Writer's Festival

3) Summarize and comment upon the Writers’ Festival event you attended, trying to make connections between what you learned there and what Krakauer writes about (if possible).

         During the writer’s festival here in Mussoorie, we were privileged to witness some very interesting, compelling, fun and informative presentations. One of the speakers we heard was the long-time alpinist Steve Swenson, hailing from Seattle. He spoke of his experiences climbing various peaks in the Himalaya, including being one of the first to summit Saser Kangri II, the second tallest unclimbed peak in the world.

         However, his experience that stuck me the most was when he described his experience of climbing Everest in 1994 without supplemental oxygen. He went solo up the mountain (with Sherpas?), but was dismayed to see the commercialization of this great peak, sullied with tons of people with their own ambitions, their own dreams, their own motivations, and their own set of morals. He witnessed people abandoning teammates in distress in order to fulfill their own summit dreams. After this “depressing” experience on the mountain, he vowed he would never again climb a peak over 8000m, as these had become so commercially exploited.

         This relates to Krakauer’s descriptions of Everest in “Into Thin Air”. Krakauer discusses the commercialization of Everest as something of a sacrilege to some people. He adds that he and his climbing compatriots, when he was younger, looked down on Everest for its commercialization and the obsession with it that seemed to clutch amateur climbers. Towards the end of the book, Krakauer discusses a situation exactly like the one that so depressed Swenson.

Bruce Herrod was a member of the South African team. On the team’s summit day, Herrod began really strong. As Breshears recalled “Bruce looked strong, really good. He shook my hand really hard, congratulated us, said he felt great”. (page 290) He later says “Please be careful…Remember that getting to the summit is the easy part; it’s getting back down that’s hard”.

Herrod was still far below when Woodall and O’Dowd reached the summit, and still struggling upward when they came back down. He continued-alone-to the summit, and reached the top just after 5 pm. It took him 17 hours to get up there. As one teammate said “The fact that he was up there that late, with no one else around, was crazy. It’s absolutely boggling”.

His teammates waited for him to radio in that evening, but they fell asleep, casually disregarding their teammate, abandoning him to his death atop the mountain.

This demonstrates exactly the casual disregard of teammates for one another atop one of the world’s most commercialized mountains. Herrod was left alone, despite his struggle, and is now presumed dead, somewhere up in the atmosphere.