Camp IV (South Col) is the high-altitude staging camp on Everest’s South Col, where the 1996 expedition’s summit push and storm-struck descent converged. Its importance lies in the sharp reversal it embodies: climbers aimed to return there before darkness and oxygen ran out, but as the storm closed in, the camp became a precarious refuge and the point from which Anatoli Boukreev repeatedly set out to search for missing people.

A staging point for the summit bid

The expedition’s acclimatization plan treated higher camps as successive steps toward the summit. During the first excursion, clients were to climb to the planned site of Camp I without staying overnight; on later trips they would sleep higher, train at the altitude of Camp II, then descend for rest and observation. On summit day the plan was more exacting: Scott Fischer intended his clients to leave Camp IV at midnight on May 10, carry three oxygen canisters apiece, and return by 6:00 P.M., before nightfall and the depletion of their supplies. Boukreev’s role was planned around that deadline: if clients were not back by six, Fischer expected the guide to bring help, including oxygen, hot drinks, and physical assistance.

The camp was also connected to a broader system of preparation. Because the route between Camps III and IV needed fixed ropes, several commercial expeditions agreed to cooperate on the work. Mountain Madness chose to send Sherpas rather than guides, but a conflict between establishing Camp III and resting the Sherpas left Boukreev to take their place in the rope-fixing effort. The camp’s safety thus depended not only on what happened at the South Col itself, but on shared labor and supplies distributed along the route.

Plans, equipment, and communication

The summit teams expected the route above Camp IV to be prepared before they left. Climbers from the Fischer and Rob Hall expeditions understood that their climbing sirdars, Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa and Ang Dorje Sherpa, would depart ahead of them to fix the ropes. Instead, neither sirdar nor any other Sherpas had gone ahead. Lopsang later said he had been told by a member of a Montenegrin expedition that the ropes were already fixed; Jon Krakauer questioned that account, while the book also considers the possibility that exhausted leaders received and trusted an inaccurate report. The unresolved discrepancy matters because the clients’ expectation of an uninterrupted ascent did not match the conditions they encountered above the camp.

Communications were another weak link. Martin Adams criticized the expedition’s old ten-channel radios as antiquated, while the mountain’s radio traffic depended on a chain of Nepali-speaking intermediaries. At Base Camp, Dr. Ingrid Hunt had messages passed through Ngima to Gyalzen at Camp II and then to Pemba at Camp IV; reports returning from the mountain followed the chain in reverse. Hunt found the information sporadic and incomplete, and she sometimes went to Rob Hall’s camp because its communications were better. The physical distance between camps was therefore compounded by a fragile information network: urgent news could be delayed, filtered, or fail to reach the person who needed it.

Return to camp in the storm

Boukreev reached Camp IV at about five o’clock on May 10. Pemba offered him tea, and Boukreev rested briefly. He saw no descending Sherpas and did not understand their plan; as the snowstorm began and no climbers appeared, he took three oxygen bottles and climbed back up to look for the fixed line and anyone still above. Strong wind and poor visibility led him off to the left onto hard ice. He could not find the route, and after spending hours searching, he turned back, reaching his tent at about 9:47 P.M. He recognized that continuing in the dark risked a fall toward the Kangshung Face.

Boukreev later tried again without reliable information that anyone was missing. He returned from his first search, then went up once more after Martin Adams reached camp around ten or half past ten and reported seeing no one. Around one in the morning, Neal Beidleman and Klev Schoening arrived with news that Sandy Hill Pittman, Charlotte Fox, and Tim Madsen had been left behind and needed help. Boukreev went out in severe wind, cold, and snow. At one point he came within roughly thirty meters of the stranded group without seeing them; he returned for crampons and then set out again, navigating by directions from people in camp and trying to locate them in darkness.

The search depended on exhausted people and scarce equipment. Boukreev went to the Sherpas’ tent seeking help, but found them asleep and depleted after their own summit attempt; he understood that they too had used oxygen and had little strength left. He spoke with Lopsang about the danger to climbers who had been out for more than fifteen hours and whose oxygen might be exhausted. Elsewhere, Beidleman and Mike Groom had already sought assistance from members of the Adventure Consultants expedition, without success. When Boukreev appealed to nearby teams, he found Rob Hall’s clients and Sherpas unable or unwilling to help, while some climbers had not yet returned. Camp IV was the destination everyone needed, but arrival there did not guarantee that a rescue party could be assembled.

Refuge and rescue base

After Beidleman and his companions finally made it back, they collapsed outside the tents. Boukreev helped remove their crampons and pushed them into separate tents. Their return came after they had stumbled and walked into the wind, nearly snowblind and frozen. The camp offered shelter, but the people inside were themselves exhausted, injured, or incapacitated; its tents became temporary havens rather than a fully functioning rescue station.

The book’s account makes Camp IV a crucial junction in the disaster’s chain of failures and responses. The summit plan placed a firm limit on time and oxygen, yet the route was not fixed as clients expected, radios and relay procedures did not reliably convey emergencies, and the people reaching camp could not readily recruit help. At the same time, Boukreev repeatedly left the relative shelter of the camp to search for those who had not returned. Camp IV’s significance is therefore double: it was the intended end of the summit-day journey and the narrow, imperfect base from which attempts to bring stranded climbers home began.