The Literary Tradition Concerning the Everest Disaster of 1996
The expedition to climb Mt. Everest is amongst man's most quixotic ambitions, brimming with a sense of conquest over the most daunting of that which the earth has to offer us. To the individuals who scaled the mountain in two separate commercial groups in May of 1996, this was a test of will, endurance, courage and survival with a cost far higher than any of its participants had anticipated. On one day in 1996, eight climbers would be lost to a torrential and catastrophic storm which group leaders had failed to anticipate, leading to what remains the deadliest season over in Everest history. The events of that day in May, particularly, have spawned a cottage industry of literary perspectives on the subject, the vast majority of them authored by the individuals who engaged and survived the experience. Without question, this would be an altering experience for those who endured it and for the mountain itself, which would rightfully thereafter be due a tremendous resurgence in respect. And certainly, this is the perspective which highlights John Krakauer's literary accomplishment with Into Thin Air which dutifully captures the tension between natural majesty and human arrogance. By a matter of some irony, Gammelgaard's appr
His recognition of the overarching power of the mountain relies on a steady history of climbing disaster relating to man's relative smallness in the face of the geological beast. Indeed, the two expeditions led by Rob Hall and Scott Fischer are here observed to have been ill-fated for their competitive focus on one another, rather than the true enemy, which was the mountain itself. One of the resolutions that this text, composed by Anatoli Boukreev, a group leader who miraculously lead his entire group to base camp safely and intact, reaches is that a foolish human competitiveness had pervaded the game of climbing Mt. A return to innocence, leaving the defeats and sorrow of the past behind. So is this denoted in the chronicle of Everest's early climbers provided by Willis, who reflects on a set 1895 treks, notes that "it can be argued that on all three Everest expeditions, Mallory underestimated the mountain. They called from the summit at 6:00PM-that's the last we ever heard from them. " (Gammelgaard, 12) But in many ways, the spare way in which language is used does much to detract from the ability of the text to demonstrate reflection. Ultimately, in the wake of the events which precipitated this school of literature, Krakauer's work is the infinitely more realistic and valuable of the two. There are defensible elements of Gammelgaard's work where credibility is concerned. Gammelgaard's position is one of pure and unreflective confidence, a position that serves as the cause for tragedy in Krakuaer's permeating thesis. It is a yet to trusting my own strength to carry this project through successfully. The Climb focuses on the ideological and practical distinctions between the expeditions, noting that "the differences between Hall's and Fischer's philosophies of guiding were emblematic of an ongoing debate between practitioners in the adventure travel industry. Indeed, there are many instances in which reporting on the events in the developing literary tradition would be frank but also emotionally intuitive, such as is perhaps achieved in The Climb, an expertly conceived reflection on why the expeditions failed so disastrously on that particular day. Krakauer's text rings with recognitions of mortality and comprehension of the foolishness which allowed the organized groups to proceed under an array of poorly conceived conditions, not the least of them being overcrowding.
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Acceptance Essays
