Mountain Madness’s May 10 summit push

Mountain Madness’s May 10 summit push was a carefully planned attempt whose safeguards proved incomplete at the point of greatest exposure. The expedition had arranged gradual acclimatization, shared responsibility for the route, and oxygen supplies intended to last through a return to Camp IV by early evening. But the expected ropes were not fixed ahead of the climbers, the summit team lacked a definite turnaround time, and radio communications were unreliable. The effort reached the summit in a staggered sequence, with Neal Beidleman improvising essential route work while the clients advanced and eventually descended into a day already marked by delay and uncertainty.

Preparation and the summit plan

The push followed a four-excursion acclimatization plan developed by Scott Fischer and Anatoli Boukreev. On the first excursion, the team would climb to 6,100 meters, the site of Camp I, without staying overnight; clients would carry only personal equipment, while climbing Sherpas working under Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa carried ropes and supplies. The group would return to base the same day, rest, and allow the guides to observe the clients’ condition. On the second excursion, they would spend a night at Camp I and climb to 6,500 meters, where the Sherpas were establishing Camp II, before descending for another multiday recovery period.

The larger plan also depended on cooperation between expeditions. Mountain Madness had agreed with Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants, Todd Burleson’s Alpine Ascents, Ian Woodall’s Johannesburg Sunday Times Expedition, and Makalu Gau’s Taiwanese National Expedition to help fix the ropes between Camps III and IV on April 26. Because Mountain Madness intended to send Sherpas rather than guides, the need to establish Camp III and then give the Sherpas rest created a staffing conflict. Boukreev was assigned to contribute in their place. The expeditions’ shared work mattered not only for safety: May 10 was circulating as a proposed summit date, and Mountain Madness did not want to lose its position among the early teams to make a summit bid.

The summit-day plan allotted each client three oxygen canisters, or approximately eighteen hours of oxygen. The climbers were to leave Camp IV at midnight, reach the summit, and return by 6:00 P.M., before darkness and before their oxygen ran out. Fischer had hired Boukreev in part for his ability to conduct rescues, bringing oxygen, hot drinks, or physical assistance to descending climbers if needed. The arrangement assumed that a guide who was properly conditioned and acclimatized could climb without supplemental oxygen and serve as a reserve for clients in difficulty. It made the clients’ oxygen supply, rather than a fixed turnaround hour, central to the plan’s logic.

The route and its missing safeguards

At the Balcony, climbers from three expeditions began to bunch together. The natural resting place offered an opportunity to change from a first oxygen canister to a second, drink, and recover briefly. But the climbers were already in the Death Zone, where cold and oxygen deprivation made delays especially costly. Mountain Madness clients understood that ropes between Camp IV and the summit were supposed to have been fixed in advance by Sherpas from Fischer’s and Hall’s teams, who would leave well before the clients so the ascending groups would not have to wait.

That preparation had not occurred. Neither Lopsang nor Ang Dorje Sherpa, Hall’s climbing sirdar, nor other Sherpas had set out early to fix the ropes. Lopsang later said a climber from a Montenegrin expedition, after that team’s failed May 9 summit attempt, had told him that the ropes were already fixed. Jon Krakauer questioned this account, noting that Lopsang and Ang Dorje carried three hundred feet of rope in their packs when they left Camp IV. The book also presents a possible alternative explanation: Fischer arrived at Camp IV late on May 9, exhausted and concerned for the camp and its climbers, and may have believed a report that removed the rope issue from his list of immediate worries. The evidence leaves the precise chain of communication disputed, while establishing that the clients began without the advance route preparation they expected.

The expedition had no definite summit-day turnaround hour laid down by Fischer. Rather than specifying a time or altitude at which every climber should reverse course, Fischer’s approach was to have Lopsang, Boukreev, and Beidleman alternate in leading, while Fischer brought up the rear and turned around stragglers as he passed them. If problems arose, Fischer expected to communicate by radio with Lopsang near the front. Neither Boukreev nor Beidleman had been issued a radio. This flexible arrangement depended on Fischer’s ability to monitor the group and on communication with Lopsang; it was not the same as a clear, shared cutoff rule. Clients later described differing understandings of whether Hall’s cutoff was one o’clock or two, or whether the decision would be made on the mountain.

Beidleman’s improvised route work

Neal Beidleman recalled the team’s preparations at Camp IV beginning at 10:00 P.M., when he first heard a Sherpa moving around. About fifteen minutes later the Sherpas brought tea. The climbers spent the next hour and fifteen minutes organizing, then came out of their tents at about 11:30 P.M. They put on crampons with the intention of departing at midnight. Beidleman remembered helping Tim Madsen and Charlotte Fox with their crampons and telling Fox to leave at approximately 12:00 or 12:10 A.M.; Sandy Hill Pittman said she left first with Lopsang.

Beidleman said that his assigned role was not to fix lines. Fischer had expected him to stay in the middle of the group, organizing and helping climbers while continuing upward. But when Beidleman checked his watch on the Southeast Ridge, the team seemed behind the cutoff times Rob Hall had recommended, and he saw no organization at the front. He moved ahead to help establish the route, calling back for climbers to hurry and not wait too long. He followed Lopsang and Ang Dorje over an initial rise; they made a safer trail to the left through deep snow and reached a bench where Lopsang was ill and vomiting.

Beidleman took two ropes from Lopsang: a long white polypropylene rope and a length of seven-millimeter Perlon rope, perhaps sixty meters. Ang Dorje fixed one line, after which Beidleman used the polypropylene rope to fix another long pitch and dug out remaining ropes toward the South Summit. He reached the South Summit at 9:58 A.M., according to his watch, close to the roughly 10:00 cutoff he remembered for that point. The timing made him anxious. Martin Adams arrived behind him, perhaps half an hour later. Beidleman then spent about an hour on the South Summit and another forty-five minutes below it, behind a rock where climbers sat watching the traverse. He recalled seeing no Mountain Madness Sherpas there and believed Ang Dorje was tired, sick, or unwilling to continue fixing.

The rope work continued higher on the route. Andy Harris and Jon Krakauer asked to pass Beidleman because their oxygen was low, and he let them go. He uncoiled a rope of perhaps a hundred meters, asked Adams to help pay it out and attach it to an anchor, and began climbing. The rope caught in rocks; Adams helped free it. Beidleman tied it off at a snow stake, but the team had brought no additional anchors, having expected the Sherpas to provide them. He reached the end of the rope without finding another anchor and did not want to leave his ice ax, which he needed for self-arrest. Rather than leave an unsecured line that climbers might mistake for a fixed rope, he threw the rope’s end forty meters toward Tibet and continued upward. He reached the summit at about 1:25 or 1:30 P.M.

Staggered summits and descent

The summit was reached over a prolonged interval, not as a single group arrival. Boukreev said he reached it at 1:07 P.M. Beidleman estimated his own arrival at 1:25 to 1:30. Klev Schoening was approximately half an hour behind Beidleman, Ingrid Hunt estimated her time at about 2:00, Pittman placed hers at 2:15, and Madsen and Fox were thought to have reached the top around 2:20 or 2:25. These recollections give the summit push a dispersed shape: climbers who had started together and were moving along the same route were now separated in time, with rope fixing and waiting contributing to the uneven progress.

Beidleman later reported that he and the four Mountain Madness clients who had summited with him began descending at 3:10 P.M. Fischer was still approaching the top: he reached the Hillary Step at approximately 2:35 P.M. and summited at about 3:40. At the Hillary Step, Boukreev told Fischer that the clients on the summit looked well, but raised concern about the cold and dwindling oxygen. Fischer said that things seemed okay at that moment and thought that, if the descent went well, the clients might return to Camp IV before dark. Given the delays and the late hour, he and Boukreev agreed that Boukreev’s best position was Camp IV, where he could respond if the descending climbers needed help.

Communication, risk, and significance

The expedition’s safeguards were vulnerable not only on the route but also in the communication chain. During summit day, Dr. Ingrid Hunt’s messages to and from Fischer and Lopsang were relayed through several people and camps: from Hunt to the Base Camp sirdar, then in Nepali to a Sherpa at Camp II, onward to Pemba at Camp IV, and through the same chain in reverse. Hunt believed the information she received was incomplete or reshaped to present matters more favorably, and communication with Pemba was sporadic. She moved between Mountain Madness’s camp and Hall’s because she considered Hall’s communications better, repeatedly asking by radio for news.

The central tension of the push lies between its stated safeguards and the conditions in which the climbers actually proceeded. There was a measured acclimatization scheme and a defined oxygen allotment, but the route was not prepared as clients expected; there was no single, definite turnaround time from Fischer; and the guide expected to respond to emergencies had no radio. Beidleman’s decision to move forward and fix lines addressed an immediate practical gap, but the work consumed time and exposed the absence of the planned organization at the front of the group. The push’s outcome therefore cannot be reduced to a summit count: its staggered arrivals and late descent mark the widening distance between the expedition’s timetable and the demands of the mountain.