The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev and coauthored by Weston DeWalt seeks to present the Mount Everest disaster of 1996 through a different lens.  With the help of the authorship Anatoli Boukreev and other members of Fischer’s Mountain Madness, the title of his company, seek to show their perspective of what occurred on the fateful day in 1996.  This 372 page book is in response to Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. The Climb seeks to not sully Krakauer’s name, no, the book as Boukreev intended it merely seeks to show his point of the events that occurred.

The tale begins with Boukreev relating the process of how he came upon being hired on as a guide for Mountain Madness. Indeed, at first Rob hall had approached Anatoli Boukreev about the possibility of guiding for him on his expedition. It seemed at first Boukreev would accept the position until he was later offered twice the amount by Fischer which after a short consideration accepted.  It is at this point that the tale begins in full.  With the help of his coauthor Anatoli begins to detail the events leading up to the beginning of the climb of Everest.  From the get go, the Mountain Madness expedition under the tutelage of Fischer had many obstacles.  The first and foremost, of these hardships was acquiring enough oxygen for the climb.  It was up to Boukreev to negotiate with a Russian oxygen company to buy the tanks necessary for the journey up Everest. However, he was unable to purchase from Poisk the manufacturer that he was to deal with because Rob Hall had already bought out their supply.  Once this debacle was resolved one would hope that the rest of the journey for the Mountain Madness team would be smooth sailing. However, this was sadly not to be the case. When Mountain Madness and Fischer had finally gathered all of its clients and had travelled from Katmandu to the staging area where they would make a push for the base camp the snow was so thick that they were unable to ferry all of their supplies up to base camp.  Due to this they were delayed a few days before finally arriving in base camp.  From there Boukreev and the other climbers on Fischer’s expedition encountered very few problems during the acclimatization of the clients and it would seem that for all intensive purposes the rest of the climb would go over as effortlessly as a climb up Everest could.  

The retelling of the tragedy came to a head when Mountain Madness and Rob Hall’s expedition began their push for the summit of the mountain.  One of the most interesting tidbits that occurs in the book is when both expeditions encounter a pair of climbers from the IMAX team who climbed down because they had a foreboding feeling about climbing the mountain.  Boukreev shared their sentiment and for much of the journey from camp III to camp IV his intuition continued to tell him that climbing was a bad idea.  Throughout the text Boukreev speaks of actions he would have done differently on the expedition, but because Fischer was in “charge” he trusted him to make the decisions for the team. On the day of the summit Boukreev lead the charge with two of his clients and he and those two were the first to summit around two o’clock.  At the same time as this many clients from Hall’s expedition and Fischer’s had become so intermixed that it had slowed down progress substantially.  Looking down he realized that most of the clients if not all that had not summited already would be pushing their oxygen limits, He went to rush down the mountain to camp IV in order to prepare more tea and oxygen for climbers that would be descending much later. Once back in camp IV the storm, seemingly out of nowhere, struck the climbers and Boukreev describes his multiple attempts to save people including later going to find Fischer and attempt to save him after the sherpas informed him it was hopeless.

In the end he was unable to save everyone which he says haunts him even today and he made every attempt possible to help as many clients and guides as he could. As we already know when both of the expeditions made their bid for the summit they became trapped in a storm that took the lives of Fischer a few other climbers from Halls party.

Throughout the entirety of text there is a common theme for Boukreev of attempting to present the truth of how events occurred. For him it is imperative that people know what occurred on that day not only so that his own name may be cleared, but also so that others can learn from the mistakes made by both expeditions during the summit bid. Within the text Boukreev does not seek to engage Krakauer on his level and he simply presents the facts as he sees them in an objective manner. He wrote multiple letters, with the help of friends, to the editor of Outside magazine seeking to present his side of the story and recover his names. His efforts were sadly for naught and until this book was published Boukreev’s retelling of the events that occurred were not present in mainstream society.  He seeks to address many of the points brought up by Krakauer in his text on the tragedy. Boukreev states that his climbing gear was as good as any others and that he had been authorized to climb without supplementary oxygen on that day.  In addition to this, he states that it was the plan all along for him to journey down to camp IV before all of the clients in order to better provide support.

While Boukreev is still seen as a shady guide to the many who read only Into Thin Air by Krakauer, one can see that through this text Boukreev was not the sole reason why so many died.  Everyone made mistakes that day and it was a tragedy.  However, it was largely out of everyone’s hands. Through this text Boukreev and DeWalt provide an alternate viewpoint of the events that occurred that awful day and seek to shed some light on the truth of the events that occurred. In the end, it is up to the reader to determine what they think this text merely seeks to give them as much accurate information as possible to base their conclusion off of.