Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

I'd been meaning to read this for a long time, and plucked it from my building's Laundry Room Library last week. I'm probably one of the few people in the world who hadn't already read it, but just in case it's new to you: in 1996 Outside magazine sent journalist & mountain climber Jon Krakauer off to Mount Everest to report on what it was like climbing as a member of a commercial expedition. These commercial ventures had been criticized by True Mountaineers for making it far too Easy for any Millionaire Nitwit Tourist to go up and down Everest.

So Krakauer goes on up the mountain with a group of paying clients led by a team of Sherpas and the expedition leaders, they get up near the top, and a lot of them die, including the super-experienced and all-around great guy leader of the expedition. It does not sound like fun, at all. Even before everyone dies, it doesn't sound like it was any fun. At all. Then again I'm not a mountain climber so what the F do I know?

The upper portions of Everest are littered with dead bodies, e.g...

There are many more pictures of some of them here (thanks to Eric Redbeef for this), along with a recent example of the kind of moral dilemma that happens up there, wherein 20-plus climbers trek right on past a stranger who's dying and asking for help...because, a) He's a Stranger, and b) chances are good they'd die too if they stopped to try to help him...does that make it OK? I dunno. I do know that I will never be up there to be on either side of that fun little issue.