BS. Krakauer is an accomplished mountaineer and technical rock climber. If you've ever read his book "Eiger Dreams" you'd know that what you say is completely untrue. He has found and done things not only worth dying for, but things that are way more likely to kill him than many of the things the rest of us choose to do.

I wouldn't discount the subjects of Krakauer's stories as "hapless" either. In fact, when one looks at the details that Krakauer gives, they do not seem hapless at all.

I think it did mean something!

I also think the frakkin' idiots who knowlingly lied to the family and media about how he died should be executed!

Well, if you don't consider folks hapless who (a) pay sky-high prices to get hand-held into the "death zone" above 20K feet when their own individual skills wouldn't take get them as far as base camp (I'm not talking about the guides here, just their customers); or (b) don't realize that the level of rivers rise and fall dramatically based on the seasons and if you go across in winter you're unlikely to be able to get back in the spring, I don't know who on earth would qualify.

You speak of what you don't know. Some pay $5000, some pay $80,000 - but hand holding only gets you so far on Everest. One of my friends is a guide on Everest, he runs Sierra Mountaineering International, he's successfully summited Everest twice. He (and I) would disagree that just because you pay a guide to help you to the top of Everest that doesn't make you hapless. It makes you smart. Just as I don't perform surgery on myself, or run electrical wires in my house, I would also hire a guide (and have) to show me how to be most successful in getting to the top of a mountain. I did it to climb Mt. Washington in the middle of winter a few years back. Even the guides on Everest wouldn't make it far if they weren't helped to stage further up the mountain by the Sherpas - so are the guides hapless too?

Shout out to my awesome hapless guide Eric!



He rocks!

So the guy writes book about tragic stories? Everyone has a niche.

Ummm, leaving aside what I may or may not know about climbing, I think we may be having a little semantic issue here- according to Miriam Webster's online dictionary: hapless means:

Main Entry: hap·less
Pronunciation: \ˈha-pləs\
Function: adjective
Date: 14th century
: having no luck : unfortunate

My point was that Krakauer wrote about people who died on a frikking expensive vacation or a rather pointless meander into the woods- which to me seems to be the very embodiment of "having no luck" or being "unfortunate". I fail to see what on earth that has to do with your guide friend, who apparently is very much alive.