clarified in the aftermath. It is or seems to be an odd beast that throws himself into the air above where we can safely breath. I have never been above about 18 thousand feet. It is unlikely I will go higher than that. And this, well, this surely is a cautionary tale for anyone who is thinking of doing it. 

25/104 Into Thin Air