It’s a funny thing, I often find myself with an obsession of one thing or another. I’m never aware of it until it strikes and it always strikes hard. Once I’m infected I must find out everything there is to know about the thing, whatever it is. It was most recently knitting. Once I have satisfied my curiosity I either continue to be obsessed for years, sometimes decades, or else it drops off. Knitting has dropped off, I’m sad to report but perhaps I will pick it back up again. No, this week, this day, it is Mount Everest. More to the point: the desire to climb, the mystery of and most importantly, the ease with which the mountain seems to take the lives of climbers both experienced and inexperienced. My brother-in-law gave me Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air which is what sparked the present obsession with all things Mount Everest.

The obsession has become such that I am currently monitoring the present expeditions, of which there are many, this being the time period that most climbers take to the highest peak in the world, and the target summit push for most of them is May 10, which is, of course, when 12 people died during the tragic 1996 climb, which is what Into Thin Air is about. We are approaching the big moment and this website has links to all of the current expeditions, among them, Mountain Madness, which was Scott Fischer’s company making a big show that Spring. Fischer was the only one on his team who died and he was quite famous and beloved in the world of mountaineering.

Have I ever been climbing? Nope. Do I ever want to climb Mt. Everest? Well…that’s a tough question. I can understand the desire to do it, to take on something that challenging. In all ways, I understand it. But I am probably too old to start now and as a mom I can’t really take the risk. But I will say that I understand it.

Into Thin Air follows Krakauer’s assignment by Outside Magazine to cover this idea of guided tours up the mountain. Rob Hall, the leader of his expedition (also died), believed he could, with proper planning, bring anyone to the top of Everest. With the help of Sherpas (a bizarre part of the whole thing I think you have to witness to really understand), Hall’s plan included a two-month trek. First, get to Base Camp. Next, slowly make your brain and blood and body used to the high altitude. That part of it does not sound fun and is, in fact, what makes this kind of climbing so dangerous, among other things. Our bodies, nor the bodies of any mammals, were not made to breathe at such low oxygen levels. I told you I was obsessed.

So they were to climb up to Camp 1, then back down. Then up to Camp 2 and then back down. They bravely took on the Icefall, where pillars of ice can come crashing down at any time and kill you. They did all of this until at last, around midnight, when they were all sick as dogs, dizzy, skinny and almost dead already, they had to do the final push towards the summit. Naturally, so many things went wrong. Among them, a freak storm that came out of nowhere and was so severe climbers could only see about two feet in front them, this on a terrain where one wrong turn can send you tumbling down the face of the mountain, thousands and thousands of feet.

Another problem, they didn’t stick to their plan to turn around, no matter what, by 2pm. They couldn’t because of various other problems, like too many climbers hitting the same spot at once and delaying things hours – every delay meant more badly needed oxygen gas in the tank wasted. The Sherpas had not gone ahead and laid the rope line, as they were supposed to have done and that meant the climbers had to do it, which meant more delays. No one could have known the storm was coming and maybe without the storm they would have all been fine. There is no way to know.

Krakauer was one of three of his team to hit the summit by 2pm and he was given permission to head back down. As he writes, it isn’t the going up that kills people most often; it’s the coming back down. In their “summit fever” to get to the top they use up all of their reserves of oxygen, of energy and thus, often there is nothing left to get them back down again. Krakauer had a very difficult time making it back to his tent. By then, he had become delirious, another bizarre effect of altitude sickness and not one of the worst but can be deadly.

The storm hit just before he got to his tent and by then, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer and many of the other climbers were up high on the summit or near it and stuck in the dangerous storm. Eventually, Hall and many others were simply die. Krakauer and the survivors lived to tell the tale and continue to be haunted by the events of that day on Everest. It is so fascinating to me I ran to ebay and bought the IMAX DVD (an IMAX team was also heading to Everest that season to make the movie about it), a 2001 movie of Into Thin Air, which I know is going to be really bad, and a Discovery three-part series on the dangers of climbing Everest.

So, why am I so obsessed with this? Because it’s there. No, I don’t really know why. I know that these past few days my daughter and I were stricken with walking Pneumonia. Breathing has been difficult for me and so I felt a kind of kinship with those sucking for breath. But part of it is Krakauer’s writing. He’s so good at it and makes it all so interesting I wish I had the book to read all over again. I may also read Into the Wild but it’s an even more depressing story because at least Everest is something I can understand – being a dumbass and abandoning life for the wilderness does not really appeal to me. What amazed me about Into Thin Air was how Nature so badly kicked Man’s ass. These guys were not idiots – they were famous, expert climbers. They did everything right yet did everything wrong. It’s not unlike the Titanic in that way. Again, Nature Kicked Man’s ass that time too and it also involved freezing cold ice.

I would love to hike to Everest’s base camp and just stay there. I don’t even need to climb up the mountain, although if I were twenty years younger I might attempt it. Two things have occurred to me about this. The first is that, if you gotta go, dying on Everest is not a bad way to go. You go numb, you lose consciousness and you’re probably kind of happy, maybe lonely. Death feels like sweet relief. The other thing that occurred to me is that taking someone up Everest could be the perfect murder. Think about it. Let’s say you want to kill your husband. It wouldn’t be that hard as survival is so utterly fragile up there. Removing his oxygen tank, for instance. But there are many ways to do it. I’m surprised no one has ever thought of it before. It would be impossible to investigate and you’d totally get away with it. That is, if you survived.

I have no idea how long my obsession with all things Everest will last. But I can tell you right now, it ain’t going anywhere for a while. I’ve got the DVDs coming. It’s a shame that someone already made Into Thin Air into a movie because I think it could really be an incredible film, certainly a hell of a lot better than the one no one saw.