It’s coming up on a decade now since renowned adventure writer Jon Krakauer published a book. And at 70, and with several best-sellers under his belt, he’s earned the right to put down the pen and enjoy his golden years. However, last week Krakauer started writing again – a treat for all his fans – but it wasn’t under the circumstances that one might expect.
Krakauer announced on social media that he’s going to release an eight-part series defending his book Into Thin Air against a YouTuber, Michael Tracy, who has been criticizing Krakauer’s reporting and accusing his writing of pushing a false narrative. Into Thin Air is a first-person narration of the events that took place on Mount Everest in the spring of 1996 that eventually led to the deaths of eight climbers.
“In August 2024, I learned from comments in my Instagram feed that a YouTuber named Michael Tracy had been aggressively maligning my book, Into Thin Air, on his YouTube channel, which has more than 130,000 subscribers,” said Krakauer. “In April 2024, Tracy posted the first of at least 16 videos (thus far) claiming to have identified numerous errors in my book about the 1996 Everest disaster, most of which he insists are lies intended to promote a deliberately false narrative.”
“Almost all of Tracy’s allegations are demonstrably untrue,” Krakauer continued. “Given the damage Tracy is attempting to inflict on my reputation, and his flagrant misrepresentations of what happened on Everest in 1996, I feel the need to debunk as many of his dishonest claims as possible.”
As a result, Krakauer has been posting daily episodes on his Medium page, tackling Tracy’s barrage of claims one by one. He’s also published the stories in video-audio format on a newly created YouTube channel.
“In most of his videos about my book, Tracy seems to be trying to do what the MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon famously called ‘flooding the zone with sh*t’ — spewing forth such an overwhelming torrent of misinformation that it creates lasting doubt about what’s true and what isn’t,” Krakauer wrote on Medium. “Tracy’s videos about me include dozens of deceitful statements, and he continues to post additional misleading videos on an intermittent basis — which for all practical purposes, renders any attempt to refute every spurious claim in his videos an exercise in futility.”
However, Krakauer isn’t automatically discrediting everything that Tracy says. There were a few points made by Tracy that Krakauer acknowledged as errors/typos in the book, corrections that he will add to subsequent editions of Into Thin Air, but nothing so grave as to change any of the conclusions Krakauer drew through his investigation. But overall, Krakauer criticizes Tracy, who has only sumited Everest via Tibet, not Nepal where the disaster in question took place, for providing flimsy evidence for his claims and not having personally taken the time to interview any first-hand sources.
Tracy has already clapped back at Krakauer, posting a YouTube video on February 10 that claims Krakauer keeps changing his narrative and that the admitted errors are more consequential than Krakauer claims.
Surely, this is not the end of this feud. Krakauer has a few more episodes to release and Tracy promises that he will respond once Krakauer “has had his final answer.”
