G. Weston DeWalt—Jon Krakauer dispute

The G. Weston DeWalt—Jon Krakauer dispute was a prolonged public and editorial conflict over the portrayal of Anatoli Boukreev’s actions during the 1996 Everest disaster and the reliability of DeWalt’s book, The Climb. It expanded from disagreement about the events themselves into disputes over interviews, sourcing, and professional responsibility; after Boukreev’s death, DeWalt treated answering Krakauer’s renewed criticism as a promise he had made to his absent collaborator.

Origins and Public Confrontation

The conflict unfolded through books, letters, journalism, and public appearances rather than through a single exchange. In late 1997, after The Climb appeared, DeWalt and Boukreev took part in panel discussions at the Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival. Boukreev had rarely spoken publicly about the disaster in the year and a half since it occurred. The occasion mattered to him partly because, in August 1996, he had listened to Jon Krakauer criticize his conduct at another panel without confronting him: Boukreev believed Krakauer was entitled to his platform and that the forum was not the place for a personal clash.

At Banff, Boukreev argued that journalists should exercise greater care when commenting on high-altitude mountaineering. During the question-and-answer session, Krakauer called The Climb “dishonest” and said Boukreev appeared to discourage a free press on Everest, without offering supporting evidence in that exchange. The other panelists remained silent when the moderator invited them to respond. As the discussion ended, David Roberts stood and called the book “self-serving.” Some audience members booed; the moderator intervened, and civility returned after a pause. Later that evening, a Canadian Alpine Club officer apologized to Boukreev and DeWalt on behalf of Canadian mountaineers. Boukreev remarked that the Everest tragedy had been enough tragedy, and that the disaster seemed to have been reduced to a sideshow.

The Letter and DeWalt’s Rebuttal

Two days after the American Alpine Club’s annual meeting in December 1997, Krakauer sent Jed Williamson a long, accusatory letter. Williamson was a former club president and one of the five members of the committee that had given Boukreev the David A. Sowles Memorial Award for his actions on Everest. Krakauer circulated copies to people in publishing and mountaineering and to journalists. DeWalt describes the letter as a series of indictments of Boukreev, himself, and The Climb.

Among the specific charges, Krakauer alleged that DeWalt had not attempted to interview Neal Beidleman, who had guided clients on the Mountain Madness expedition; that DeWalt had never contacted Ed Viesturs of the IMAX expedition; and that virtually every Sherpa on Everest in 1996 blamed Boukreev for the disaster. With Boukreev in Nepal at Annapurna I Base Camp and out of communication, DeWalt took responsibility for answering the recipients. On December 16, he mailed a point-by-point response and sent a copy to Krakauer.

DeWalt answered the accusation about Beidleman with a specific account of their contact: before submitting the manuscript, he had faxed Beidleman an excerpt from the Everest Base Camp debriefing tape in which Beidleman supported Boukreev’s decision to descend ahead of the Mountain Madness clients, and he had asked him to give an on-the-record interview, which Beidleman declined. DeWalt also disputed the claim about Viesturs, stating that he had interviewed him in Salt Lake City in January 1997, and had both an audiotape and a transcript; The Climb quoted that interview. The dispute was thus not simply over competing interpretations of the mountain, but over whether the book’s account had been built on interviews and documentary material that Krakauer said were absent.

DeWalt challenged the allegation about the Sherpas through the apparent contradiction between that sweeping blame and the outcomes of the two groups. Galen Rowell, a respected mountaineer, writer, and photographer, had independently questioned Krakauer’s claim in a letter written a week before Boukreev’s death. Rowell pointed to the survival of Boukreev’s clients without major injuries and contrasted it with the deaths and serious injuries among members of Krakauer’s party. His question was how shortcomings in Boukreev’s guiding could explain the survival of his clients while members of Krakauer’s team died or were badly injured. The contrast did not, by itself, settle responsibility for the disaster; it sharpened the evidentiary challenge to a claim about what virtually every Sherpa believed.

A Controversy That Would Not Quiet

The disagreement continued through journalism as well as direct correspondence. In a 1998 Columbia Journalism Review article, Weinberg asked readers of Into Thin Air to consider the stakes of Krakauer’s account: if it was accurate, the climbers in Boukreev’s care might have suffered less had he been more concerned and less macho; if it was exaggerated or wrong, the error would damage Boukreev’s reputation, not merely the record’s factual precision. Dwight Garner then published “Coming Down” online at Salon, presenting an account of what had happened on Everest and examining points in the dispute. DeWalt judged the article reasonably objective and found that it offered useful perspective on the controversy’s central issues.

After Garner’s article, Krakauer and DeWalt exchanged letters on Salon’s website. DeWalt believed their exchange had explored the issues exhaustively and expected the controversy to subside, leaving others to assess the arguments. That expectation failed when Into Thin Air: The Illustrated Edition appeared in November 1998 with an extensive postscript.

The Postscript and DeWalt’s Response

Krakauer’s postscript remained sharply critical of Boukreev’s guiding in 1996, while acknowledging his exceptional high-altitude climbing ability and briefly recognizing that he had rescued Mountain Madness climbers. Krakauer explicitly credited Boukreev with saving Sandy Hill Pittman and Charlotte Fox at considerable risk to himself, a point he said he had made on many occasions. The postscript did not mention that the American Alpine Club had honored Boukreev for his actions.

DeWalt regarded the postscript as disingenuous: in his view, it tried to compensate for earlier failures of authorial responsibility that had helped create a misleading understanding of Boukreev’s conduct. He also argued that Krakauer repeated complaints about The Climb that had already been answered, and that this repetition weakened the postscript’s apparent aim of defending Krakauer’s integrity and Into Thin Air. These are DeWalt’s judgments, not neutral findings; the dispute is presented through the account of a participant who had written The Climb with Boukreev.

DeWalt initially considered ignoring the postscript. After reading it a second and third time, however, he concluded that Krakauer remained committed to a characterization of Boukreev that DeWalt believed was seriously flawed and misleading. He said silence would betray a trust: he had promised Boukreev that he would do what was necessary if Boukreev did not come home. Boukreev’s death in the Annapurna I avalanche made that promise a living responsibility for DeWalt, and he decided that a further response was necessary. In an introductory note to that response, DeWalt explained why he would revisit earlier arguments: Krakauer’s postscript, he wrote, sometimes omitted the responses and refutations already made in other forums, so retracing those arguments was needed to give readers the omitted context.

Evidence, Reputation, and the Limits of Resolution

The dispute’s recurring pattern was accusation followed by a demand to restore context. Krakauer challenged the reliability of The Climb by citing alleged errors and defects in its reporting. DeWalt countered that many items Krakauer labeled errors were matters with which he disagreed, and said that both he and St. Martin’s Press had considered Krakauer’s comments; they believed the mass-market paperback, published in July 1998, had responsibly addressed his complaints. Their disagreement therefore concerned not only what happened on Everest, but the standards by which a book’s factual reliability and an author’s responsibility should be judged.

The conflict also tied criticism of a book to the reputation of a living climber and, after Boukreev’s death, to the obligations of those who could still answer on his behalf. DeWalt’s documented claims about interviews and Rowell’s comparison of the teams’ outcomes gave the exchange concrete points to test, while the broader arguments about guiding, press freedom, and authorial responsibility remained contested. Salon’s correspondence and Krakauer’s postscript did not bring the quarrel to a clear settlement. Instead, each new account revived the earlier question of what readers had been told, what evidence had been left out, and how confidently a complex disaster could be assigned to one person’s failings.