Balcony

The Balcony is a small natural resting place high on Mount Everest’s Southeast Ridge, but on summit day it became much more than a landmark. Climbers from several expeditions converged there to change oxygen canisters and recover briefly, while delays over the uncompleted fixed ropes consumed time in the Death Zone. Later, as climbers descended into deteriorating weather and an emergency unfolded above, the Balcony marked the route near which Scott Fischer and Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa were reported to be in distress.

Position and Conditions

Jon Krakauer and Ang Dorje Sherpa reached the Balcony at 8,500 meters at 5:30 a.m., after stop-and-go progress that had cost them more than an hour. Krakauer reported that they sat on their backpacks without climbing higher. Other climbers’ accounts place their arrival at roughly 6:00 a.m., as daylight spread across the sky. The variation in reported times reflects the fragmented, arduous movement of summit day rather than a single shared timetable.

The Balcony was described as a natural resting place about the size of a franchise-motel room. Its scale matters: it could gather climbers from three ascending expeditions, but offered scant space for anything beyond a brief pause. At this altitude, climbers used the stop to change from their first oxygen canister to their second, drink liquids, and sometimes take photographs. Martin Adams described the transition in mental terms: climbers were moving from a place where they could hardly think to one where they could not think at all. The Balcony lay within the Death Zone, where cold and oxygen deprivation made lingering dangerous; it was a pause in the ascent, not a place of safety.

Oxygen and the Summit Push

The Mountain Madness expedition’s oxygen inventory makes the pause there legible as part of a tightly constrained plan. At Camp IV, the team had sixty-two canisters: nine heavier Zvesda bottles reserved for sleeping before the attempt, and fifty-three lighter Poisk canisters allocated to the May 10 climb. This represented 51 percent, by volume, of the oxygen bought from Henry Todd; most of the rest had already been used, particularly by Pete Schoening and Ngawang Topche Sherpa, while a small reserve remained at Base Camp for medical emergencies.

The distribution left little room for delay. Five of the six climbing Sherpas planned to use oxygen; Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, the climbing sirdar, intended to climb without it, though he carried one bottle for emergencies. Each of the other five Sherpas carried two bottles for personal use and two more for clients and guides, for a total of twenty-one bottles taken uphill by the Sherpas. The six clients, Scott Fischer, and Neal Beidleman carried two bottles each, while Anatoli Boukreev carried one. In all, the climbers took thirty-eight Poisk canisters from Camp IV, leaving fifteen full Poisk bottles there, along with whatever remained of the Zvesda supply. The margin was too slim to support an overnight delay and a second summit attempt on May 11: the effort had to succeed on May 10 or not at all.

That arithmetic gave every stop on the route a consequence. The Balcony was where climbers changed canisters and took a breath, but the expedition’s limited supply and late progress meant that rest could not be separated from the clock. An oxygen bottle was not simply personal equipment: its location, pressure, and allocation shaped how the climbers could proceed. Martin Adams had already criticized the expedition’s old two-way radios as a serious communications misstep; on the mountain, oxygen and rope would prove equally consequential parts of the infrastructure connecting guides, clients, and Sherpas.

The Rope Delay

The clients of both the Mountain Madness and Adventure Consultants expeditions understood that fixed ropes between Camp IV and the summit were meant to be installed before they arrived at the difficult upper route. Sandy Hill Pittman recalled being told that the Sherpas from both teams would fix the lines in advance, allowing the clients to leave later without waiting. Klev Schoening and Lene Gammelgaard described the same expectation. In practice, neither climbing sirdar—Ang Dorje Sherpa for Rob Hall’s expedition and Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa for Fischer’s—nor another Sherpa had gone ahead to fix the ropes.

The explanation became disputed after the climb. Lopsang said that a member of the Montenegrin expedition, which had failed in its May 9 summit bid, told him that the ropes were already fixed. Krakauer later questioned that account, noting that the guides had not been told of a change in plans and that Lopsang and Ang Dorje carried three hundred feet of rope in their packs. The account also presents a competing possibility: Fischer had reached Camp IV at 5:30 p.m. on May 9, exhausted and occupied with the camp and his own condition, and may have believed a report that the ropes were ready. Carrying rope, moreover, could be prudent even if a route was believed fixed, since ropes might be buried, unreliable, or insufficient for an alternate line or an accident. The evidence records both the suspicion and the reasons it remains uncertain; it does not resolve the disagreement by turning circumstantial evidence into certainty.

The delay became concrete at 8,600 meters, where climbers had to negotiate rock steps and required fixed ropes up to the South Summit at 8,748 meters. After more than an hour of waiting, Beidleman told Boukreev he intended to move ahead and help establish the route. Boukreev agreed and offered Beidleman his oxygen canister, which he had originally intended to retrieve on the descent. He felt well acclimatized and strong, while Beidleman was about to undertake hard work; the offer transferred equipment toward the person taking on the immediate task.

With Klev Schoening behind him, Beidleman followed Lopsang and Ang Dorje over a bulge and through fresh snow to a ledge. There he found Lopsang bent over and vomiting, unable to take on the work of fixing the ropes. Beidleman took rope from Lopsang’s pack and, with Ang Dorje’s assistance, threaded it toward the South Summit. They could use some old lines they judged trustworthy, but elsewhere they had to install new rope, a laborious process. The delay at the Balcony thus belonged to a larger bottleneck: the infrastructure the climbers expected to find ready had instead become work that had to be performed on the route.

The Descent and the Emergency

The Balcony also reappears in the account of the crisis unfolding during the descent. At 5:45 p.m., Dr. Hunt learned that Lopsang and Fischer were just below the South Summit, out of oxygen, and that Fischer was very weak. Earlier information had led her to believe a Mountain Madness climber was in trouble above the Hillary Step; the person in distress there was actually Doug Hansen, a client of Hall’s expedition. The Balcony region therefore belongs to a sequence in which incomplete reports, separated climbers, and failing oxygen made it difficult for anyone at Base Camp to understand the full situation.

Lopsang later recounted that he caught up with Fischer just above the Balcony after staying behind to ensure that Hansen was with Hall. Fischer told him, “I am very sick… . Lopsang, I am dead.” The reported words locate Fischer’s deterioration on the descent and give the Balcony a grim association, without making it the place where his fate was finally decided. Boukreev, meanwhile, had reached Camp IV and initially knew neither of the emergency above the Hillary Step nor of the problems Fischer and Hansen faced. As evening went on, the crisis had not been communicated to him.

When Boukreev understood that the Mountain Madness clients had not yet returned and would soon be out of oxygen, he prepared to go back uphill. Around 6:00 p.m. he began getting ready; by 6:30 he had put on his crampons and set out with three oxygen canisters, a mask, a regulator, an ice ax, and a ski pole. The weather was still manageable at the South Col, though worsening above. Within ten to fifteen minutes, clouds dropped onto the camp and winds of at least forty to fifty miles per hour drove snow across the route, turning the sky from gray to white. The account places this renewed rescue effort on the route that leads past the Balcony, now transformed from a place of brief rest into part of an increasingly hazardous search.

Narrative Significance

The Balcony concentrates the expedition’s central practical tensions in one cramped point on the mountain: the need to keep moving, the dependence on equipment, and the consequences when coordination fails. Oxygen is counted bottle by bottle; the expected fixed ropes are absent; a guide gives his canister to a colleague who moves ahead to address the resulting delay. These are not separate technical details but linked conditions of the climb, each affecting what the next person can do.

Its brief pauses also expose how little control a planned schedule could command above Camp IV. Climbers arrived in groups, changed bottles, drank, and waited; the route ahead still required difficult work, while oxygen and daylight continued to run down. Later, reports of Fischer’s weakness near the Balcony passed through an unreliable chain of radio relays, while Boukreev at Camp IV remained unaware of the emergency until he recognized that his clients had not returned. The Balcony’s significance lies in that double character: a modest resting place on the route and a threshold where the expedition’s human plans met the limits imposed by altitude, equipment, delay, and weather.