DEATH ON EVEREST; JOURNALIST WHO SURVIVED RECOUNTS FATEFUL '96 CLIMB.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

It was a classic and horribly tragic case of hubris.

Although Mount Everest had defied human attempts to conquer it for more than a century, although one person had died for every four who made it to the top, the world's loftiest mountain had, in recent years, come to seem more accessible, even tame: in 1993, 40 climbers reached the summit on one day alone. As journalist Jon Krakauer notes in his gripping new book (``Into Thin Air''), Rob Hall, the leader of the Adventure Consultants expedition, bragged that he could get almost any reasonably fit person to the summit. His rival Scott Fischer, head of the Mountain Madness expedition, boasted, ``We've got the big E figured out, we've got it totally wired.''

On May 10, 1996, both Hall and Fischer, along with another Adventure Consultants guide and two clients, died in a sudden blizzard that swept across the mountain. By the end of the month, a record 12 climbers had lost their lives on the mountain.

Having joined Hall's group to do an Outside magazine article on the growing commercialization of Everest, Krakauer provides the reader with a harrowing account of the disaster as it unfolded hour by hour. An experienced climber himself, Krakauer gives us both a tactile appreciation of the dangerous allure of mountaineering and a compelling chronicle of the bad luck, bad judgment and doomed heroism that led to the deaths of his climbing companions. His book turns out to be every bit as absorbing and unnerving as his 1996 best seller, ``Into the Wild,'' the story of a young man named Christopher Johnson McCandless who left civilization and died mysteriously in the Alaskan wilderness.

As described by Krakauer, even the routine facts of climbing in the death zone (above 25,000 feet) sound dangerous and painful. Bone-chilling, finger-freezing cold at night and blinding, skin-burning solar radiation at noon, not to mention the perils of frostbite, hypothermia, HAPE (high-altitude pulmonary edema, brought on by climbing too high, too fast) and HACE (high altitude cerebral edema).

The misery ratio

In the case of Everest, the climber must also negotiate seracs - huge, tottering blocks of ice (sometimes 12 stories tall) that can topple over without warning. Sheer faces of ice must be scaled with the help of axes and ropes, while crevasses - glacial fissures that continually open and close - must be bridged with ladders lashed end to end. ``The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I'd been on,'' Krakauer writes. ``I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain.''

In response to the question the reader repeatedly wants to ask - Why would anyone in his right mind want to try such a thing? - Krakauer supplies a variety of answers. Because it's there, because it's a challenge, because it offers a chance for ``minor celebrity, career advancement, ego massage.'' For the earliest climbers, it was ``the most coveted object in the realm of terrestrial exploration'' after the conquest of the North and South poles. For their elite followers, it was a kind of grail, a test of skill and will and courage.

``Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there,'' Krakauer writes of ``the culture of ascent.'' ``Prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable. Nobody was admired more than so-called free soloists: visionaries who ascended alone, without rope or hardware.''

All this began to change in 1985, Krakauer observes, when Dick Bass, a wealthy 55-year-old Texan with limited climbing experience, reached the summit of Everest with the help of a gifted young climber named David Breashears. Suddenly Everest seemed within reach of the weekend climber, at least the rich weekend climber with enough money to acquire the very best guides and the very best equipment. By 1996, the most reputable guide services were charging $65,000 to join an Everest expedition.

Not hard-core climbers Indeed, Krakauer quickly discovered that his fellow Everest clients were ``nothing like the hard-core climbers'' he had climbed with in the past. Among them were Seaborn Beck Weathers, a 49-year-old Dallas pathologist who described himself as a Walter Mitty type (he later lost an arm and the digits of his other hand, to frostbite), and Sandy Hill Pittman, a wealthy New York socialite who arrived with a satellite phone, two computers, a CD-ROM player, an espresso maker and ``stacks of press clippings about herself to hand out to the other denizens of Base Camp.''

Neither expensive technological gear nor raw technical expertise, however, was enough to save those climbers who died in the blizzard that unexpectedly kicked up on May 10. Krakauer acknowledges that human errors were made. Intent on getting their people to the summit, the guides, already exhausted from shepherding their less-competent clients, ignored the turnaround time of 2 p.m. they had set to reach safe ground by night. Both Fischer and Hall, after all, had a lot to gain by delivering on their promise of a successful ascent: publicity, renown and more clients down the line.

In the end, it was the mountain itself and the random hazards of weather that determined the climbers' fate, for as Krakauer notes, ``on Everest it is the nature of systems to break down with a vengeance.''

Oddly enough, none of this appears to have dampened amateur interest in scaling Everest. In recent months, The New York Times has reported, demand for the 200 available spaces in the base camp has risen sharply, thanks in part to all the talk about the casualties claimed by the Big E last year.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: no caption (book cover)