Neal Beidleman and Anatoli Boukreev fixing ropes on the summit route

Neal Beidleman and Anatoli Boukreev fixing ropes on the summit route became a practical response to a breakdown in the May 10, 1996 ascent: the climbers had expected the route to be prepared ahead of them, but reached the upper mountain without the promised fixed lines. Beidleman and Boukreev took on the work as they climbed, using rope from the Sherpas and from Beidleman’s own supply. Their effort helped open a way toward the summit, but the improvised work also revealed how thin the expedition’s preparations were: rope was scarce, anchors were absent, and the climbers were already behind schedule.

The Plan and Its Failure

The clients of Mountain Madness and Adventure Consultants understood that the Sherpa climbing sirdars, Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa and Ang Dorje Sherpa, would leave Camp IV ahead of the teams and fix the ropes between the camp and the summit. The clients were meant to follow later, without having to wait on the route. Instead, neither sirdar nor any other Sherpas had departed early to do the work. Beidleman recalled that he had understood from Scott Fischer that his place was in the middle of the group, helping clients onward, not at the front fixing lines. The uncompleted preparation turned an assumed safeguard into a task that had to be taken up during the ascent itself.

There was uncertainty about why the Sherpas had not gone ahead. Lopsang later said that a member of the Montenegrin expedition, which had attempted and failed to summit on May 9, told him the ropes were already fixed. Jon Krakauer questioned that explanation, noting that Lopsang and Ang Dorje carried three hundred feet of rope in their packs, and that guides had apparently not been told of any changed plan. The account also leaves room for a less deliberate failure: Fischer arrived at Camp IV late on May 9, exhausted and occupied with the camp and the climbers’ condition, and may have believed a report that the route was prepared. Whatever the explanation, the consequence on summit day was concrete: the climbers reached the upper route without the fixed lines they had expected.

Beidleman Takes the Initiative

Beidleman said he began moving forward from the Southeast Ridge after checking his watch and judging that the ascent was slow against the cutoff times Rob Hall had recommended. The group lacked organization at the front, and Beidleman called back for climbers to hurry rather than wait. He followed Lopsang and Ang Dorje over an initial bulge; with them and Klev Schoening, he took a safer line to the left and broke through deep snow to a bench. Lopsang was there, ill and vomiting. Beidleman took two ropes from him: a long white polypropylene rope and, as he recalled, a length of seven-millimeter Perlon rope, perhaps sixty meters long.

Ang Dorje fixed one rope while the climbers continued upward. Beidleman then used the long polypropylene line on another pitch and dug out the remaining ropes toward the South Summit. He reached it at about 9:58 in the morning, close to the approximately 10 a.m. cutoff he associated with Hall’s plan. The timing sharpened his concern that the ascent was running late. He remained on the South Summit for roughly an hour, then waited about forty-five minutes below it, behind a rock where climbers sat and watched the traverse. Looking around, he saw that none of his own Sherpas was there; he was unsure whether Ang Dorje was tired, sick, or unwilling to continue fixing.

Crossing the Ridge Without a Prepared Line

Beidleman and Boukreev concluded that they needed to move across the ridge and fix the route toward the summit. Beidleman called to Andy Harris, a guide with Hall’s expedition, asking him to help, then he and Boukreev unfurled the Perlon rope and started across. Their decision reflected a division of responsibility that Beidleman later described: he believed Boukreev would work near the front, Fischer would sweep behind the group and make the difficult decisions about who should turn around, and Beidleman would help keep the middle moving. He did not feel comfortable ordering clients to abandon their attempts, and believed that his own position left him able to descend safely. He saw his task as either pushing the route forward or acting as a gatekeeper, rather than making the turnaround decisions he thought belonged to Fischer.

Boukreev recalled that he had expected the Sherpas to fix the lines, as Fischer had indicated, but saw no one taking the initiative. He asked Beidleman to belay him as he went forward. Boukreev later described the traverse as relatively quick and not especially difficult for strong climbers; he and Beidleman used the rope they had, and after the Hillary Step continued over a short, steep section with crampons and ice axes. The rope ran out before that section was secured. Beidleman added that he stopped and took another rope from Jon Krakauer so that he could fix the stretch in the wind.

That line, perhaps a hundred meters long, did not make the job straightforward. Beidleman asked Martin Adams to help pay it out and tie its end to an anchor. After Beidleman climbed roughly twenty or thirty feet, the rope caught among rocks; Adams helped free it. Beidleman tied it at a snow stake, then continued with the remaining forty or fifty meters, but found no further anchor. The team had brought no anchors because they had expected the Sherpas to supply them; Beidleman said that, earlier, he had not understood anchors to be part of his own assignment. Rather than leave his ice axe on the steep slope, where he wanted it available to arrest a fall, he threw the rope’s loose end down the remaining forty meters into Tibet. That deliberate gesture prevented anyone from mistaking the unsecured rope for a fixed line and pulling on it.

Timing, Equipment, and Consequences

The rope work took place within a summit attempt constrained by a small oxygen reserve. At Camp IV, Mountain Madness had sixty-two canisters in all: nine heavier Zvesda bottles reserved for sleeping and fifty-three lighter Poisk canisters set aside for the May 10 climb. The Sherpas took twenty-one bottles uphill; the clients, Fischer, and Beidleman carried seventeen between them, while Boukreev carried one. Together, the climbers carried thirty-eight Poisk canisters, leaving fifteen full Poisk canisters and whatever oxygen remained in the Zvesdas at camp. The reserve was too slim to support an overnight delay and a second summit attempt on May 11. The climbers had been told the attempt was one shot, no more, so unplanned waiting on the route mattered beyond lost time.

Communications and coordination were also fragile. The expedition’s radios were old models with ten channels, which Martin Adams had criticized as inadequate. On summit day, messages between Base Camp and climbers travelled through several Sherpa relays, and Ingrid Hunt said the only people carrying radios on the mountain were Nepalis. She found that messages could be incomplete or inconsistent, and that communication with Pemba at Camp IV was sporadic. The expectation that the upper route had already been prepared was therefore not just a mistaken assumption about rope: it sat within a wider system in which equipment, assignments, and information did not reliably meet.

Beidleman reached the summit at about 1:25 or 1:30 p.m.; Boukreev recalled reaching it around 1:07. Their climbing and rope work had carried them through a section left unfinished by the plan, but it did not remove the danger or the delay of the summit day. The episode is significant for the way it turns an apparently routine piece of expedition infrastructure—the fixed line—into a record of decisions and omissions. In the gap between the ropes expected and the ropes actually present, Beidleman and Boukreev had to make a new route usable with what they could carry, while the summit timetable and the limited oxygen left little room for improvisation.