On 10–11 May 1996, a storm caught several commercial expeditions high on the southeast side of Mount Everest as they descended from the summit, and eight climbers died — the deadliest single day the mountain had then known. Among the dead were the two expedition leaders, the New Zealand guide Rob Hall of Adventure Consultants and the American guide Scott Fischer of Mountain Madness, both of whom perished above 8,000 metres after staying too long on the mountain. The season’s total toll reached twelve, then the largest in Everest’s history.
The two flagship guided teams had left the highest camp on the South Col, at roughly 8,000 metres, near midnight on 10 May, climbing the standard southeast ridge route from the Nepalese side. Both leaders had spoken of a firm turnaround time — a deadline, around 1 or 2 p.m., past which a climber short of the summit must turn back to descend in daylight. That discipline broke down. Ropes that should have been fixed in advance at the Balcony and the Hillary Step were not, creating long queues at the route’s bottlenecks, and clients reached the summit dangerously late in the afternoon, some after 2 p.m. and several near or after 4 p.m. As they started down, a blizzard with winds reported above 100 km/h closed over the upper mountain and erased the route.
The disaster became the most scrutinized event in mountaineering history, in large part because the journalist Jon Krakauer was a client on Hall’s team and wrote the bestselling account Into Thin Air; the Russian-Kazakh guide Anatoli Boukreev, a guide on Fischer’s team who carried out a remarkable solo rescue on the South Col, answered Krakauer’s criticisms in his own book, The Climb. The episode reshaped the public debate over the commercialization of Everest. It also depended, as every Everest climb does, on Sherpa labour: Ang Dorje Sherpa and Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa led the climbing support, broke trail, and were drawn into the rescue, work that this record places at the centre rather than the margin of the story.
Across the 1986 climbing season on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth and one of the deadliest, thirteen climbers died in a succession of avalanches, falls, illness and exhaustion — the worst single year the mountain had then seen. The toll was not one accident but a chain of them, culminating in a five-day storm in early August that trapped a group of climbers at the high camp on the Shoulder, around 8,000 metres, and killed five of them as they tried to descend. The mountain, in the Karakoram on the China–Pakistan border, stands at 8,611 metres.
The deaths spanned the whole season rather than a single day. In late June an avalanche on a new American route killed two climbers, John Smolich and Alan Pennington; days later the French pair Maurice and Liliane Barrard disappeared on the descent from the summit. July took the Polish climber Tadeusz Piotrowski, who fell after a hard new route on the south face, and the Italian soloist Renato Casarotto, who died in a crevasse fall at the foot of the mountain after retreating from a solo attempt. In early August the Polish climber Wojciech Wróż fell from the fixed ropes and a Pakistani high-altitude porter, Mohammad Ali, was killed by rockfall. Then the storm closed in.
The final phase, the August catastrophe on the Shoulder, became the season’s defining horror. Several climbers who had summited on 4 August were pinned at the top camp by a storm with winds reported above 160 km/h, without food or fuel, for roughly five days. As they finally tried to descend on 10 August, weakened and snow-blind, five died: the British climber and filmmaker Julie Tullis, the British climber Alan Rouse, the Austrians Hannes Wieser and Alfred Imitzer, and the Polish climber Dobrosława Miodowicz-Wolf, known as Mrówka (“the Ant”). The Austrian Willi Bauer and the Austrian filmmaker Kurt Diemberger survived, gravely frostbitten. The season also recorded the first ascents of K2 by women — Wanda Rutkiewicz and Liliane Barrard on 23 June, and Tullis on 4 August — achievements bound, in Barrard’s and Tullis’s cases, to the same mountain that killed them.
On the night of 1–2 February 1959, nine experienced Soviet ski-hikers died on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl in the northern Ural Mountains after fleeing their tent, which they had cut open from the inside, into a blizzard at temperatures near −25 to −40 °C. They died of hypothermia and traumatic injury within roughly a mile and a half of the tent, most without proper boots or outer clothing. The party was led by 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov, and the place where they died has carried his name ever since: Dyatlov Pass.
The group had set out as a ten-person ski tour toward the peak Otorten, an ambitious winter route undertaken by students and graduates of the Ural Polytechnic Institute. One member, Yuri Yudin, turned back early because of illness, which is why nine, not ten, died. When the party failed to return on schedule, searchers found the abandoned tent on 26 February, slit open from within, with the skiers’ boots, coats and supplies still inside. The first bodies were found nearby that month; the last four were recovered in early May from a snow-filled ravine, some bearing severe injuries — crushed chests and a fractured skull — and showing soft-tissue loss to the face that decomposition and the environment can explain.
The strange details — the cut tent, the lightly clad night flight, the violent injuries on some bodies — fed decades of theories ranging from a military weapons test to the wholly invented. The original 1959 inquiry closed by attributing the deaths to an unspecified “compelling natural force.” When Russian authorities reopened the case in 2019, they concluded in 2020 that an avalanche had most likely driven the party out of the tent; in 2021 a peer-reviewed study by the avalanche scientists Johan Gaume and Alexander Puzrin offered a physical mechanism — a small slab avalanche, triggered hours after the hikers cut into the slope to pitch their tent — consistent with both the flight and the crushing injuries.
On 3 June 1950, at about two in the afternoon, Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal stood on the summit of Annapurna I in the Nepalese Himalaya — the first human beings to climb an 8,000-metre peak. No one died on the mountain, but both summiteers descended into a near-fatal ordeal of storm, frostbite and gangrene that cost Herzog all his fingers and toes and Lachenal all his toes, amputated piecemeal and largely without anaesthetic during the retreat. The triumph and its mutilation were inseparable; this is a case in which the party reached its objective and was nearly destroyed by it.
The expedition was organised by the French Alpine Club and led by Maurice Herzog, who departed Paris on 30 March 1950 with an exceptionally strong team: the guides Louis Lachenal, Lionel Terray and Gaston Rébuffat, the climbers Jean Couzy and Marcel Schatz, the doctor Jacques Oudot, and a corps of Sherpa porters under the sirdar Ang Tharkay. They held permits for two peaks, Dhaulagiri and Annapurna, but knew the location of neither with certainty; much of the brief pre-monsoon season was spent simply finding a mountain they could climb.
Having judged Dhaulagiri too hard for the time available, the team turned to Annapurna’s North Face, forced a route through its glaciers and ice cliffs, and pushed Camp 5 to roughly 7,400 metres. From there Herzog and Lachenal made an oxygen-free dash for the top into a closing weather window. They succeeded — and then the descent unravelled. Herzog had dropped his gloves and went on bare-handed; the four men of the upper party, snow-blind and lost, survived a night crammed in a crevasse; and only the Sherpas and teammates who carried, dragged and nursed the casualties down the mountain brought them out alive. The labour and judgment of Ang Tharkay and the other Sherpas, routinely minimised in the triumphalist telling, were central to that survival.
In 1985, on the descent from the first ascent of the West Face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, the British climber Joe Simpson shattered his right leg, and his partner Simon Yates — lowering him blind down the mountain in a storm and being dragged toward his own death — cut the rope, dropping Simpson into a crevasse. Both men survived. That is the rare and central fact of this case: a decision that should by every reasonable expectation have killed one climber instead left both alive, after Simpson, presumed dead, hauled and crawled himself across a glacier and down a moraine for roughly three days to reach base camp.
Simpson and Yates, both young and accomplished alpinists, climbed Siula Grande — a 6,344-metre peak in the Cordillera Huayhuash — by its previously unclimbed West Face in alpine style, carrying everything with them and leaving no fixed ropes or stocked camps behind. A third man, Richard Hawking, a non-climber, waited at their base camp. The ascent succeeded; the descent, down an unfamiliar and dangerous ridge in worsening weather, did not.
When Simpson fell and drove his lower leg into his knee, the two improvised a system of lowering him in 90-metre stages on their roped-together lengths. In darkness and storm, Yates lowered Simpson over an unseen ice cliff, leaving him hanging free in space, unable to climb the rope or descend it, and out of all communication. After holding the dead weight for more than an hour as his own snow anchor failed, Yates faced being pulled off the mountain to certain death, and cut the rope. Simpson dropped into a crevasse, survived on a ledge, and — rather than wait to die — lowered himself deeper, found a way out, and began the crawl that defines the story.
On 17 May 1982, high on the unclimbed Northeast Ridge of Mount Everest, the British climbers Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker disappeared while attempting to force a passage through the rock towers known as the Pinnacles, at roughly 8,250 metres. Watched from below through a telescope, they were last seen in the late afternoon moving slowly toward the Second Pinnacle, then lost to sight; they were never seen alive again, and both died on the mountain. Boardman’s body was found a decade later, in 1992, near where they vanished. Tasker’s was never recovered.
Boardman, 31, and Tasker, 34, were among the most accomplished mountaineers Britain had produced — partners on the audacious 1976 first ascent of the West Wall of Changabang and the 1979 oxygen-free ascent of Kangchenjunga, and authors both. They were the lead climbers of a small, four-man expedition organised and led by Chris Bonington to attempt Everest’s last great unclimbed line, the Northeast Ridge, from the Tibetan side and largely in alpine style — without the vast siege of fixed ropes, stocked camps and bottled oxygen that had carried earlier parties to the summit.
The ridge defeated them at the Pinnacles, a series of steep rock-and-ice towers above 8,000 metres, in the heart of the death zone. The fourth climber, Dick Renshaw, had already been forced off the mountain after suffering a minor stroke; Bonington had turned back lower down; and the expedition doctor Charles Clarke and support climber Adrian Gordon remained below. When Boardman and Tasker pushed on toward the Second Pinnacle and did not return, there was no one within reach to help. The most probable explanation is a fall or collapse from exhaustion on appallingly difficult ground at extreme altitude.
In August 1953, an eight-man American expedition led by Charles Houston was driven into a desperate, storm-bound retreat high on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth, when one of its members, the geologist Art Gilkey, was felled by a life-threatening blood clot at roughly 7,800 metres. Gilkey died on the descent — almost certainly swept away by an avalanche while anchored to an ice slope on 10 August — and his body was never recovered intact, though clothing and remains positively identified as his emerged from the glacier forty years later. The other seven men survived.
The expedition, the third American attempt on K2, was attacking the Abruzzi Spur on the mountain’s southeast side, the route that remains the standard line today. The team had pushed Camp VIII to about 7,800 metres and was poised for a summit bid when a violent storm pinned them in their tents for days. There, Gilkey collapsed with thrombophlebitis — a clot in his leg that soon threw emboli to his lungs, a condition that is grave at sea level and effectively a death sentence in the thin air of the death zone.
What makes the episode famous is not the death but the rescue that nearly failed and the single act that saved the rest. As the exhausted party lowered the immobilized Gilkey across a steep traverse on 10 August, George Bell slipped on hard ice and his fall, transmitted through the tangled ropes, plucked five more men off the mountain. Pete Schoening, the youngest member at twenty-five, held all six on a belay improvised around his ice axe and a frozen boulder — an act mountaineers know simply as “The Belay.” It is remembered as one of the great feats of self-rescue, and as a model of the team ethos its members called the brotherhood of the rope. Throughout, the climb depended on Hunza and Balti porters who carried the loads on the lower mountain.