Screenshot: HuffPost Live
Imagine your hero telling you that your dreams are nightmares in wait. Well… that was precisely the wake-up call Jon Krakauer had for an unsuspecting 11-year-old climber who asked for advice on climbing Everest.
The Into Thin Air author was on HuffPost Live last Thursday with fellow climber and photographer Jimmy Chin to discuss Meru, “a story of one’s past, present, and future, from inner demons to familial responsibility, from life to death, and everything in between. It is a meditation on the taxing pursuit of big-wall climbing, of which Shark’s Fin on Mount Meru remains an ultimate prize. At 21,000 feet above the Ganges River in Northern India, it is both a dream and a nightmare for the world’s best and brightest and toughest climbers.”
But back to Krakauer’s rather harsh response to fan Tyler Armstrong. In his reply to the young adventurer’s inquiry, the legendary chronicler of the Great Outdoors invokes concerns surrounding objective risk, offering Tyler one piece of strong advice: “You should be willing to turn around.”
Like other professionals’ experiences with Everest, the tallest mountain in the world unparalleled presents challenges of objective risk and abdicating your own decision making to guides as well as abdicating part of the risk to sherpas, which is bound to make even the most minimally empathetic people uncomfortable.
Why did Krakauer go?
“I always wanted to do it as a kid,” he admits. “Excuse was I was broke and a freelance journalist and was going to get paid well.”
According to the older, wiser author, that isn’t enough: “It’s a serious, serious choice. If you do it, if you go for it, you’ll be making really important decisions where your brain isn’t functioning because of hypoxia or you haven’t had enough to eat. Meru is a much harder mountain to climb, but in some ways Everest is much more dangerous. The dangers are more insidious. They’re not as obvious.”
Tough lesson for the kid calling in for sure. However, a good lesson nonetheless, especially with the increased accessibility of these high adventure trips (with the right amount of money). People say most of life’s greatest lessons are learned through pain. That might be true, but in this circumstance, it is a pain Krakauer wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy.
