The Press Box - Jon Krakauer on Climbing Mt. Everest, Writing Non-Fiction, and 30 Years of ‘Into Thin Air’

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

On today’s bonus episode of The Press Box, Bryan is joined by bestselling author Jon Krakauer. It’s the 30th anniversary of his book ‘Into Thin Air,’ so they talk about climbing Mount Everest, the quick writing process of the book (21:25), why he stopped writing books (38:34), and much more. Host: Bryan CurtisGuest: Jon KrakauerProducers: Donald LoBianco Isaiah Blakely, and Oscar De La Luz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to a bonus edition of the press box. Brian Curtis here, along with producers, Isaiah Blakely and John Romer. The last time John Crackhour was on the press box, we talked about his great book, Into the Wild. Today, Crackhour is back, and we're going to talk about his other great book, Into Thin Air.

30 years ago this month, while reporting an article for Outside Magazine, John Crackhauer climbed to the summit of Mount Everest. He would write the following words. Straddling at the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet. I understood on some dim, detached level that the sweep of the earth beneath my feet was

a spectacular sight. Making it to the top of the world would have been sufficient material for an article or book, and indeed I'm always a little thrown when I see into thin air in the travel section of a a bookstore, but the story would become far bigger and grimmer. As Crackhauer descended Everest, he encountered a storm that left eight people dead, including the leader of his expedition, Rob Hall. You'll hear Crackhauer say that Into Thin Air was written very quickly in just three months, that it was an attempt to make sense of a deadly ordeal, that it was cathartic. Another time, he used the word exorcism to describe the writing process. When I got to reread Into Thin Air last week,

It just felt powerful, as if Crackhauer were short-roping me up the mountain, and I found myself staying up late, unable to read the book in anything less than 100-page chunks. Now, if you've read Into Thin Air, you'll be interested in hearing Crackhour describe his time on Everest and everything that went into writing this account. If you've never read Into Thin Air, I'm jealous. Here's John Crackauer. All right, John, when you wrote Into Thin Air, you said that you couldn't go more than a few hours without thinking about the events you witnessed on Mount Everest.

When do you find yourself thinking about those events today? Random. Random times. I mean, I don't know. It was a major event in my life. And yeah, I can't think of anything else in my life that has been present for the last 30 years, ever present. You know, there's moments when I'm, if I'm, yeah, it's not every moment of every day if I'm engaged in something like climbing or writing the things that you know really require my focus which I love those things because everything else might you know I got the monkey brain going all the time and it's it's so such a relief to build to turn it off at times but yeah no it's it's there it just hasn't gone away what led you to Everest in May of 96 um well

mark Bryant or I was another editor I think who called me initially in 95 to see if I wanted on the spur of the moment in a few days to go to the Tibetan side of Everest to write about this commercialization of Everest. Then I said, yeah. And then I thought about it and said, if I do that for the next two months, I'll be sitting in base camp, wishing I was climbing Everest. So I called them back, so I'm not doing it this year, but if you can wait and let me go next year, I'll get in shape so I can climb. If you can find someone, you know, who will, a commercial expedition who will accept me to climb, that'd be a much better story. Plus, I had this secret dream of climbing Everest myself ever since I was nine years old. So, you know, I can't,

I can't separate the two very easily, whether my journalism or my desire to climb Everest was the driving force. Sometimes I think it was the latter. You said that one through line in your work is that you like to write about fanatics. Do you think of the people who want to climb Everest as fanatics? Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of different reasons people climb, but the majority of people, I mean, even now that it's so much safer and so much easier than it was 30 years ago, it's still going to take two months out of your life on the mountain.

You've got to train for it. Everest mostly, as I've written, is about enduring suffering. That's the main skill you have to have. So the people who are driven enough to endure that much suffering, are by definition fanatics. You were writing this piece for Outside magazine. For people who were born into a different and less interesting journalistic universe, what did Outside offer you as a writer?

A lot. It was the first magazine where I landed, first real magazine where I landed an assignment. I sent in a query letter, as we called them those days, to outside. And it was accepted. and they ran the piece. And then I think days or maybe a couple of weeks later, a new editor there named Mark Bryant called me up to give me another assignment. He said, have you ever been stuck in a tent and a storm?

How'd you like to write about that? So, yeah, they, outside magazine started my journalism career. And it was a really good place, really good luck to have that magazine, which cared a lot, cared a lot about things beyond the outdoors. I mean, mostly they cared about good writing. So they had this stable of really good writers who were role models, David Quaman, you know, people like that who Barry Lopez. So it was a privilege and an honor to write for them. And I just, you know, they did.

Their owner of the magazine, then, Larry Burke was famously a tightwad. So they paid horribly. There was no benefits. So for the first 10 years of my freelance career, most of, you know, I probably wrote at least 60 articles for outside then. I had no insurance. I was making $10,000 or $15,000 a year max. It was hard, but it was a great, it was to have editors like Mark Bryant and Laura Honold

and Mike McCrae. It was, you know, I learned a lot. That's how I learned, I'm self-taught. I learned to write by taking assignments. And it wasn't just good magazines like outside. My first five years or more I wrote for, you know, these commercial like for the Raytheon company their commercial corporate magazine i wrote for nissan trucks stuff like that where thankfully it was pre-internet so none of that stuff could be dug

out and found and see how terrible it was but yeah and then i you know i i parlayed my skills which were limited but uh you know this is a when you entered freelancing you so i you know i'd been a carpenter so i i wrote query letters to architectural digest and they went for it i wrote for them about you know what had it didn't have much to do with building tract houses as I've been doing but I had been a commercial fisherman in Alaska so I turned that into a story for Smithsonian magazine I had buddies climbing buddies who used to do this firewalking thing while you build the bonfire rake out the hot coals and walk on the coals and I turned that into an assignment for Rolling Stone so yeah I mean I I was really committed I mean I found something

I thought I could maybe be good at. And I was determined to make it work. So I was working 24-7 as you have to do when you're self-employed as a writer. And I learned a lot and I made it work. I got luck. I had a lot of lucky breaks. Definitely. Luck, you can't overlook the importance of serendipity in my career or most careers.

So, yeah. When you, before you set off for DePaul, what did you think your Everstory was going to be about? I thought it seemed like a really bad idea for Everest, which had up until that point, up until a few years earlier, been the domain of the world's greatest climbers, to even be invited on an expedition. You had to be really fantastic. And now anyone with the money can try to climb Everest. And that's, you know, I had never been to altitude when I went to Everest.

I'd never been higher than 17,000 feet during a failed attempt to climb to Nali. So I didn't have a good sense of what altitude was like, but I knew that it was dangerous. And I knew that some of these novices being taken up had, didn't have very good basic climbing ski. Yeah, so I thought it was a potential recipe for disaster. I didn't imagine that I would be part of that sort of defining disaster. I mean, if I had known that, I would never have gone. So, I mean, there you have it. There were two commercial outfits that took people up the mountain that wanted you to come

with them, what benefit did they see in taking a reporter along with them up the mountain? Well, they were competing with each other. Scott Fisher, who was a friend of mine in Seattle. I lived in Seattle. He was a really strong climber and a friend of mine had just launched guide service and he saw Rob Hall, the other company who wanted me and he thought he could emulate that success. So he wanted me for publicity. I mean, and, you know, it was expensive. It was expensive for them and I certainly didn't have any money to pay for anything so outside magazine and what today would be considered not the best journalistic practices traded ad you know at credit credit for advertisements in the magazine if they would waive $55,000 of their $65,000 fee.

I knew none of this until I was at base camp and Rob Holt told this to me but so yeah they each were in it to get the advertising as Rob said that stuff is really expensive now Scott Fisher is going to be competing with me. He's an American. He's going to have much more access to the American market. I'm in New Zealand. To compete with him, I need that American advertising. And Rob was very plain.

He didn't pick me because he thought I was a great columnar. He said, yeah, I want that advertising. Yeah. And the clients who were paying $65,000 to go up the mountain, how do they react to your presence as a journalist? Well, I didn't really think about it much at first. But I realized that, you know, no one told them a journalist would be climbing with them.

And I wouldn't like it. And so the most telling thing was after the expedition, after the disaster, one of the TV stations, Forrest Sawyer, ABC, I think did a really good, like almost a documentary about it. And they interviewed everybody and they interviewed Beck Weathers at length. And after they were all done,

they turned over all their transcripts of all their interviews to me. And an interview Beck had done that had not aired was incredibly revealing. He said, Forre Sawyer asked him, so how to feel to have a journalist along? And Beth was really frank. He said, well, frankly, it was really troubling because, you know, you know there's this guy

who's going to be writing about all your foibles and you don't want to appear like an idiot in front of millions of people. So you might be doing things you would normally do to try to look like a better climber trying to make the summit and then soyer asked him well what do you think how do you think it affected rob hall the expedition leader and he's well same for him i'm sure he really felt the need to get clients on the summit you know so that really you know i that my presence on the mountain had a huge effect on the outcome i'm convinced not just among my fellow

clients trying harder than they would have maybe but i think especially for rob hall who Scott Fisher's team, his rival, his clients were younger, stronger, more experienced, a couple of ringers on that team. Ours, you know, most of the climbers were quite competent. Some were not too strong. But Rob could look and see that Scott had a better chance of getting all his clients to the top. And I think he felt pressure to get as many of his clients as he could.

And that's why he should have turned around Doug Hanson early in the morning. Actually, Doug Hansen had turned himself around. This is pre-dawn. We left for the summit at 1130 just before midnight. Sometime in the wee hours, you know, maybe 2, 3 a.m. Doug Hanson was cold. He hadn't been doing well. He hadn't been to climb.

He turned around and headed down. Rob Hall was bringing up the rear of the group, saw him. They had a conversation, no one heard what they said, but he convinced Doug clearly. Doug turned back around and started climbing in. So that was his first time. Later, you know, Rob had this rule. Everyone needs to if you're not at the summit the actual summit by one or two p.m. He never did tell us the exact time one of those two times

You will be turned around by me by the Sherpas and you will obey that you know you will go down That is the cardinal rule turn around time 2 p.m. latest you do not go up Well he had an opportunity to turn Doug around Repeatedly and he never did after one two Doug didn't reach the summit till four I mean and then he collapsed he was so exhausted and that there were so many mistakes made so many bad decisions it was this cascade of bad decisions that each one didn't seem that bad but that one was the one that sort of made the jenga tower fall and it had tragic consequences so i still embaffled because rob was an incredibly

thoughtful and conservative guide he was a really good guy there was consensus he was the best guy on the mountain the best prepared um and he made these very good guide these bad choices that had a terrible outcome. I was thinking about this when I was rereading your book last week. You talk about the two categories of people on Everest. Climers who are doing this because of it's a logical extension of their passion. And then the novice, the tourist, who wants to go to the top of the mountain. There's an obvious difference in skill between those two types of people.

But at the end of the day, how different are their motives for getting to the summit of Mount Everest, really? I don't think they are. I mean, at first, Beck Weathers, he was his blowhard, Texas Republican, who was always making, ridiculing me for being a Democrat, a bedwet Democrat who liked Hillary Clinton. And I thought he was just an asshole and a braggard. But by the time we were actually going for the summit, and I saw that, you know, his feet were hamburger from these boots. He just kept, he was tough. He did really well at altitude. And, you know, he had suffered from depression.

Climbing sort of transformed his life. him meaning cured his depression i i don't think he was really very different for me i mean so yeah by the end i think everest is the highest mountain in the world um it is this incredible magnet for i mean it's just this iconic thing it's like even stronger like now people pay and whatever they pay a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars to go in space for 30 seconds with jeff bezos or whoever evers is kind of like that only it's much more legit you really got a it takes a lot out of you even if you're being guided, even if Sherpas do all the work, which they do. They carry all your stuff.

They carry the oxygen. You never have to carry more than a day pack. But still, it is still, you are just miserable and you have frostbite and you have altitude sickness. And my ribs had torn ligament from coughing in every breath. I mean, I've never been that miserable for that long in my life. I never hope to be again. So anyone you can, you know, endure that kind of deserves to climb Everest if they can hack it. Having said that, anyone who's willing to endure that probably lacks the judgment to be on

Everest because they aren't going to turn around unless you put a gun to their head and make them turn around. And that causes a lot of the tragedies on Everest that are still going on today. On the mountain, you were laboring to breathe. You found it very hard to think clearly, given the lack of oxygen. But you also had to take meticulous notes. How did you take notes? Well, I couldn't use a tape recorder.

I learned early on the batteries in the cold just wouldn't work. So I had, you know, I had this, on Summit Day, I had this big down suit. Throughout, I had all these pockets and a different notebook in every pocket. And I, anytime I had what they call a space pen, pressurized, would write underwater. So I had my space pen and I would take notes

in my own illegible shorthand, anyone but me. And then at the end of the day, I had a bigger notebook, spiral notebook, that I would transcribe those notes into and add commentary. in the tent because it was really hard to take. And but you know, there were times I couldn't take notes. A lot of the key events, you know, it was,

I ran out oxygen at 28,900 feet for 90 minutes waiting to go down on the one rope that I need to repel down when 30, 30, 25, 30 people were coming up. And you know, it was frostbite heaven there. I couldn't do any, I couldn't pull a pen out. I could barely stand there clutching, you know, my anchor. So yeah, there was a lot of it dependent on memory and memory at altitude is incredibly unreliable. So when I got back, I interviewed anyone on that expedition who would talk to me,

dozens of interviews. Some people I interviewed three or four times comparing, you know, their version to someone else's. And it was so hard to even find disagreement to find an agreement about the most basic things that, sure, there's a lot of unreliable information or you couldn't trust. And I did my best to fact check it all. I still got written mistakes. One of the pleasures, it wasn't my idea. The 30 edition was my publisher's idea, but I'm really grateful for it because it allowed me

in this new edition to correct many of the small and a couple of big errors that I'd made. And that's a gift. I don't, you know, when you, almost any time you write a book, there's going to be errors, any book. And usually that's it. It's set and type and goes away. But if your book happens to keep selling over the years, they have new printings, even if it's not a new edition, where you can often persuade your publisher to let you correct errors. And I like to do that.

I mean, people hold that against me. You keep changing stuff. Well, yeah, I learned I was wrong and I correct it. I think it's really important to get it right. So some people see that as a fault. I see as I'm much more open about, you know, when I make a mistake and really want to correct it. And so, yeah, I'm grateful for this edition.

Speaking of memory, what do you remember about being on the summit on May 10, 1996? I remember that I was desperate to get down. I mean, I realized, I made a horrible mistake. So we each had three bottles of oxygen and Rob Hall's team, which now people would think, why do you only give you three? But that was the norm then. Each bottle, you kept it at half flow, would last you about six hours,

which should be enough time for you get up and down alive. We were so slow because another big mistake Rob and Scott made was they hadn't, they emphasized how important it was to fix ropes ahead of time, you know, ropes over the most dangerous parts so we could just clip a Jumar, this device that would safeguard us. Those ropes weren't fixed almost anywhere. So, and they had to be fixed in a few key places, and that slowed everything way down. So by the time I got to the South Summit, where you can see the summit, it's only just above you, but it's still, you know, an hour away. I decided, and Robert often told this, you shouldn't need your,

third auction bottle for the dissent you want to save it continuously plan for the dissent if you need three bottles you shouldn't be there i believe that um so i went i i didn't have my third bottle i went to the top for two and i realized it was this traffic jam i'm stuck here i'm not moving for a long time once i can get to the top i better do it fast and get down so i got to the summit there was one person ahead of me anatoly bucgreb had been there a little before i was uh and i was and i was I immediately at his request and the person right behind me was my guide Andy Harris. I took photos of them. I didn't even spend five minutes on top.

I had all these flags and shit I was going to get pictures of. They never take them out of my pack. I just knew I needed to get down before my gas ran out or I was fucked. So I turned around, I headed down as fast as I could. Andy was right behind me. I get to the crux pitch, the steepest thing where the fixed rope was. It's called the Hillary Step. I look over to clip into the rope to rappel down and here's the first of

or the second or third of the, you know, 25 people coming up and I realized I'm doomed. And, you know, 10 minutes later, my oxygen ran out and I just sat there for 90 minutes waiting to go down. So, yeah, when I got to the summit, I've climbed enough stuff, I had climbed a lot of difficult things, difficult peaks by then and realized summit's only halfway.

And most people die on the descent. And I did not want to die. And so I was, you know, the summit was the summit, but I was really concerned. about getting down. I had been the whole way up. When I was going down, it was the same thing. I don't know that my, that other people that day were as concerned about going down, but I was really concerned. This episode is brought to you by L'Oreal Group. Beauty is a powerful force that moves us. That's why L'Oreal Group has built a business that is inclusive at its heart with 100%

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What do you remember about the writing process? I remember Mark Bryant, my editor, said, look, John, you've just had this really traumatic experience. Feel free to, you know, just... wait, wait months until you write it. But I also knew that he said, but it would be great if you could, you know, we could get it in the September issue. And I said, I really want to get in September issue.

I saw this as it would be this cathartic experience. I was really, you know, angry and upset. I had really bad PTSD, although I didn't realize it then. So I said, I'm just going to write this. And I'm a really slow writer normally, but, you know, I interviewed a lot of people as I was writing. and I had to turn it in, turn the piece in, I think, at the end of July. The September issue was published

the first week of August. And as soon as I turned it in July, I realized I made a huge mistake, one huge mistake about Andy Harris. I had believed he had died falling down the lonesy faces and long story when really he had gone back up to try to help rescue Doug Hansen,

help Rob rescue him, and he had died up there. And I had told him, bit wrong in the book much to the anguish of his family i felt terrible this was in pre-internet there was no online outside online so you know in the next issue mark ran a correction but i felt terrible about that and soon after that by beginning of september around you know after the piece had come out i realized i need to write more i have not there's been no catharsis i need to write a book i need to turn this into a book like thing and i done that within into the wild people don't realize they think into the air was my

first book it was my second real book um the first was into the wild which had also been and and an article and assignment from mark brian for outside and i turned that into a book and in fact it had just gotten on the bestseller list when i left for everest so um i you know i knew how to do that i i realized that writing an article is actually a great way to write a book you have your outline you have you've done a lot of the research you know what research you need to do so I decided to do that for into thin air unfortunately I had made a commitment to fly to Antarctica at the end of November and so I had to write the book now I had basically less than three months to write the book three and I did that too so I turned it in before I went to Antarctica when I

came back in the spring just before publication I made you know some corrections and copy editing And then that was published in April of 97. So these two books, bang, bang, you know, I was, I just been, it was such a relief to go to Antarctica where there was no contact with the real world. It was just my climbing buddies. You know, at first I was really skittish about climbing in. It was climbing these big concrete, you know,

like, sorry, granite towers in Antarctica. One was the size of haftome, this vertical spire, beautiful. And to be there, just focused on the climbing again. It was the best thing for my mental help. Then I came back and all the turmoil and controversy over Everest was raging and my book was published and that was gas on the fire. And it was all kind of, I had to go on a book tour. I was grateful for the first book tour because my publisher sent me a book tour. What author wouldn't?

The second one, it was just every day, you know, for over a month and just burnout. And it was controversial and I just, it almost killed me literally. So, yeah. Yeah, it was Everest. I really, this is, you know, I've said this before, people don't believe it. I wish I'd never gone to Everest. It was a big mistake. I didn't belong there.

I didn't have the high health experience. The outcome was horrific. I'm really glad I wrote the book, having gone there, I'm really glad I wrote the book. People have misinterpreted. They think because I didn't want to go to Everest, I didn't want to write the book. No, I definitely wanted to write the book. Was the end of thin air better for having been written faster, do you think? I think it was.

A lot of people think I should have waited. It would have been more measured. It wouldn't have been. It feels much more honest. If emotionally honest, I think my anger and self-loathing come through in that book. And so I'm glad I wrote it when I did. I think it has an authenticity and reads in a way that it wouldn't have. And it was, you know, I've never written that fast before since.

And so I can't really tell. I you know I in a weird thing so I had to go to Santa Fe drive to Santa Fe I don't know a couple months ago maybe a month before this book tour thing started for this 30th anniversary issue and it's a six-hour drive from where I live in Colorado so I decided I knew I needed I should reread the book before I had gone on this publicity tour so I said you know that's a good way to kill two hours I found an old audio version of the bullet on cassette tapes that I never listened to and listened to it on the way down for six hours and it blew my mind it once I got over the sound of my own voice which I was just cringe to hear myself reading it was very weirdly powerful to hear myself reading out loud this book and it at one point brought me to tears and many times I was going oh Jesus I should have fixed that but it was a very powerful experience it was in very one of the strangest things I've done in a long time what's your greatest skill as a writer as you see it my only skill is not only but my greatest skill is I am obsessive and so I edit my first drafts are horrible every sentence in anything air and every other book I've written has been rewritten at least a hundred times probably a lot more than that and that's my gift is when I write it I can't tell it's bad when I reread it I can see some of what's bad when I reread it

the hundred time I have fixed it up pretty good that's the That's the great thing. I envy musicians so much because what they do is so moving. I've been in these concert halls when you're, you know, 15,000 people are on the same wavelength. That's that emotional power. But, and I am envious of them. It's also some of the musicians I know is it just sort of,

the inspiration just comes to them. They don't get musicians block like I get writers block. But what I'm grateful about writing is you don't have to perform it. you can you can revise it 100 times before you publish it and no one knows the better you know so you can make it as good as you're willing to make it and i like that i need that how'd you feel about the commercial success of into thin air very mixed you know i had survivors guilt terribly and now i got rich off that and it really made me feel shame intense shame luckily uh in 19 after right about the same time the article came out i got involved with the american himalian uh foundation

himalayan foundation muslima americans say uh which is an incredible organization it was founded in nineteen eighty one by climbers and does great work for the people of nepal are and i got involved with them it was a place to give to offload a lot of money so i didn't feel as bad and i've been a big donor and i'm now the board chair of this organization which is very rewarding um always has been so yeah it really helped heal me to do that because the book yeah the book was not good for my soul i was reading an interview you gave with the for the book the new new journalism it's true that the success of this book and the success of into the wild allowed you to put aside magazines and just focus on writing books from that point in your career yeah yeah i mean into the wild would

have been enough um you know at that point even within the wild i thought this is great because i i realized I like going deep. I like writing long. Long form was, you know, I was always being told, you know, you got to cut this down by 75. So to be able to go long, I love that. And now that I had some, you know, income in the bank, I didn't have to, I mean, before then, you know, up until I went to Everest, because I hadn't really been paid anything. I got a $30,000 advance for Into the Wild, which just paid for the three years I'd spent writing it. So for the first time of my life, I had money.

wasn't broke literally i mean i wasn't you know my car would die and i would ride a bike my wife and i wouldn't have a car for three months to we could afford so yeah really changed it it it was nice being able to that was one of the greatest things about the success of those first two books was being able to give up you know magazine writing for book writing i got lucky there do you read reviews of your books yeah yeah i do i mean it's painful it's less painful now i think it's valuable. I mean, it's valuable even when you think the reviewer is wrong. It's good for your humility to realize. I don't, I mean, my books are so controversial and I've never, into the wild was hugely controversial. Most of the state of Alaska hates me to this day for writing that book.

So I got used to people hate mail. I mean, outside magazine got serious bomb threats from into thin air. Like I think, you know, it was all bullshit, but they, they took them seriously. I think they called the FBI I can't remember but so yeah there were a lot of threats there's a lot of i got i've gotten a thick skin you know that's a good quality to have and the state of alaska was bad at you because they thought you'd made a hero of chris mccanalyst and other people would try to do what he did yeah that's what they said i think a lot of it is that he reminded them too much of their younger cells when they came up and now you know alaskans most people in alaska were not born there um and they all not all but a lot of them were like you know they once you become

you've got the car hearts and the extra tough boots and you're living you know on the outskirts of fairbanks and you're a real alaskan then it's sort of embarrassing to look back at your cringy youthful self who was a lot like chris McCannelist i mean i really believe that i mean i'll get i'll take a lot of hate just for saying that but um you know i'll take it i know john there's a whole body of work that's like reactions too into thin air which we don't need to delve into here But how active are those disputes still today? Oh, I think they're active. I mean, I had this YouTuber a year ago.

And I'm told he's still at it. But, you know, I wrote all these refutations of his videos and turned him into video, not very skillfully. And so I've done that. It's out there. I just, I have this thing. When I'm accused of getting stuff wrong, I'll investigate and correct it if I really did get it wrong. But when I'm right, I don't, the, this started with Indifinnair came out and there was this big dispute. People felt that was unfair to Anatoly Buchanan, the hero, one of the heroes of the mountain.

And I disagreed with that. And the Columbia Journalism Review, which was the, at the time sort of arbiter of good and bad in journalism, published an article called something like when bestsellers get it wrong. And it cited three bestselling books where the author got it wrong, one of which was mine. And the author of that article, who was a professor, a respected professor at the end of journalist himself at Missouri, I called them up and said, what? What the hell? You know, you didn't even call me to fact check. He's well, you know, you never, this has been out here for a year. And you've never said anything to indicate you thought these criticisms of you were wrong. So I, I assumed you accepted them. And I called bullshit. But I realized, no, he's right. And I should in the future make an effort to refute stuff. That's what I did within thin hair back in 98. After that, and that's what I did again last year when the YouTuber was going after me. I just want my side of the story out there.

I'm a big fan of let people read them. There have been like at least 25 books about the 96th successor. Let people read everything and make up their own mind. I'm not going to persuade people. I mean, you know, you know this from all the writing you've done, that a lot of people, you write something ironically and people take you seriously. You write something seriously and they take you ironically. that you can't predict how people are going to interpret what you write and you shouldn't try to.

So some people are going to, you know, hate what I write. Okay, great. You know, just here's my side of the story. Make up your mind. Your book about a disaster on Everest had the odd effect of convincing more people to climb Everest. What do you attribute that to? That was, well, looking back, I should have seen that. I attributed to human nature.

I mean, I really believed, I feared that. my into thin air was going to shut down the guiding, it was going to kill it in the cradle guiding on Everest. And I had friends who were guides, and they were going to hate me. In fact, these friends told me, this is the best thing that ever happened to us. And they were right.

And I didn't see that. But part of it is Everest. And now you've added this, you know, wow, Everest killed all these people. Now if I climb Everest, I had even more prestige because I'm a badass because I climb the mountain that, you know, I mean, literally, that's part of it. I mean, climbing, we didn't be climbing without risk.

It's an important part of it. And it's an important part of Everest. With Everest, people, I think a lot of people go to Everest like the idea of risk, but not when tragedy strikes. Nobody likes that. And that's what concerns me is. I mean, Everest is a lot safer, but it's still really dangerous. Right now, as we speak, this year on Everest, it was a weird and bad season

because there was a very, it was, the Kumbu Icefall, the first real dangerous. challenge was closed for two weeks in early April when it's always open and that's when people are acclimatizing and putting gear up so for the whole season was two weeks shorter and this year there's record record record's a record number of people trying to climb Everest there's anywhere from 800 to a thousand are expected to try to summit and right now finally the mountain has been open and just in the past few days I think about well just yesterday well today well today and Wednesday in Nepal, I think probably close to 100 people have climbed it today.

There's still, though, more than 600 people waiting to climb it, and they're all going to do that. They have to do that between now and the end of the month. So there's going to be intense crowding over the next few days. And that, A, really denigrates the vibe if you're climbing Everest and envision, you know, I'm the great conquer of Everest, but you're standing in line like you're at the Department of Motor Vehicles, which literally you i just saw a picture of the lines yesterday it was like literally you know just back to back to back people as far as you could see for a thousand two thousand feet up the lousy face not only that those crowds have led to deaths in the past and could lead to deaths in the future

will at some point so it's really dangerous right now i'm nervous i hope everyone gets up and damn fine but they're not going to do it alone they're not going to have the mountain to themselves it'll be crowded it's such a strange reaction reminds me to somebody that watched Scarface or Goodfellas and said, you know, I want to be a gangster. It's like, actually, the moral of the movie was the opposite. Not to do those things, but, you know. Well, I mean, within the wild, you know, people became really enamored of Chris McCannels. There became this sort of cult of pilgrims.

And same thing, he, you know, he almost drowned trying to, he tried to get back to civilization. The river was high. He tried to cross, almost drowned, decided to go back and wait, be patient and wait until September. uh several people at least three have died in that river from drowning and you think they would have seen the danger of that having read the book but they didn't i mean people are people are risk takers when you were writing a book did you read other books as inspiration oh yeah i mean i always do that i always have with ever so i didn't really have time but i've always i like to read and it's a way of procrastinating so yeah i always when i have writer's block instead of actually writing oh in

the writer's block by reading great writing, I hope will sustain me. That's what we tell ourselves, right? If I just read this book, then I'll remember how to write something. What do you find yourself reading these days? Oh, man, I read a lot of fiction. I really like, there's a female writer from the great, from UK named Samantha Harvey. I read, but I still read the same books I've always read, Annie Peru, Annie Dillard. I like the annies, Anne Patchett, Anne Lamott. I mean, I love David Quaman, I love Barry Lopez, John McPhee. I mean, that's how I learned to write, literally,

by reading those books over and over and over and figuring out how to discern good from bad. When we talked a few years ago, you told me you'd stopped writing books. Why'd you stop? A, I'm 72, and I would like to spend my final years not writing, living instead of writing, And the last book, real book I wrote was Missoula, Rapin Justice System in a college town,

which is really, really gutting to write. It really took it out of me. And I just, the risks of my subjects, it just, I said, I can't do this again. And I just decided then and there, I'm not writing any more books. And I think people are starting to believe me now. My publisher, you know, initially, Bill Thomas, I have a great editor and publisher at Double Bay. he thought, wait, who's offering you more money? What? And I said, no, Bill, you'll be the first to know if I, but I don't think he believed me until pretty recently. Have you seen an idea over the last few years

that made you waiver even for a second? I think of. For a second, but you know, yeah, you know, I'll read something and go, wow, that would make a great book. But within 10 seconds, I go, I thank God, I don't have to write that, you know, literally. I mean, I have not come close to going back on my pledge to write no more books, to myself, my wife. my publisher and I don't I have no regrets about that I mean I still write a lot for I'm still involved in deeply involved in a number of nonprofits including the American Himalian foundation and I I write for some of them a lot for some a little bit I write stuff that most I mean almost nothing I'm writing now will ever see the light of day but I I still I mean I still hate writing

but when I don't have to really finish anything or don't have to write you know know, it's an epic length book. It's just a memo. I can still make that last week by procrastinating, but it's just doesn't hang over me like a book week. John Crackhauer, it's always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me. All right, before we go, a couple books I want to put on your radar. The first is the 30th anniversary edition of Into Thin Air with a new introduction by John Crackhauer. That's out from Vintage right now. The second one is a book I have pressed into the hands of many a young journalist, including Kevin Clark, not that many years ago. It's called the New New Journalism, Conversations with America's best nonfiction

writers on their craft. It was put together by a guy named Robert S. Boynton, who once upon a time wrote for the New Yorker and has also taught journalism. And what Boynton did was he got writers like Crackhour and Lawrence Wright and Michael Lewis and Susan Orlean to give these long, fascinating interviews about where they get their ideas and how they approach various ethical issues in journalism and where they actually write those great books and pieces. What does their office look like? What times a day do they write? It's an absolutely fascinating book and one that I would recommend not only to any journalist, but anybody who's ever been interested in finding out where those great pieces and books come from. You will be fascinated by it and you won't be

sorry, or someone other than me will give you your money back. All right, that's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. But next to magic by Isaiah Blakely and John Romer. Coming up on the old press box, Sarah Longwell of the Bullwark is going to be here with me in the studio in L.A. To talk politics and media, Joel Anderson's here on Thursday. And of course, we will have more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then.