1996 Mount Everest disaster
Based on Wikipedia: 1996 Mount Everest disaster
The Day the Mountain Became a Tomb
Rob Hall was a careful man. The thirty-five-year-old New Zealander had summited Everest four times and had built his company, Adventure Consultants, on the promise that careful planning could get ordinary people to the top of the world's highest peak. He charged sixty-five thousand dollars per client, and for that price, he delivered meticulous preparation, acclimatization schedules, and turn-around times that left no room for ego or ambition to override judgment.
On May 10, 1996, something went terribly wrong with the careful plan.
By the time the sun rose on May 11, eight climbers lay dead on the mountain's slopes. Hall himself would die slowly, alone near the summit, after spending the night in temperatures that dropped to forty below zero while speaking to his pregnant wife via satellite phone from Base Camp. He told her to sleep well, that he was perfectly fine. Both of them knew he was lying.
The Business of Climbing
To understand what happened on Everest in May 1996, you need to understand what mountaineering had become by then. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had first reached the summit in 1953, an achievement that required years of planning, massive government support, and a team of over four hundred people. By 1996, commercial expedition companies were promising to get paying clients to the same spot in a matter of weeks.
The math was seductive. Pay your fee, follow instructions, and you too could stand where only a few hundred humans had ever stood. The climbing Sherpas—members of an ethnic group from Nepal's mountain regions who had become the indispensable workforce of Himalayan mountaineering—would carry your gear, fix your ropes, and set up your camps. Guides would tell you when to climb and when to rest. Bottled oxygen would compensate for the fact that at twenty-nine thousand feet, the air contains only a third of the oxygen found at sea level.
But mountains don't read brochures. And Everest, despite decades of human traffic, remained exactly what it had always been: a place where the margin between life and death could be measured in hours, or even minutes.
Two Teams, One Mountain
That spring, two major commercial expeditions were attempting the South Col route from Nepal. Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants had nineteen members, including eight paying clients. Scott Fischer's Mountain Madness, also with nineteen people and eight clients, was camped nearby. The two leaders were friendly rivals—Hall the methodical planner, Fischer the charismatic risk-taker who climbed with an almost religious faith in his own physical prowess.
Fischer, forty years old and impossibly fit, had a habit of referring to himself in the third person. "Scott Fischer doesn't get altitude sickness," he would say. He had summited Everest before without supplemental oxygen, a feat that requires both exceptional physiology and exceptional luck.
The client rosters read like a catalog of successful middle-aged Americans willing to spend serious money on adventure. There was Sandy Hill Pittman, a socialite who had climbed six of the Seven Summits—the highest peaks on each continent—and was documenting her climb for NBC's website. Beck Weathers was a Texas pathologist who had taken up mountaineering in his forties to combat depression. Jon Krakauer was a journalist on assignment from Outside magazine, an experienced technical climber who had never been above eight thousand meters.
On Hall's team, Yasuko Namba, a forty-seven-year-old Japanese woman, had already climbed six of the Seven Summits. Doug Hansen was a postal worker who had attempted Everest with Hall the previous year, turning back just seven hundred vertical feet from the summit. He had come back to finish what he started.
The Death Zone
Above roughly twenty-five thousand feet, the human body begins to die. This region is called the Death Zone, and it is not a metaphor. At this altitude, your body cannot acclimatize no matter how long you stay. Every hour you spend there, your muscles are consuming themselves for energy, your brain is slowly swelling from lack of oxygen, and your judgment is becoming impaired in ways you cannot perceive. High-altitude pulmonary edema, known as HAPE, can fill your lungs with fluid. High-altitude cerebral edema, or HACE, can cause your brain to swell until you become delirious, then comatose, then dead.
The only solution is to get down. Fast.
This is why turn-around times matter so much on Everest. The summit is not the goal—the summit is the halfway point. You need to get back to Camp IV on the South Col, at twenty-six thousand feet, before dark. Climbing in the dark, exhausted, hypoxic, and possibly caught in weather, is how people die.
Rob Hall's turn-around time was 2:00 PM. Anyone who hadn't reached the summit by then was supposed to turn back, no exceptions.
The Morning of May 10
The climbers left Camp IV shortly after midnight, moving in the darkness with headlamps and supplemental oxygen. The plan was to reach the summit by midday and be back in camp before nightfall. Thirty-three climbers from various expeditions were attempting the summit that day, creating a traffic jam on a mountain that barely has room for one person at a time in its most technical sections.
The first problem emerged almost immediately. The climbing Sherpas had not set fixed ropes on the route above the Balcony, a flat area at about twenty-seven thousand four hundred feet. Without fixed ropes, climbers cannot clip in for safety, and they cannot move as quickly. The delay cost nearly an hour.
Then came the Hillary Step.
Named for Sir Edmund Hillary, this forty-foot wall of rock and ice is the last major obstacle before the summit. It is narrow enough that climbers must ascend one at a time. And on May 10, there were no fixed ropes here either. The guides had to stop and install them while dozens of climbers waited, burning through their supplemental oxygen, burning through their energy reserves, burning through their safety margin.
Some climbers recognized the danger. Stuart Hutchison, Lou Kasischke, and John Taske—all clients on Hall's team—turned back when they realized they would run out of oxygen before reaching the summit. This was the smart decision, the decision Hall had trained them to make.
Others pushed on.
A Guide Without Oxygen
Anatoli Boukreev was a controversial figure even before May 10. The thirty-eight-year-old Russian was one of the world's elite high-altitude mountaineers, with an astonishing record of ascents without supplemental oxygen. Scott Fischer had hired him as a guide for Mountain Madness, but Boukreev climbed differently than the other guides.
He didn't use bottled oxygen.
His reasoning was that bottled oxygen creates a false sense of security. If your system fails—and at extreme altitude, equipment fails regularly—you suddenly find yourself far higher than your unassisted body can handle. Better, Boukreev argued, to climb on your own lungs and know exactly what your body can do.
The counterargument was that a guide without bottled oxygen is limited in how much help he can provide to struggling clients. Without the extra oxygen, Boukreev couldn't stay at high altitude for extended periods. He couldn't slow down to match the pace of exhausted clients. He needed to get down quickly, or he would become a victim himself.
Boukreev was the first to reach the summit that day, arriving at 1:07 PM. He spent about ninety minutes near the top, helping other climbers complete their ascent, then began his descent. By 5:00 PM, he was back at Camp IV.
His clients were still on the mountain. The blizzard was coming.
The Storm
Weather on Everest can change with terrifying speed. What had been a clear morning began to deteriorate by early afternoon. Snow started falling around 3:00 PM, and the light began to fade. What climbers didn't know—what they couldn't have known without the sophisticated forecasting tools that would come later—was that they were about to be hit by a storm of exceptional violence.
By late afternoon, the mountain was being battered by winds of seventy miles per hour, driving snow that reduced visibility to almost nothing. The temperature with wind chill dropped far below minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit. The fixed ropes that marked the route down became buried in snow. The trail the climbers had broken that morning disappeared completely.
Scott Fischer, who had not summited until 3:45 PM—nearly two hours past the turn-around time—was in trouble. He was exhausted, possibly suffering from both HAPE and HACE, and could barely move. Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, one of his climbing Sherpas, tried to help him descend but could only get him as far as the Balcony, still more than a thousand vertical feet above Camp IV.
Lopsang eventually had to leave Fischer there. To stay would mean dying beside him.
Lost on the South Col
Meanwhile, a group of climbers from both expeditions became hopelessly lost on the South Col—the relatively flat area where Camp IV was located. In good weather, this should have been simple navigation. But in the whiteout conditions of the blizzard, with no visible landmarks and no way to see more than a few feet, they wandered in circles.
The group included guides Neal Beidleman and Mike Groom, along with clients from both teams: Klev Schoening, Charlotte Fox, Tim Madsen, Sandy Hill Pittman, Lene Gammelgaard, Beck Weathers, and Yasuko Namba. They walked until they couldn't walk anymore, then huddled together on the ice, not knowing they were just sixty-five feet from a cliff that dropped four thousand feet down the mountain's east face.
Around midnight, the storm cleared enough for them to see the lights of Camp IV, only about six hundred feet away. Beidleman, Groom, Schoening, and Gammelgaard went for help while the others stayed behind, some too weak to move.
When Boukreev came out to rescue them, he found Pittman, Fox, and Madsen and brought them back to safety. He didn't see Beck Weathers. He found Yasuko Namba, but she appeared to be dying—barely breathing, unresponsive, her face covered in ice. He made a triage decision: save those who could be saved, leave those who couldn't.
It was the kind of choice that mountains force on people.
The Man Who Refused to Die
Beck Weathers had been having vision problems all day. Years of radial keratotomy surgery—an early form of vision correction—had left his corneas vulnerable to pressure changes at altitude. By the time he descended from the Balcony, he was essentially blind. He had waited for hours in the cold for his vision to improve, then stumbled down with the group that got lost on the South Col.
When the others were rescued, Weathers was left for dead. He had been lying in the open for hours, covered in ice, with his right arm frozen and extended above his head in what climbers would later describe as a "self-arrest" position, as if he had been trying to stop himself from sliding down a slope.
Stuart Hutchison went out to check on Weathers and Namba the next morning. Both appeared dead. Hutchison did not check for vital signs—in those conditions, with rescue essentially impossible, it would not have mattered. He returned to camp and reported that both climbers were gone.
But Beck Weathers was not dead.
Sometime around 4:00 PM on May 11, after lying exposed for nearly eighteen hours in conditions that should have killed any human being, Weathers woke up. He had no idea where he was or what had happened. His face was so encrusted with ice that he could barely see. His right arm was frozen solid, useless. His left hand was frozen into a solid claw. But he could see Camp IV in the distance, and he walked there.
When he stumbled into camp, his colleagues thought they were seeing a ghost. The flesh on his face had turned purple-black. His nose was gone—literally frozen off. His right arm would later be amputated, as would most of his left hand. But Beck Weathers walked into that camp under his own power, having essentially returned from the dead.
Rob Hall's Last Night
While the chaos unfolded on the South Col, Rob Hall was dying slowly near the summit.
He had stayed with Doug Hansen at the Hillary Step, trying to help his struggling client descend. Hansen had been climbing toward his dream for two years, had turned back seven hundred feet from the summit the previous year, and had spent everything he had to come back and finish. Hall wasn't going to leave him.
When the storm hit, both men were trapped. Hansen disappeared sometime during the night—his body was never found. Andy Harris, one of Hall's guides, climbed back up through the blizzard to bring oxygen to Hall and Hansen. Harris also disappeared and was never found.
Hall made it to the South Summit, just below the true summit, and could go no farther. His hands and feet were frozen. He was out of supplemental oxygen. At sunrise on May 11, he radioed Base Camp.
He was alive. He was alone. He could not move.
Throughout the day, his colleagues at Base Camp maintained radio contact, trying desperately to talk him into descending, even a little. A rescue from that altitude was essentially impossible—no helicopter could fly that high, and no climber could reach him and bring him down. Hall's only chance was to save himself, and he couldn't.
That evening, Hall asked Base Camp to patch him through to his wife, Jan Arnold, in New Zealand. She was seven months pregnant with their first child.
The conversation was brief. Hall told his wife that he loved her. He asked her to name their daughter Sarah. He told her not to worry, that he was warm and comfortable. Then he said goodbye.
He was found months later, in the same spot, frozen in place.
The Aftermath
Eight people died on Everest during that single storm. Rob Hall. Scott Fischer. Doug Hansen. Andy Harris. Yasuko Namba. And on the north side of the mountain, where another expedition was climbing from Tibet, three members of an Indo-Tibetan Border Police team also perished. It was the deadliest day in Everest's history at that point.
The survivors wrote books. Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" became a bestseller and brought the disaster to a mass audience. Anatoli Boukreev, stung by Krakauer's criticism of his decisions, co-authored "The Climb" to present his own account. Beck Weathers wrote "Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest." The competing narratives disagreed on crucial details and assigned blame in different directions.
Boukreev's decisions remain controversial. Krakauer argued that by descending ahead of his clients and climbing without bottled oxygen, he had abandoned the people he was supposed to protect. Boukreev's supporters pointed out that he was the only guide who went out into the storm to rescue stranded climbers, saving three lives while others huddled in their tents. The American Alpine Club awarded Boukreev its David A. Sowles Memorial Award for his rescue efforts.
Less than two years later, Boukreev died in an avalanche on Annapurna in Nepal. He was forty years old.
What the Mountain Taught
The 1996 disaster sparked a fierce debate about commercial mountaineering that continues today. Critics argued that the business model was fundamentally flawed—that charging wealthy amateurs large sums to climb dangerous mountains created perverse incentives. Guides were reluctant to turn clients back because unhappy clients don't pay, don't return, and don't recommend you to their friends. Clients who had invested tens of thousands of dollars and trained for years were reluctant to turn back when they were so close to their goal.
Defenders of commercial climbing pointed out that experienced climbers die on Everest too, that the mountain kills the skilled and the amateur alike, and that most commercial expeditions return safely. They noted that the 1996 disaster was caused by specific decisions—the failure to set fixed ropes, the violation of turn-around times—that could be corrected.
In the years since, commercial climbing on Everest has only grown. Better weather forecasting has helped climbers avoid the worst storms. Improved equipment has made the climb safer. And yet people continue to die there, sometimes in clusters when conditions turn bad, sometimes one by one in accidents that attract little attention.
The mountain doesn't care about experience or preparation or how much you paid. It doesn't care about dreams or determination or the stories we tell ourselves about what we can achieve. It is simply there, higher than any other place on Earth, and if you want to stand on its summit, you have to accept that you might not come back.
Rob Hall understood this better than most. He built his business on managing risk, on knowing when to push and when to retreat. On May 10, 1996, he stayed with Doug Hansen when he should have gone down alone. It was a decision that cost him his life, and there's no way to know whether it was bravery or stubbornness or something else entirely.
His daughter Sarah was born three months after he died. She never met her father, but she knows his last words to her mother. She knows he loved her before she existed. And she knows that he died on a mountain because he wouldn't leave a friend behind.
There are worse legacies.
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