...In the text, Beck Weathers is described as having love and passion towards Mt Everest and climbing in general. Many people wonder why someone would to do something that has an average chance of survival of 1:4 – one death for every 4 people that summit. In Beck Weathers case like many other climbers it was his obsession to conquer her, “her” because in the text Into Thin Air, the mountain is a very important character and is portrayed as a volatile female. Jon Krakauer says in the book “Beck seems to lack in skill, but he makes up for it with sheer determination”. I cannot understand this’ drive beyond logic to conquer’ either but I think it’s something that only those who want to have attempted to or have summited Everest before (and lived to tell the tale) can understand. Mt Everest is supposedly not a very challenging climb and doesn’t allow climbers to show their skills, but It is stereotyped that it’s what “real” climbers should do. Being on top of the world is big deal for some people and we need to respect their dreams just as they do ours.// Beck Weathers first encountered his own problems in Mt Everest’s “Death Zone” when the altitude (close to 29,000 feet at this stage) started to affect his surgically repaired eyes. It only got worse for Beck from this point, he got caught in the storm along with many of his fellow climbers. The storm was not for the mountain to “pick it’s victims” but to test them to their mental and physical limits. Five people that were...
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...“Into Thin Air”, a book written by Jon Krakauer, mountaineer and renowned for his writing of the outdoors, is Krakauer’s account of the deadliest season of Everest. In the beginning of the story, Krakauer writes, “I can attest that nothing I saw early on the afternoon of May 10 suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down,” (Krakauer 5). This quote is foreshadowing what is to come later in the story, and Krakauer suggests that he and other climbers were unaware and unsuspecting of the “murderous storm”. As the story goes on, Krakauer talks about Everest, writing, “I stared at the peak for perhaps thirty minutes, trying to apprehend what it would be like to be standing on that gale-swept vertex,” (Krakauer 59). This quote tells of the presence of Everest, and how large, yet beautiful it is. Krakauer does a good job of letting the reader know what it is like to be looking at the largest mountain in the world. Lastly, Krakauer writes, “I stayed behind to...
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...Into Thin Air Have you ever read “Into Thin Air”? I am going to talk about a chapter from the book that I have read. The chapter talks about Jon Krakauer’s journey climbing Mount Everest. Along with his journey, it talks about the events that went with his journey. “Into Thin Air” is a good story that I would recommend to anyone because it teaches you to never give up, to help others, and what it is like to climb Mount Everest. My first point of why “Into Thin Air” is a great story to read is that it teaches you to never give up. My reasoning for this is that Jon Krakauer faced many challenges while climbing Mount Everest, but he never gave up. One challenge that he faced was when he reached Hillary Step.(Krakauer,page 358). Jon reached the top of...
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...Jon Krakauer was a part of the deadliest expedition in Mount Everest history (at that point), with 8 people dying on May 10 and 11th in 1996. Into Thin Air was written by Jon Krakauer, an avid mountaineer in his youth and a journalist as he is climbing Everest. Jon writes about his expedition and personal experience of climbing Everest. In the book Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer uses rhetorical appeals to express the dangers of climbing Mt Everest. Jon Krakauer triggers readers emotions with careful wording, and uses human nature to justify climbing Mt Everest. Jon is explaining the history of Mount Everest, when he exclaims that it's human nature to want to climb everest. “Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it...
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...Nearly eleven times as large as the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest manmade structure, Mount Everest looms over the rest of the world with the spectacular height of 29,029 feet. Imagine how amazing it feels to stand on the summit of this mountain, the highest elevation on Earth that any human can climb to, peering over the rest of the beautiful world. The author of Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, Jon Krakauer, experiences this, but he has determined that it is by far the worst incident of his entire life. Krakauer ascends the mountain with well-respected and world-famous mountaineer Rob Hall’s team. Several of the people on Hall’s team, including Krakauer, successfully reach the summit, but descending proves...
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...Essay on “Into Thin Air” Second Place Academy “And the 2013 state runner up is…La Salle Academy”. My entire senior year, award ceremonies always seemed to turn out that way. It was the running joke of our senior class; we had taken on the title of Second Place Academy. First place kept escaping our sports team’s grasps, including my own. As a cheerleader and avid sports fan, I attended basically every game, match, and meet during my senior year. That year some of the recipients of those second place medals included the hockey team, cheerleaders, boys soccer, boys basketball, girls lacrosse, volleyball, gymnastics, football, and so on. Through the tears, disappointment and many upsets, I learned bitter sweetly how much my high school community really means to me. La Salle Academy is a large, private Catholic high school located in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island. We are known for our sports, our arts, and of course the education you receive while in private school. With private schools, come a variety of unwanted factors. One is the hate you receive from public school students, I learned quickly that it doesn’t matter who you are, and they just love to see you fail. Another is the rich group of students who have all been friends since kindergarten, and have climbed the ladder of private schools together. This group’s bubble is almost impossible to break into. Now, don’t get me wrong I learned to love this school. I transferred from a public school La Salle after...
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...Defined by The Guides Network HACE is “where the brain swells and stops functioning in the normal way.” Pressure builds inside the skull and motor and mental skills weaken. Symptoms of this potentially fatal medical condition are Confusion, fatigue, hallucinations, blindness, paralysis, seizure, coma, and many more serious results. HAPE is also easily attainable contributed to the deaths. “HAPE is an accumulation of fluid in the air sacs of the lungs, due to leaky capillaries. It severely inhibits exchange of oxygen in the lungs, and can result in death,” says The Institute for Altitude Medicine. The symptoms include chest congestion, shortness of breath, unconsciousness, coma, death and more. All of these conditions and symptoms are highly attainable in high altitudes such as Everest and could have contributed to the deaths of the voyagers. Krakauer was concerned that he had HACE or HAPE while he was on the mountain because he had several of the...
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...English 102 Rob Hall versus Scott Fischer In Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer takes the time to describe a little bit about the guides of both teams on Mount Everest during the climb. Krakauer talks about Rob Hall, who is the guide of Adventure Consultants, and also was the guide who led Krakauer to the top of the mountain. He also tells about Scott Fischer, who was the guide of Mountain Madness. Rob Hall is definitely the better guide to go on the climb with, because he is the more serious mountaineer, and he also was more careful about planning the climb up Mount Everest. Adventure Consultants is also a much more professional sounding name than Mountain Madness. Hall was more of a serious climber when it came to going up the mountain. He was said to have “impressive organizational skills” (34), and once the groups were at base camp, “Nobody commanded more respect on the mountain than Hall” (65). This shows that even Krakauer thought Hall was very good at planning, and that he really knew how to be a leader when it came down to climbing. These are essential when it comes to going up the summit, because without proper planning and a good leader, there wouldn’t be anyone to tell clients what to do to keep them safe and get them to the summit, which is what everyone on the trip is paying for. Fischer told a reporter “When accidents happen, I think it’s always human error. So that’s what I want to eliminate” (69). Yet, he still led his group by more of a “seat-of-the-pants, what-worry-me...
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...que desde mi punto de vista es la personalización del cliente dándole un abanico de posibilidades no solo mas amplio si no especializado a lo que el cliente demanda, teniendo así no solo la satisfacción del cliente si no una probabilidad de vender impresionante, el ejemplo mas claro fue el de un alpinista británico llamado Joe Simpson escribió un libro llamado Touching the Void , un relato desgarrador sobre la muerte; cerca en los Andes peruanos, el cual obtuvo buenas críticas, pero sólo un éxito momentáneo, fue olvidado pronto. Entonces, una década más tarde, ocurrió algo extraño. Jon Krakauer escribió Into Thin Air , otro libro sobre la tragedia alpinismo, que se convirtió en un éxito editorial. De repente, Touching the Void comenzó a vender de nuevo. Random House saco una nueva edición, para mantenerse al día con la demanda. Y comenzó a promover junto a su Into Thin Air pantallas, las ventas aumentaron y todo gracias a que Amazon lo puso en recomendaciones uno del otro creando un efecto expansivo, también con esto nos pudimos dar cuenta que los gustos tanto de música como de entretenimiento en general se pueden agrandar no solo al manejo de quienes deciden que series o que música esta mejor si no que el mercado alcanza niveles donde antes no llegaba. Éste es el long tail se trata de encontrar todo lo que hay en el catálogo, los más viejos álbumes y recordados con cariño por los fans de siempre o redescubiertos por nuevos fans. Hay temas directos, B-sides, remixes, hay nichos...
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...judgment and simple physical mistakes were the cause of eight people dying up on the summit on that fateful day of May 10th 1996. Of the various mistakes made on the Summit, the most obvious mistake would be that the guides, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, did not make their clients turn around at the designated time. The last client reached the summit at 4:00 P.M.; this was two hours after the latest turn around time Hall had preached about the month prior. Fischer had passed a few of his clients on his way down the mountain after 3:40 P.M. and still allowed them to continue to climb the summit. Hall waited at the top of the summit for Doug Hansen far past the turn around time to make sure he made it to the top. Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air, stated that Doug Hansen…” had been talked into returning this year by Hall, who felt sorry that Hansen had been denied the summit and had significantly discounted Hansen’s fee to entice him to give it another try.” (72) Rob Hall’s guilt regarding Hansen’s previous attempt and failure of the summit could account for his lapse of judgment. Not sticking to the turn around time was not the only mistake to happen on the mountain. There were several climbers, both experienced and beginner, that ignored their limitations. For instance client Beck Weathers had eye surgery years prior to his trip to Mount Everest, and early in the climb he discovered that the low barometric pressure caused his eyesight to fail, a side effect of the...
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...Everi THE INTERACTION OE COGNITIVE BIAS, PSYCHOLOGICAL SAEETY, AND SYSTEM COMPLEXITY Michael A. Roberto B usiness leaders and scholars have learned important lessons from tragedies such as the Challenger disaster, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and the Three Mile Island accident.' Similarly, we can leam important lessons about leadership and decision making from the unfortunate events that took place on Mount Everest several years ago. Survivors have offered many competing explanations for this tragedy. While they have focused on the tactical blunders, this research examines the underlying cognitive, interpersonal, and systemic forces that played a role in the incident. This conceptual analysis suggests that cognitive biases, team beliefs about interpersonal risk taking, and system complexity interacted to create a fatal disaster. Incredible achievement and great tragedy unfolded on the treacherous slopes of Everest on May 10, 1996. TVventy-three people reached the summit along the South Col route in Nepal on that day, including Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, two of the world's most skilled and experienced high-altitude climbers. Unfortunately, Hall, Fischer, and three members of their expeditions died as a storm enveloped the mountain during their descent. Others barely escaped with their lives after many hours wandering in the dark while braving subzero temperatures. Hall, the leader of the Adventure Consultants expedition, had established an impressive track...
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...the twelfth casualty of the season.” Krakauer will never leave behind every single moment that he experienced on his first expedition summiting the highest mountain in the world in 1996. Mount Everest has been infamous of taking away many lives during its climbing season every summer from April to June, and of course, there was no exception in Krakauer’s trip. The victorious glory after summiting Everest was swiftly swept away from him on his way back to Camp Four. Descending down from the South Col to his tent, Krakauer has no idea how he will never have a chance to see half of his teammates again, not even Rob Hall or Andy Harris, who he thought was near the Camp during the deathly storm. Putting his thoughts and feelings in Into Thin Air, “a personal account of the Mt. Everest disaster”, Krakauer vividly recalls his memory about what happened during the entire trip, perhaps giving the audience a sense of responsibility for the death and injure of his team members in the very last chapters of his book and somewhat extends that responsibility towards Boukereev, a professional guide in another team. Jon Krakauer describes his trip descending down with some blurry memories, providing his readers with a sincere sense of guilt for the lost of Andy Harris. He confesses that he is “physically and emotionally wrecked” after spending an hour “scouring” for Harris, and all that he gets from the search team is conviction that Harris “was dead”. The feeling of guilt doubles when...
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...Question 1. After understanding and analyzing the tragedy of Mount Everest , May 1996 that took lives of eight climbers during summit attempts, we can conclude that the tragedy may occur due to several root causes whether it is by nature or human error. The major factor that leads to this tragedy is that all the climbers are lack of team work and communication. Even though they are in the same expedition but they have their own individual’s goal, eager to reach at the summit. For example, Jon Krakauer one of the clients of Adventure Consultant said that he felt disconnected from the climbers around him, they were a team in name only. Supposedly, during the acclimatization exercises, the climbers should take time to get to know each other, learn their responsibilities as a team build their confidence and trust to their teammates, instead they were doubting each other whether they could rely own their team member during difficult times. That also might cause this tragedy, which is lack of trust towards team member. One of the potential causes of the tragedy was overconfidence. Overconfidence occurs when leaders believe that their experience, abilities, skill, or maybe even luck, will allow them to overcome any challenge they face. Research has shown that such overconfidence can lead to poor decision making as leaders substitute their own personal skill for careful analysis of the situation and planning. Hall, in particular, may have been prone to overconfidence. He had reached...
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...Jon Krakauer, author and climber, is employed by Outside Magazine to write down an article about the commercialism on Mt. Everest. Krakauer joins the most fatal Mount Everest expedition in history. Krakauer joins the climbing service referred to as adventure Consultants, guided by Rob Hall. The guide service is meant to speed up the adjustment method and guide the climbers with success to the summit of Mt. Everest. The climb is broken into camps: Base Camp, Camp One, Camp Two, Camp three and Camp Four. After spending weeks at Base Camp preparing for the gruesome climb ahead, the group makes several journeys up to the other camps to hurry up the adjustment method. Then, the group makes a summit push. Throughout the climb, Krakauer describes his teammates, his guides and different expeditions on the mountain. He tries to piece together a continual timeline of the events that will occur within the weeks they're on the mountain. All of the climbers have issues adjusting to the altitude, exhausting quickly, losing weight and moving slowly. The climbers' experience in mountain climbing varies greatly from some well qualified cambers, and some who must rely dominantly on the guides. Despite a variety of mishaps, the primary death doesn't truly occur until about hafway through the book. From that time on, death is something all the climbers become well acquainted with. The actual summit push is when everything begins to collapse. Rob Hall appoints a 2:00 pm turn-around time, which means...
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...The Old and The New When first reading Harryette Mullen’s tanka on page 101, we can see in our mind’s eye climbers hiking beside dead hikers on Mount Everest. Looking further into the tanka, more meanings are excavated. The climbers represent a new generation of people while the dead represent the past generations that they are trying to surpass. The peak of Everest is the goals, ideals, and innovations the new generation are hoping to achieve, while Everest itself is the journey the climbers go through to achieve their goals. The fatigue represents the old ideals that the newer generation is trying to overcome, while the frozen dead indicates the way the old generation are frozen in their antiquated beliefs and ideals. The first three words in the poem are “Climbers on Everest” (Mullen 101), which initially gives the reader a vision of a rough and turbulent journey for the climbers. The groups that the climbers are referring to are the new generation of young adults struggling on the mountain. The mountain symbolizes life’s journey, which includes a beginning, the main climb, and the peak. This refers to the timeline of humanity, with ideals being changed for the better as one goes up the mountain. Specifically naming Mount Everest paints life as hard and strenuous, as Everest is the highest and most difficult mountain to climb. The climbers are described as being “fixed,” which means that they have a stubborn determination toward reaching their goal, with the word “reaching”...
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