1996 Everest climbing season

The 1996 Everest climbing season was a spring window for climbing Mount Everest that combined the mountain’s long-established seasonal appeal with an unprecedentedly crowded commercial expedition scene. Its defining tension was between carefully planned acclimatization and summit logistics, on one hand, and the pressures, equipment constraints, and communication failures that shaped the May 10 attempt, on the other.

The spring season and a crowded base camp

The season began under an omen that unsettled local Sherpas: in March, comet Hyakutake appeared to move across the night sky over the Himalaya, its tail spreading into the darkness. The spring interval between winter’s decline and the summer monsoons had historically been the most successful period for Everest expeditions, but the Sherpas’ concern was grounded in more than superstition. By 1996, over the seventy-five years since the first summit attempt, more than 140 climbers had died on the mountain, and nearly 40 percent of those fatalities had been Sherpas.

The human scale of the season had changed sharply. In the early 1980s, spring visitors to Everest Base Camp could have fit into a single Paris metro car. In 1996, more than four hundred people would arrive along the trail and pitch tents, making the camp resemble a rock-concert encampment. Commercial expeditions brought paying clients alongside their guides and support staff; the growth in numbers intensified doubts about whether all climbers were prepared for the demands of the mountain.

Several expeditions became subjects of camp gossip and concern. The Taiwanese National Expedition, led by Makalu Gau, drew jokes that masked anxieties about its members’ qualifications and ability to descend safely. The Johannesburg Sunday Times Expedition was publicly associated with Nelson Mandela, while climbers exchanged stories about the inexperience of some of its members and questioned its leader, Ian Woodall. Ed Viesturs, then thirty-seven and guiding for the MacGillivray Freeman IMAX/IWERKS Expedition, was reported to have remarked that many people on the mountain should not be there. His expedition’s film project, planned for release in 1998, promised a large-format, immersive version of Everest to theater audiences.

Commercial competition and expedition pressure

Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants expedition returned in 1996 after a failed 1995 summit season. Hall had taken a record thirty-nine clients and expedition personnel to Everest’s summit since his company began operating there in 1990. But the previous year, deep snow had slowed progress enough that he turned all his clients back; none summited. His advertising had prominently claimed “100% Success!” before that reversal. In 1996, success mattered not only as a mountaineering outcome but as a source of future business, and Hall faced a new competitor.

Scott Fischer, founder of Seattle-based Mountain Madness, arrived with a strong public profile and a commercial guiding operation built around his ambition to climb widely and enjoy the life. He was new to guiding a commercial Everest expedition, but his charisma helped draw clients and persuade them to commit. The season placed Fischer and Hall’s teams among several commercial expeditions whose schedules and shared work on the route would affect one another.

The Sherpas who supported those expeditions occupied a central but hazardous place in this system. Many earned family income through work as porters, cooks, yak drivers, or high-altitude support personnel. Near the beginning of the season, a puja ended with monks giving Sherpas protective red-string amulets, which they placed around their necks. Soon afterward, they would travel from their homes to Everest Base Camp to establish camps, carry loads, and serve climbers. The reported daily pay ranged from $2.50 to $50, while the high-altitude work exposed support staff to the same lethal environment that had already claimed a disproportionate share of Sherpa lives.

Preparation, equipment, and shared route work

Mountain Madness’s preparations included a formal acclimatization plan developed by Fischer and Anatoli Boukreev. The team planned four excursions at progressively greater altitudes. On the first, clients would reach 6,100 meters, the site of Camp I, and return to base camp the same day without spending the night there. Clients were to carry only personal belongings and equipment to conserve strength; climbing Sherpas working under Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa would carry rope and supplies. Later outings would include an overnight at Camp I, a training excursion to 6,500 meters at the planned site of Camp II, and rests between climbs so guides could observe the clients’ condition and readiness.

The plan depended on equipment and coordination as well as acclimatization. Martin Adams criticized the old ten-channel two-way radios Fischer had brought, contrasting them with modern, lightweight radios that every climber could carry. The radios were a key link between base camp and climbers on the route, intended to convey information about problems, emergencies, equipment, weather, and medical needs. Adams considered the models inadequate, making the expedition’s communications vulnerability visible before summit day.

Route preparation also required cooperation across competing teams. When Camp III remained unfinished and Mountain Madness’s Sherpas were nearing exhaustion, Fischer, Hall, Todd Burleson of Alpine Ascents International, Ian Woodall, and Makalu Gau agreed that their teams would cooperate in fixing ropes between Camps III and IV on April 26. Mountain Madness planned to send Sherpas rather than guides, but establishing Camp III and then resting the Sherpas would leave the team without workers to contribute. Boukreev was therefore assigned to take their place. The team accepted this obligation partly to preserve its position among the early expeditions expected to make a summit bid; May 10 was circulating as a possible summit date. Boukreev welcomed the rope work because he wanted the route ready and safe, but needed a rest day before undertaking it.

Summit-day margins and the communications breakdown

By the night before the May 10 attempt, Mountain Madness’s oxygen supply left little room for a delay. At Camp IV the team had sixty-two canisters in total: nine heavier Zvesda canisters reserved for sleeping and fifty-three lighter Poisk canisters set aside for the climb. Only 51 percent by volume of the oxygen purchased from Henry Todd remained available for the summit bid; most of the rest had already been used, particularly by Pete Schoening and Ngawang Topche Sherpa, with a small amount kept at base camp for medical emergencies.

The planned distribution made the margin concrete. Five of the six climbing Sherpas intended to use oxygen, carrying two canisters for themselves and two more for clients and guides; Lopsang, the climbing sirdar, planned to climb without oxygen but carried one canister for emergencies. The Sherpas took twenty-one bottles up the mountain. The six client climbers, Fischer, and Neal Beidleman carried two each, while Boukreev carried one. Together the climbers carried thirty-eight Poisk canisters, leaving fifteen full ones at Camp IV, in addition to whatever remained of the Zvesdas. The supply was not enough to support an overnight stay at altitude and a second summit attempt on May 11. For some clients, the limit had been expressed as a single attempt, with no second chance.

A further mismatch emerged on the route. Clients from the Fischer and Hall expeditions understood that Ang Dorje Sherpa and Lopsang would leave Camp IV ahead of them and fix the ropes so the climbers would not have to wait. Instead, neither sirdar nor any other Sherpas had departed early to do the work. Lopsang later said a member of the failed Montenegrin expedition had told him the ropes were already fixed. Jon Krakauer questioned that account, noting that Lopsang and Ang Dorje carried rope in their packs, while G. Weston DeWalt’s account stresses that the available evidence was circumstantial and allows that Fischer may have believed the work was complete. The discrepancy between the clients’ expectation and the route conditions became one of the season’s disputed details.

Fischer did not set a definite summit-day turnaround time for his clients. Although he was associated with a personal Two O’Clock Rule, he and Beidleman and Boukreev had planned instead for Lopsang and the guides to alternate leading, while Fischer followed behind and turned around stragglers as he caught them. If problems arose, Fischer was expected to contact Lopsang by radio, who was assumed to be near the front. Neither Beidleman nor Boukreev had been issued a radio. Hall’s clients, meanwhile, held differing understandings of whether their turnaround time was one o’clock, two o’clock, or a decision to be made on the mountain.

On the evening before the climb, the wind subsided and the climbers saw a clear, star-filled sky. Boukreev and Beidleman checked clients’ crampons, equipment, and condition as Fischer distributed oxygen; Adams was given two canisters and told to check their pressure. Yet the apparent calm did not mean that information could flow reliably. On summit day, messages between Dr. Ingrid Hunt at base camp and Fischer and Lopsang passed through a chain of Sherpa intermediaries, including Ngima at base camp, Gyalzen at Camp II, and Pemba at Camp IV. Hunt believed messages were being embellished to present the situation more favorably, and communication with Pemba was sporadic. She moved between the Mountain Madness and Hall camps because Hall’s camp had better communications, repeatedly asking for news as the emergency grew more serious.

Boukreev reached Camp IV at about 5:00 p.m. and asked Pemba to prepare more tea, expecting other climbers to descend behind him. Pemba did not tell him about a radio exchange Hunt said had occurred around 4:30, concerning whether Pemba would take oxygen up the mountain; nor did anyone tell Boukreev that an emergency might be developing above the Hillary Step. The gap between the radio traffic at base camp and what reached the returning guide illustrates how the season’s equipment and communication problems could separate people at the very moment coordination mattered most.

The season’s visible stakes

The season’s preparations culminated in a summit attempt whose logistics were already tight: the oxygen reserve ruled out an easy second bid, the expected fixed ropes were not in place as clients had understood, and the guides lacked equal access to radios. The book’s account places these details alongside the commercial pressure to reach the summit and the more basic demands of acclimatization, route work, and keeping clients alive. In that sense, the 1996 season is not only a time setting for the disaster but the framework of competing plans and limited safeguards through which the May 10 crisis unfolded.