Beck was already snow blind and in a bad way and had already spent 8 hours alone. This is something that emerges not in ‘Into Thin Air’ but in ‘The Climb.’ B met Beck on the way down, and saw that he needed to be taken down, but he thought he saw another guide, and so left it to them to take him down.

So what is the case against B? K doesn’t make the point that B didn’t take Beck Weathers down off the mountain, but that showed a real lack of initiative. He didn’t accept that the outcome might have been better if he had acted differently. But from K’s perspective, B was insufficiently remorseful. He agonises over the part he played in misreporting what happened to Andy Harris, and about his inability to help the other climbers in his party after he had made it down to the South Col. So what’s the story? I think that K feels that even if he’s wrong about particular matters of detail, still his account gets to the heart of the matter, that is, that it reflects a basic truth of the extent of B’s culpability. We also know, from the appendices to ‘The Climb’ in which some of these arguments are detailed that Krakauer (K) pretty adamantly stuck to his account in the face of attempts to correct him. For my part I didn’t really feel that ‘Into Thin Air’ portrayed Boukreev (B) in such a bad light, but we know that B was sufficiently hurt to want to set the record straight. Ken writes: I suppose this post will be a little opaque to people who haven’t treated themselves to ‘Into Thin Air’ and ‘The Climb’ (or any of the pages and pages available online related to this issue), …but I am going to say what I think is the source of the antagonism between John Krakauer and Anatoli Boukreev.

Jon krakauer beck weathers