May 10, 1996

May 10, 1996 was the date of the summit attempt and storm that turned a climb on Mount Everest’s southern side into a fight for survival. The danger did not arise from weather alone: a thin oxygen margin, delayed movement on the route, uncertain turnaround arrangements and fragmented communication narrowed the climbers’ options before the storm enveloped them. The book returns to the day as both a physical crisis and a dispute over how its decisions should be understood.

The summit plan and its narrow margins

The expedition’s preparation aimed to let climbers ascend through successively higher camps and then return to an altitude to which they had acclimatized. The plan devised by Scott Fischer and Anatoli Boukreev called for four acclimatization excursions. On the first, the team would reach 6,100 meters, the site planned for Camp I, then return to Base Camp the same day; clients would carry personal equipment while Sherpas transported ropes and supplies. This staged approach was intended to preserve clients’ strength and allow the guides to observe their condition between excursions.

The summit attempt depended on cooperation between expeditions as well as on that acclimatization schedule. An agreement among Fischer, Rob Hall, Todd Burleson, Ian Woodall and Makalu Gau called for ropes to be fixed between Camps III and IV on April 26. Mountain Madness expected its Sherpas to contribute, but sending them to establish Camp III and then rest would leave no Sherpas for the shared work. Boukreev therefore went in their place. The rope-fixing effort mattered to the route’s safety, while the decision also reflected pressure to retain a place among the early expeditions making a summit bid. Later, climbers from Fischer’s and Hall’s teams would find that the ropes expected to be fixed in advance between Camp IV and the summit had not been prepared as planned.

At Camp IV, the Mountain Madness team had sixty-two oxygen canisters: nine heavier Zvesda bottles reserved for sleeping and fifty-three lighter Poisk bottles intended for the climb. Only thirty-eight Poisk canisters went up the mountain, leaving fifteen full ones at camp, along with whatever oxygen remained from the night before. That was not enough to support an overnight delay and a second summit attempt on May 11. The team’s oxygen calculations rested partly on supplier Henry Todd’s estimate that a Poisk bottle would last six hours at a flow rate of two to two and a half liters per minute. The schedule assumed that climbers leaving at midnight could reach the summit in ten or eleven hours, collect a third bottle cached at the South Summit on descent, and return to Camp IV before their supplies ran out. The plan looked workable on paper, but depended on a timely ascent, the expected oxygen flow and no serious complications.

Delays and decisions on the mountain

The climbers’ progress on May 10 was impeded by a bottleneck on the fixed ropes. By 10:30 A.M., Hall’s clients were spread between the Balcony and just below the South Summit, mixed among Fischer’s clients and the Taiwanese climbers. The Sherpas carrying additional oxygen were also strung out along the route, so the third bottles were not yet available at the South Summit. At the recommended flow rate, climbers using their second canister had only about one or two hours of oxygen remaining. Several of Hall’s clients at the back of the queue began considering a turnaround; one believed the congestion left too little time to return by the one o’clock deadline he understood to apply.

There was no shared, definite turnaround time within the Mountain Madness team. Fischer had not announced a specific hour by which climbers had to turn back. Instead, the arrangement he had worked out with Boukreev and Neal Beidleman was that Fischer would bring up the rear and turn around stragglers as he overtook them, while Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa and the guides alternated in leading. Fischer was expected to keep in radio contact with Lopsang, who would be near the front, but neither Boukreev nor Beidleman had a radio. Hall’s clients, by contrast, understood the deadline differently: some thought it was one o’clock, some two, and others expected the decision to be made on the mountain. These ambiguities left safety rules dependent on interpretation at altitude, when delays and impaired judgment were already changing the choices available.

At the start of the ascent, clients had been told that Sherpas from both Fischer’s and Hall’s teams would leave ahead of them to fix the ropes. Instead, no Sherpas had departed early for that task. Lopsang later said he had been told by a climber from a Montenegrin expedition that the ropes were already fixed. Jon Krakauer questioned that account, while the book also notes that fatigue and the demanding conditions at Camp IV may have shaped what Fischer and Hall understood about the work. The evidence does not establish a single explanation for the failure, but the mismatch between what clients expected and what they encountered contributed to delays on the route.

The storm and rescue effort

In the early evening, a vicious storm struck Mount Everest and persisted at high elevations for more than ten hours. Twenty-three climbers who had climbed the mountain that day from the Nepalese side could not reach the safety of their highest-altitude camp. In the Death Zone, above 8,000 meters, cold and oxygen deprivation made prolonged exposure lethal. Visibility shrank to little more than arm’s length; some climbers used ropes for guidance as oxygen gauges dropped to zero and hypoxia undermined rational thought. Frostbite made the loss of fingers or other extremities an increasingly real prospect.

Boukreev, at camp below the stranded climbers, tried to persuade others to help with a rescue. He then went out alone into the storm, carrying three oxygen canisters, a mask and regulator, an ice ax and a ski pole. Within ten to fifteen minutes of leaving his tent, wind-driven snow struck him and the South Col disappeared in a white-out. Searching for the fixed ropes, he climbed steep ice while trying to keep sight of lights flashing from camp. His glasses fogged and froze from breath escaping around his mask; he removed the mask to recover what little visibility he could. The search itself was dangerous, but the storm had left climbers above camp without a clear route back and in urgent need of help.

Elsewhere, a group of climbers gathered in the storm without clear leadership, following whichever headlight was visible. Beidleman tried to establish a single leader and route. He directed the group toward the eastern side of the South Col, away from the steeper line where climbers risked descending the Lhotse Face. The choice illustrates the emergency’s competing demands: finding camp in near-zero visibility while avoiding terrain that could make a mistaken step fatal.

The day’s events also exposed the cost of delays on descent. Mountain Madness climbers spent more than an hour on the summit and then lost further time when they stopped to help Yasuko Namba, who had collapsed on the fixed ropes just above Camp IV. The camp had briefly been visible when they reached the bottom of the ropes at 8,200 meters, less than forty-five minutes away, before the storm closed in. Martin Adams later emphasized that time, not the storm by itself, had shaped the crisis. The counterfactual remains uncertain, but an arrival an hour earlier could have meant a different situation.

Deaths and the contested account

Of thirty-three climbers who ascended Mount Everest from the south side on May 10, only twenty-eight returned. Fischer died from Mountain Madness; from Adventure Consultants, Hall, guide Andy Harris and clients Doug Hansen and Namba also died. Pittman, Charlotte Fox and Tim Madsen narrowly survived, while Beck Weathers and Makalu Gau suffered severe frostbite and later lost extremities. Lopsang’s account of Fischer’s condition suggested high-altitude cerebral edema, but the book treats that diagnosis, and the possibility of a pre-existing condition, as uncertain.

The book resists reducing Fischer’s death to one personal failing or one decisive cause. It identifies a combination of worsening health, apparently complicated by insufficient oxygen, the hour and location at which Fischer became incapacitated, poor communications, the storm and the condition and capabilities of those who might have helped. Beidleman and Boukreev later said they would have tried to turn Fischer around had they recognized a definitive sign of serious distress. Lopsang, after learning Fischer had died, blamed himself. The convergence of physical deterioration and operational difficulty makes a single, certain explanation unavailable.

The day also became the starting point of a public argument. In his September 1996 article in Outside, Krakauer criticized Boukreev for descending ahead of clients, describing it as questionable guide behavior and linking the decision to his lack of bottled oxygen and light clothing. Boukreev disputed that interpretation. He said his descent had been agreed with Fischer and arose from the clients’ oxygen needs: if they ran out before reaching camp, their chance of dying would rise, and Boukreev was expected to bring oxygen, hot drinks or physical assistance to climbers in trouble. The controversy therefore turned on how to interpret a guide’s early descent: as abandonment, or as part of a rescue plan whose need became tragically real.

Aftermath and significance

Five days after the storm, on May 15, Mountain Madness recorded a debriefing about the tragedy and its aftermath. Its participants included Beidleman, Boukreev, Lopsang, expedition doctor Ingrid Hunt and six of the eight climber-clients. Fox was absent after being airlifted from Base Camp to Kathmandu for treatment of frostbite; Dale Kruse had already departed Everest Base Camp. The partial transcript preserved different participants’ accounts while omitting commentary about the recording and its disposition to protect their privacy.

The book’s account presents May 10 not as a disaster with one isolated trigger but as a sequence in which constrained resources and interdependent decisions magnified one another. Oxygen estimates relied on an uninterrupted schedule; an uncompleted rope-fixing plan met a crowded route; unclear turnaround expectations met delays; and radio messages passed through a chain that Dr. Hunt considered incomplete and at times embellished. When the weather broke, these weaknesses were no longer separate inconveniences. Together they shaped who was still above camp, what help was available, and how little time remained to reach safety. May 10 became both a day of deaths and rescue and the event around which competing accounts of responsibility, judgment and survival continued to form.