Lack Of Trust In Into Thin Air

Throughout the novel Into Thin Air there are many important aspects that are touched on every day. In the book one of the most important parts I took away from it was the trust between the climbing teammates, or lack of trust. You need to be able to trust the person you are climbing otherwise they can take you down. The whole climb though was putting a lot of trust onto the guides, which I think is the most controversial part. They put their lives into other people’s hands and some of them paid for it, with money and their lives. This also ties into another point that is relevant to the real world, always stick to a plan and always plan for the worst situation. It was interesting to see how people ignored that plan just to achieve some
If you don’t trust your teammate you can try to do too much and hurt yourself. Climbing a mountain you are tied to the others you are climbing with a lot like when you are a football team you are tied to the players around you. Vince Lombardi once said “Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work”. In football if your right tackle does not do his job the running back or quarterback can get killed. If the quarterback does not trust the right tackle he is going to be paranoid and he will be too worried about a guy coming from the right instead of worrying about throwing the ball downfield, this was shown in Friday Night Lights, they had to be brothers and be able to trust each other otherwise you won’t succeed that is why they got as far as they did. This relates to Krakauer, because he could not trust the others to help him if he got in trouble, and he worried about having to help them just like the quarterback. Climbing without people you do not know you can trust is life dangerous. When the guide Hall trusted Hansen could make it up and down the summit if he just waited it cost him his life. If he knew him better he could have known better if he could recover or if he was done. That could have saved his life
All of the climbers were willing to pay the ultimate price to reach the top of the mountain. I never have thought of anything in the world I would die just to do. The closest thing I would do is sacrifice my body to win the World Series, but I would never die to do it. They climbed up and were ready to give up everything just for the self-satisfaction of climbing the mountain and some hoped for fame. It is ironic that Sandy climbed the mountain for the fame and the publicity and when she got back she was criticized heavily and looked down upon. She could have died and she didn’t really achieve what she wanted. For Krakauer he achieved what he wanted, but I am interested to find out if he would do it if he could go back in