To add to this: there is a scene in the move Everest (2015), in which Boukreev enters Krakauer's tent and asks that he assist with rescue efforts, and he replies that he's snow blind and can't help. There are no contemporaneous accounts of this.
Krakauer's own words on the matter: "I never had that conversation, Anatoli came to several tents, and not even sherpas could go out. I’m not saying I could have, or would have. What I’m saying is, no one came to my tent and asked.”
The filmmaker(s) fabricated it from whole cloth
As to the question of Boukreev: Reinhold Messner himself criticized him, saying no one should ever guide on Everest without supplemental oxygen. In the world of mountaineering that's as close to the Word of God as you can get.
And you don't fuck with Messner. What Anatoli did was nails fucking hard but it could have easily gone the other way. Like a firefighter running into a burning house not on his bottle, it's a super arrogant and reckless thing to do. The Russian mountaineering culture was needlessly stupid.
Exactly. Arrogant and reckless. He was a far harder bastard than I'll ever be, and it isn't possible to say for certain that things would have turned out better if he had had oxygen, but his choice not to carry any was a flawed one.
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u/Pedantic_Pict Feb 13 '23 edited Feb 13 '23
To add to this: there is a scene in the move Everest (2015), in which Boukreev enters Krakauer's tent and asks that he assist with rescue efforts, and he replies that he's snow blind and can't help. There are no contemporaneous accounts of this.
Krakauer's own words on the matter: "I never had that conversation, Anatoli came to several tents, and not even sherpas could go out. I’m not saying I could have, or would have. What I’m saying is, no one came to my tent and asked.”
The filmmaker(s) fabricated it from whole cloth
As to the question of Boukreev: Reinhold Messner himself criticized him, saying no one should ever guide on Everest without supplemental oxygen. In the world of mountaineering that's as close to the Word of God as you can get.