On 8 June 1924, high on the northeast ridge of Mount Everest, the British climbers George Leigh Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappeared into cloud and were never seen alive again. They were the lead pair of the third British expedition to the mountain, attempting the first ascent of the highest point on Earth from the Tibetan side. Both men died — Mallory’s body was found in 1999, more than a kilometre below the summit, and partial remains believed to be Irvine’s were located in 2024. Neither return nor success was ever established.
The expedition was led in the field by Lieutenant Colonel Edward Felix Norton, after the nominal leader, Brigadier General Charles Bruce, fell ill with malaria on the approach. Days earlier, on 4 June 1924, Norton had climbed without supplementary oxygen to roughly 8,573 metres (28,126 ft), a confirmed altitude record that would stand for nearly three decades. Mallory, the driving spirit of the British Everest effort since 1921, chose the young and mechanically gifted Irvine — and the controversial bottled oxygen — for one last attempt.
The geologist Noel Odell, climbing in support below, caught the last confirmed sighting: two tiny figures moving on the upper ridge, by his account “going strong for the top.” Then the weather closed in and they were gone. Whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit twenty-nine years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood there on 29 May 1953 remains one of mountaineering’s enduring unanswered questions. Throughout, the expedition relied on Tibetan and Sherpa porters who carried loads and built camps high on a freezing, unmapped mountain, and whose labour made every British attempt possible.
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 1–2 August 2008, eleven climbers died on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, in the worst single accident in its history. The disaster unfolded high on the Abruzzi Spur, around and above a steep gully called the Bottleneck at roughly 8,300 metres, when a collapsing ice cliff — a serac hanging over the route — sheared away the fixed ropes that descending climbers depended on and stranded them through the night in the death zone. Most of the dead fell, were swept away by ice, or succumbed to exhaustion and exposure while trying to descend without the ropes they had counted on.
K2, 8,611 metres high on the Pakistan–China border in the Karakoram, is far more technical and dangerous than Everest, and its summit day funnels nearly every climber through the Bottleneck beneath an overhanging serac. On 1 August an unusually large international gathering — Dutch, Italian, French, Norwegian, Serbian, South Korean, Spanish and American climbers, supported by Nepali Sherpas and Pakistani high-altitude porters — set out together for the top. Confusion over fixing the ropes, a bottleneck of bodies in the couloir, and the loss of an early climber all delayed the ascent, so that most who summited did so dangerously late, some not until about 8 p.m., with the descent still ahead of them in failing light.
The toll fell across many nationalities, and especially hard on the support climbers. The dead included the Serbian Dren Mandić and the Pakistani porters Jehan Baig and Meherban Karim; the Norwegian Rolf Bae; the Frenchman Hugues d’Aubarède; the Irishman Gerard “Ger” McDonnell, the first of his nation to summit K2, who died after staying to free three entangled climbers; three South Korean climbers; and the Nepali Sherpas Jumik Bhote and Pasang Bhote, killed in the act of rescue. Survival, where it came, owed much to Sherpas — Pemba Gyalje and Chhiring Dorje among them — whose skill and decisions brought several climbers down alive.
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.
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.
On 1 September 1905, an early attempt on Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain on Earth, ended in an avalanche on the Yalung face that killed the Swiss climber Alexis Pache and three local porters. The expedition was co-organized by the Swiss doctor and photographer Jules Jacot-Guillarmod and led on the mountain by the British occultist Aleister Crowley. The disaster came amid an open revolt against Crowley’s leadership; the slide struck a party descending in the late afternoon, and Crowley, hearing the survivors’ cries from his tent at a higher camp, did not climb down to help. The four dead were left where the snow buried them.
The attempt was one of the first serious efforts on Kangchenjunga, made decades before the technology and acclimatization practices that would eventually allow an ascent in 1955. The climbers approached from the south, up the Yalung Glacier, and pushed a chain of camps onto the steep, avalanche-prone face — terrain whose danger Crowley himself reportedly recognized, having warned against descending it late in the day. The expedition reached roughly 6,500 metres, far below the 8,586-metre summit, before friction over Crowley’s autocratic command brought it to the brink of collapse.
The episode is remembered chiefly for Crowley’s conduct: his refusal to leave his tent as men died below, his cold dismissal of the accident, and his departure for Darjeeling the next morning past the disaster site without stopping, carrying with him the expedition’s funds. The judgement of mountaineering history has been severe. But the deeper record is also a sober one about early Himalayan climbing — the lethal avalanche exposure of the great faces, the absence of any rescue capacity, and the routine erasure of the local porters who made up most of the dead and most of the labour, and whose names the record never preserved.