IT WAS THE WORST STORY IDEA idea an editor could come up with, let alone assign to a real human being. That's how I felt on Saturday, May 11, 1996, the day I heard Jon Krakauer had disappeared while reporting for Outside on the growing phenomenon of commercially guided trips up Mount Everest—a story I'd conceived and helped make happen by dealing with an endless stream of logistical headaches. None of that mattered when I heard Krakauer was missing in a deadly high-altitude blizzard. Had I sent him to his death?

Just 24 hours earlier, of course, I'd considered myself a genius. On the morning of May 10, Mark Bryant, Outside's editor, made an announcement at the daily editorial meeting in our Santa Fe office. "I have news from Jon Krakauer's wife," he quietly told some two dozen staffers. "Early in the afternoon, Nepal time, Jon made it to the summit of Everest."

A cheer went up; there were high-fives. I pictured Everest, a three-sided granite pyramid jutting into the jet stream, ice crystals pluming off its top. Krakauer was up there in a snowsuit and oxygen mask, taking pictures and notes as he gazed out over the sprawling Tibetan Plateau and, in the opposite direction, the deep glacial basin known as the Western Cwm.

"How long will it take him to get down?" asked Leslie Weeden, a senior editor who tended to get right to the point.

"We'll probably know something tomorrow," Bryant said. Then he added, "Remember, he's not down until he's really down. A lot can happen on the descent. Keep Jon and all the Everest climbers in your thoughts."

I cruised the hallways with a tremendous feeling of relief. At various times it had looked as if the project might fall apart. Trying to put a deal together with the guiding companies was a tenuous and maddening process. Krakauer, a longtime Outside contributor with a reputation for being meticulous and brooding, was game from the start, but he needed occasional coaxing. Over a 12-month period, while he debated the risks, Bryant and I made the arrangements, eventually placing him with Rob Hall, owner of the New Zealand–based guiding company Adventure Consultants. Needless to say, I was happy when Krakauer decided to go.

EARLY ON SATURDAY, my wife, Dianna, and I drove to the apartment of Alex Heard, a senior editor who was moving to New York and who, with his wife, Susan, was unloading stuff at a yard sale. We were pulling out to leave when Heard came running up, looking panicked. He'd gotten a phone call. Something catastrophic had happened on Everest.

"There was a big storm yesterday," he said. "Climbers are missing. Scott Fischer is dead. They didn't have any information about Krakauer."

I felt disoriented, then my stomach flopped. "Krakauer is missing?"

I was too rattled to drive, so Di zoomed us through the adobe-lined streets to the Outside building. Within 15 minutes, other staffers started drifting in. I burst into Bryant's office, spouting the grim facts to his back. He turned away from his computer and looked up, stunned.

"Say that again?" he said.

People react differently to bad news. I almost started crying. Katie Arnold, an editorial assistant who did much of the fact-checking on "Into Thin Air," would tell me later that she was seriously spooked—after the news broke, she had nightmares in which climbers were immobilized in the clouds near the summit of Everest.

In the hallway, I heard muted giggles—the news having inspired a bit of nervous black humor. John Galvin, an assistant editor, was talking to a few people about the Patch, a white rabbit pelt, purchased at our local Hobby Lobby, that Krakauer had carried to the summit as an odd souvenir for us deskbound editors. To make a long story short, the Patch had been used prior to Krakauer's climb in a jokey nighttime ritual held near the Santa Fe ski basin, a quasi-pagan exercise designed to bring on a season of heavy snow. People couldn't help wondering whether the Patch had worked too well. Krakauer didn't know about the Patch's origins when he took it up, but he admitted later that the coincidence slightly weirded him out.

Sick humor? Yes, but tension works itself out in strange ways. For my part, I spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone, trying to learn whether Krakauer was still alive.