1996 South Summit Storm Snow and White Mist Weather

The South Col storm and whiteout was the decisive environmental crisis of the May 10, 1996 summit attempt: it turned a difficult descent into a disorienting struggle for survival, separated climbers from their intended route, and forced a scattered group to depend on one another while visibility failed. Its danger arose not from weather alone but from the collision of deteriorating conditions with the expedition’s exposed route, delayed descent, dwindling oxygen, and fragile communications.

Conditions and accumulated risk

The Mountain Madness plan depended on staged acclimatization and an orderly summit push. Scott Fischer and Anatoli Boukreev’s plan called for four acclimatization excursions; on the first, climbers would reach 6,100 meters and return to Base Camp that day, carrying only personal gear while Sherpas carried rope and supplies. Later excursions would take the team higher, with rest periods between them to recover and allow the guides to assess climbers’ condition. That careful progression set out the intended logic of the expedition: conserve strength on the way up, acclimatize gradually, and reserve effort for the summit bid and descent.

The route and timetable became more precarious as preparation encountered competing demands. On April 26, Boukreev was assigned to help fix ropes between Camp III and Camp IV under an agreement among several expeditions. Mountain Madness chose to send him in place of its Sherpas, whose labor was needed to establish Camp III and who also required rest. The teams wanted to preserve their place among the early summit bids, with May 10 circulating as a possible date. Rope work was arduous, but Boukreev welcomed the task because he wanted the route ready and safe before the summit attempt.

On summit day, however, the clients of the Fischer and Rob Hall expeditions expected the ropes above Camp IV to be fixed before they reached the Balcony. They understood that Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa and Ang Dorje Sherpa would set out ahead of them so that climbers would not have to wait. In fact, neither sirdar nor other Sherpas had gone ahead to fix the ropes. Lopsang later said he had been told that the lines were already fixed by a member of an expedition that had attempted the summit the previous day; Jon Krakauer questioned that account, noting that Lopsang and Ang Dorje carried rope. The book presents the explanation and the criticism as disputed, while emphasizing the consequential mismatch between clients’ expectations and the route conditions they encountered.

The summit-day strategy also left responsibilities and communications unevenly distributed. Fischer had agreed with Boukreev and Neal Beidleman that Lopsang and the guides would alternate leading, while Fischer brought up the rear and turned back stragglers as he caught them. If difficulties arose, Fischer was expected to communicate with Lopsang, who was assumed to be near the front. Neither Beidleman nor Boukreev had a radio. Fischer had not given his clients a definite summit-day turnaround time, although a newspaper profile described his personal Two O’Clock Rule. Meanwhile, messages from the mountain to Base Camp passed through several Sherpas and were, according to Dr. Ingrid Hunt, sporadic and sometimes incomplete. The expedition had plans for pacing and rescue, but the storm would test them amid uncertain information and limited direct contact.

The storm overtakes the descent

Boukreev recalled that the storm began while the climbers were descending, somewhere between 8,700 and 8,500 meters. He passed Martin Adams and started down to work on the fixed line, concerned that the old rope might not safely support two people as strong winds and snow began. He reached Camp IV at about five or half past five in the afternoon. The storm had begun, but visibility remained; Pemba Sherpa gave him tea, and Boukreev rested briefly.

No one followed promptly. Boukreev did not understand the Sherpas’ plan and saw no Sherpas coming down. As darkness and snowfall increased, he asked Pemba about oxygen, took three oxygen bottles, and went back uphill to look for the fixed line and the descending climbers. In the worsening wind he veered left onto hard ice and failed to find the route. He spent about three and a half hours searching, using oxygen and a mask to help him climb, but judged the conditions too dangerous to continue: poor visibility risked leading him toward the South Face. He returned to his tent at about 9:47 p.m. without finding anyone.

The crisis was also difficult to interpret from below. Hunt’s messages to Fischer and Lopsang were relayed through Ngima at Base Camp, Gyalzen at Camp II, and Pemba at Camp IV, with the chain reversed for messages coming down. Hunt believed she was not receiving accurate or complete information and that reports were sometimes augmented to present the situation more favorably. She moved between the Mountain Madness and Rob Hall camps because Hall’s camp had better communications, repeatedly asking Ngima for news. The communication chain did not give her a clear picture of the emergency as it worsened, while Boukreev at Camp IV was not told that climbers might be in danger above the Hillary Step.

From route-finding to rescue

The whiteout made the descent dangerous even for climbers who had found a rope line. Neal Beidleman recalled reaching a Japanese climber from Hall’s group, Yasuko Namba, who was sitting on the line and moving little or not at all. He tried to speak to her and help her descend more quickly, then realized she either did not understand his English or could not carry out his instructions. He took hold of her harness and moved downhill with her behind him, sometimes sliding or rolling over the terrain. Her crampons repeatedly struck through his suit into his back; she could understand what was happening but could contribute little physically.

Tim Madsen and Charlotte Fox came down behind them, and Madsen helped Beidleman move Namba across crevasses beneath the fixed line. They had to lift, push, pull, or throw her over gaps that frightened her. By the time the group reached the bottom of the line, the storm had intensified: the wind was strong, snow fell heavily, and speech was reduced to shouting, often inaudible to anyone upwind. Beidleman had no headlamp ready because he was holding Namba by the arm, and the group’s last intermittent view of a light at Camp IV soon disappeared.

Beidleman tried to keep the group on a slight side slope toward the South Col saddle, where he expected a distinctive band of rock to provide a landmark. From there, he believed, turning downhill through the rocks should lead to camp, the Geneva Spur, the fixed ropes, or the debris around the camp. But the group side-hilled too far and reached the ridge crest, where the slope that had served as a guide disappeared. Beidleman lost all sense of direction. He feared that anyone who left alone would probably become completely lost, so the climbers kept shouting for one another to stay together as they wandered, possibly onto the Tibetan side of the South Col.

The conditions magnified every weakness in the group. Beidleman said his oxygen had run out long before, and the others were staggering and struggling to understand the wind or the terrain. He described the experience as being inside a milk bottle. The wind, estimated by later conversations at roughly forty miles per hour or gusting to eighty or more, repeatedly knocked climbers off their feet. Faces iced over; people grew extremely cold. At one point, Beidleman saw or sensed a dangerous dip beyond a rise, recognized that the terrain did not belong on the South Col, and retreated to the group.

The huddle and the fragile return of direction

With help from Madsen and Klev Schoening, Beidleman shouted for everyone to stay together and ordered the climbers to huddle and wait. He remembered that an earlier storm had briefly subsided the previous night, and hoped a lull or glimpse of stars would let them identify the surrounding mountains and choose a direction. The group formed a dogpile with their backs to the wind. They lay across one another’s laps, shouted, beat on one another’s backs, checked consciousness and fingers, and tried to stay awake and warm. Beidleman remembered feeling close to falling asleep and not waking again; he could not tell whether his waves of warmth came from hypothermia, hypoxia, or both.

The snow eased briefly at least twice, but the wind continued. During one opening, Beidleman glimpsed stars. On another, he recognized the Big Dipper and the North Star; someone identified Everest. Beidleman was unsure which mountain he was seeing, but Klev was confident about the direction of camp. The brief view did not restore strength or make the route safe; it gave the group a basis for moving again. They struggled to their feet, with Namba still hanging on Beidleman’s arm, and began uphill in the direction Klev indicated, opposite the way they had come.

The group then divided between those able to move and those who could not. In the darkness, Beidleman recognized Sandy Hill Pittman mainly by the distinctive color of her jacket, while the others blurred into bodies and voices. The episode ends at that point in the supplied account, with the climbers beginning to move and their condition still precarious. The whiteout had turned navigation into collective judgment: survival depended not on a clear view of the route, but on holding together long enough for a fleeting view of the sky to make a direction imaginable.

Significance

The storm exposes the gap between a summit plan on paper and the interdependent realities of high-altitude climbing. Acclimatization, rope-fixing, turnaround strategy, oxygen allocation, and rescue capacity all mattered, but none could guarantee that the descending climbers would find the route or that those at camp would understand what was happening. Delayed rope preparation, the lack of radios for two guides, and the relay of messages through intermediaries formed a pattern of vulnerability rather than a single isolated failure.

The storm also changes the meaning of leadership. Boukreev’s return uphill with oxygen bottles shows a guide trying to search when the descending climbers did not appear, but the wind and darkness ultimately forced him back. On the slope below, Beidleman’s immediate task was not to command a clean retreat but to keep a group together, move an exhausted woman across crevasses, and prevent lost climbers from scattering. The huddle was both practical shelter and a temporary form of collective care: people beat one another’s backs, checked whether others remained conscious, and waited for a fragment of visibility. In this account, the whiteout’s defining force is its erasure of reliable landmarks and communication, leaving human coordination as the only imperfect guide through the storm.