1995 Manaslu winter ascent

The 1995 Manaslu winter ascent was a summit expedition in extreme cold that became a rescue operation before its climbers had finished descending. Ten climbers reached the high camp; eight summited, while Michael Mikhaelov and Demetri Grekov turned back. When those two later vanished from the descent, Anatoli Boukreev and Shafkat Gataullin returned uphill at night and assisted them down. The sequence joins the expedition’s objective to its immediate human cost: reaching the summit did not end the climbers’ obligations to one another.

High Camp and Summit Attempt

By December 6, the ten climbers had reached 6,800 meters and spent a night in temperatures that fell to minus forty degrees Celsius. The next day they advanced to 7,400 meters and established Camp IV on a platform of hard-packed snow, the highest camp and starting point for the summit bid. Five climbers were packed into each of two four-person tents. Winds approached sixty miles an hour, and the temperature in the tents rarely rose above minus twenty degrees.

The next morning, preparations began at 4:00 A.M., but the crowded tents made it impossible for everyone to get ready together. The team therefore staggered its departures. At 6:00 A.M., the first climbers set off across a gradual slope of hard snow and ice leading to the summit’s corniced ridge. Between 10:00 and 11:30 A.M., eight of the ten reached the summit. Mikhaelov and Grekov, who had tired early, had already turned back.

Descent and Disappearance

By 2:00 P.M., all eight summiters had returned to Camp IV, where Mikhaelov and Grekov were waiting. After a brief pause to warm themselves, the climbers resumed their descent. The effects of prolonged exposure to cold and altitude were evident in the slow pace of many in the party.

By 6:00 P.M., eight climbers had reached Camp III in darkness, but Mikhaelov and Grekov were missing. They had seemed ready to descend when the others left Camp IV. A radio message from Base Camp supplied partial information but did not explain what had happened. From Base Camp, the two had been observed through binoculars and telephoto lenses sitting in the snow on a steep face just below Camp IV, not long after the party began descending. Boukreev could only infer that they had misjudged their remaining strength and exhausted themselves.

Night Rescue

On learning that the two climbers were missing, Boukreev and the young Kazakh climber Shafkat Gataullin immediately climbed back up. They had not first had time to warm themselves or take a hot drink. Darkness complicated the search, and concern that their headlamp batteries might fail at a critical moment led them to switch the lamps on only as needed.

After three hours, they found Mikhaelov and Grekov down on the ice. One had come out of his crampons and lacked the strength to fasten them back onto his boots. Boukreev and Gataullin got the climbers to their feet; Boukreev tethered them to his climbing harness, and the three proceeded down with Gataullin’s assistance. The descent continued through night fog and near the same severe cold the team had faced before its summit attempt. The account ends not with the summit but with this return journey, in which the two climbers’ safe descent depended on others turning back uphill to find them.

Significance

The expedition’s chronology places the rescue directly after the achievement: eight climbers summited, all eight returned to Camp IV, and the group began descending, only for two earlier turnarounds to become a night emergency. The contrast clarifies that a summit bid is not a single isolated act of reaching the top. The team’s responsibility continued on the descent, when Boukreev and Gataullin left the others’ route to search for the missing climbers and help bring them down.