1996 Mount Everest disaster

1996 Mount Everest disaster
The summit of Mount Everest
Date10–11 May 1996
LocationMount Everest
Altitude 8,849 metres (29,032 ft)
Coordinates27°59′17″N 86°55′30″E / 27.98806°N 86.92500°E / 27.98806; 86.92500
Organised byAdventure Consultants
Mountain Madness
Indo-Tibetan Border Police
Deaths8

The 1996 Mount Everest disaster occurred on 10–11 May 1996 when eight climbers caught in a blizzard died on Mount Everest while attempting to descend from the summit. Over the entire season, 12 people died trying to reach the summit, making it the deadliest season on Mount Everest at the time and the third deadliest after the 23 fatalities resulting from avalanches caused by the April 2015 Nepal earthquake[1] and the 16 fatalities of the 2014 Mount Everest avalanche. The 1996 disaster received widespread publicity and raised questions about the commercialization of Everest.[2]

Numerous climbers were at a high altitude on Everest during the storm including the Adventure Consultants team, led by Rob Hall, and the Mountain Madness team, led by Scott Fischer. While climbers died on both the North Face and South Col approaches, the events on the latter were more widely reported. Four members of the Adventure Consultants expedition died, including Hall, while Fischer was the sole casualty of the Mountain Madness expedition. Three officers of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police also died.

Following the disaster, several survivors wrote memoirs. Journalist Jon Krakauer, on assignment from Outside magazine and on the Adventure Consultants team, published Into Thin Air (1997)[3] which became a bestseller. Anatoli Boukreev, a guide in the Mountain Madness team, felt impugned by the book and co-authored a rebuttal called The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest (1997).[4] Beck Weathers, of Hall's expedition, and Lene Gammelgaard, of Fischer's expedition, wrote about their experiences in their respective books, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest (2000)[5] and Climbing High: A Woman's Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy (2000).[6] In 2014, Lou Kasischke, also of Hall's expedition, published his own account in After the Wind: 1996 Everest Tragedy, One Survivor's Story.

In addition to the members of the Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness teams, Mike Trueman, who coordinated the rescue from Base Camp, contributed The Storms: Adventure and Tragedy on Everest (2015). Graham Ratcliffe, who climbed to the South Col of Everest on 10 May, noted in A Day to Die For (2011) that weather reports forecasting a major storm developing after 8 May and peaking in intensity on 11 May were delivered to expedition leaders. Hall and Fischer received these before their planned summit attempts on 10 May. Some of their teams summited Everest during an apparent break in this developing storm only to descend into the full force of it late on 10 May.

  1. ^ "Mount Everest Nepal Earthquake". The New York Times. 28 April 2015.
  2. ^ Dahlburg, John-Thor (1996). "Climbing Veterans Call Everest Deaths Inevitable". Los Angeles Times.
  3. ^ Krakauer 1997, p. 296
  4. ^ Boukreev, Anatoli; G. Weston Dewalt (1997). The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest. New York: St. Martins. ISBN 978-0-312-96533-4.
  5. ^ Weathers, Beck; Stephen G. Michaud (2000). Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest. New York: Villard. ISBN 978-0-375-50404-4.
  6. ^ Gammelgard, Lene (2000). Climbing High: A Woman's Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy. New York: Perennial. ISBN 978-0-330-39227-3.