Notes on 'The Dispute'

The article here is a pretty good overview of the ‘he said – he said’ between Boukreev and Krakauer:

http://www.nickvanderleek.com/2005/05/krakauer-vs-boukreev.html

[Scroll down some for content pulled from a Salon.com article (though I found no direct link to a cached page)…]

It’s fair to say the issue is still a fuzzy one, and that both accounts are perhaps tainted by the needs of the author to represent the events of the 1996 climb in a way that puts them in a more favourable light.

Ultimately, what I take away from this is the idea that paying somebody, anybody, to drag your green arse up the highest peak on Earth is a tricky and risky business. Some of the responsibility has to rest with adventure tourists and journalists themselves, who put themselves in an inherently dangerous setting that exceeded their skills, and perhaps put too much faith in ‘only human’ guides and Sherpas to get them up and down safely. While this might work at the best of times, eventually, a ‘worst of times’ shows up.