Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 102

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Popular Culture Review
There’s something about the recent commercialization of Everest
that’s shocking and very troubling. But maybe it shouldn’t be. The
sport of mountaineering, after all, was invented by wealthy En
glishmen who hired burly local hill people to guide them up the
Alps, do the grunt work, and keep them from harm. There’s a long
tradition of guided climbing, so who am I to say that it’s bad or
wrong, even on the world’s tallest mountain? All I can say is that
the commercial experience on Everest leaves a bad taste in my
mouth.
The way Everest is guided is very different from the way
other mountains are guided, and it flies in the face of values I hold
dear: self-reliance, taking responsibility for what you do, making
your own decisions, trusting your judgment; the kind of judgment
that comes only through paying your dues, through experience.

On one hand, Krakauer’s preference for climbing less glamorous than Himalayan
expeditions is quite persuasive. On the other hand, it is worth noting that his
preference does not necessitate the particular morality tale found in Into Thin Air.
Krakauer’s self-described “latent puritanical or Calvinist streak” is sustained by
his mountaineering experiences demonstrating to him that “there’s something noble
about stoicism and sacrifice and suffering for a goal.” Under received gender
codes, of course, this kind of suffering for teleological ends is typically masculine.
For Krakauer, it is an attraction of this form of masculinized Protestant “nobility”
that it is earned, and therefore exhibits the democratic virtues of a social meritocracy.
In this vision successful climbing necessarily involves the creation of an interde
pendent community, one symbolically represented through the practice of roping
up for protection against falling from a precipice or into a crevasse— what Krakauer
calls elsewhere the sacrosanct “bond between ropemates” {Eiger 150). Krakauer’s
earlier writings quote one climber of working-class origins who speculates about
how the large sums of money spent and the media hype about Everest climbing
might contribute to a future disaster on the peak. With “the direct involvement of
the media, the climb is going to be hyped-up like crazy. And the climbers will start
believing all that hype, of course, and develop a ‘go-for-it’ mentality. Personally,
I think somebody’s going to get killed” {Eiger 147). According to Krakauer, a
significant failing of his own Everest expedition in 1996 was that the climbers
involved never became “a team,” a community.
Instead we were a bunch of individuals who liked each other to a
certain degree and got along well enough, but we never had this
feeling that we were all in it together. Part of it was that we didn’t