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.
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.