The 1996 Everest Disaster

On the night of 10–11 May 1996, a sudden blizzard caught dozens of climbers high on Mount Everest during their summit pushes. Eight people died in a single night on both sides of the mountain — twelve on Everest over that spring season — making it, at the time, the deadliest single event in the mountain's history. The story became known worldwide through Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and later the 2015 film Everest, and it changed how commercial expeditions operate to this day.

What happened on 10–11 May 1996

The 10th of May was summit day for several teams at once. Two commercial expeditions led the push from the Nepali side: Adventure Consultants, led by New Zealander Rob Hall, and Mountain Madness, led by American Scott Fischer. An Indian expedition was climbing the north ridge from Tibet the same day.

The morning went slowly. Fixed ropes were not in place on some upper sections, and climbers queued below the South Summit and the Hillary Step. Many reached the top well after the early-afternoon turnaround times their leaders had planned; some were still climbing at 4 pm. As the last climbers descended, a storm blew in with little warning — driving snow, near-hurricane winds, visibility gone. A group of climbers became lost on the South Col, only a few hundred metres from the tents of Camp IV, and huddled in the open through the night.

By the morning of 11 May, eight climbers were dead: guides Rob Hall and Andy Harris and clients Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba from Adventure Consultants, Scott Fischer of Mountain Madness, and three members of the Indian team on the north side.

The people on the mountain

Rob Hall stayed high on the mountain with his client Doug Hansen, a postal worker who had turned back close to the summit the year before and was making a second attempt. Hansen faltered above the Hillary Step and died during the descent; Hall, unable to move down, survived a night in the open near the South Summit. On 11 May, base camp patched his radio through to his wife, Jan Arnold, in New Zealand — she was pregnant with their daughter — and he told her not to worry too much before the radio fell silent. Andy Harris, a young guide who appears to have climbed back up to help Hall and Hansen, was never found.

Yasuko Namba, a 47-year-old Japanese climber who had completed six of the Seven Summits, reached the top that day and collapsed in the storm on the South Col. Scott Fischer, one of America's strongest high-altitude climbers, weakened during the descent and died on the southeast ridge at around 8,300 metres.

And then there is Beck Weathers. The Texan pathologist was twice assessed as beyond help and left in the storm on the South Col. Hours later, blind in one eye and severely frostbitten, he stood up and walked alone into Camp IV — one of the most remarkable self-rescues in mountaineering history. He survived — losing his right hand, the fingers of his left, and his nose — and was flown off by Nepali pilot Lt. Col. Madan K.C. in one of the highest helicopter rescues then attempted.

Why it went wrong

No single cause explains the disaster, and survivors themselves disagree. The factors most often cited in the public record:

• Late turnaround times. Both leaders preached a hard turnaround — summit by early afternoon or go down — yet on the day, clients and guides kept climbing hours past it.
• Crowding and delays. With multiple teams on one route, bottlenecks formed at the Hillary Step and South Summit, burning oxygen and daylight.
• The storm itself. In 1996, expeditions had nothing like today's precision forecasting; the blizzard arrived faster and harder than anyone anticipated.
• Commercial dynamics. Hall and Fischer ran competing businesses whose reputations rested on getting clients to the top; some accounts suggest that pressure — including a journalist, Krakauer, reporting on guided climbing — made turning people around harder. How much weight each factor deserves is still debated.

Into Thin Air, Boukreev and the aftermath

Jon Krakauer, climbing with Hall's team on assignment for Outside magazine, summited that day and survived. His 1997 book Into Thin Air became one of the best-selling mountaineering accounts ever written and fixed the disaster in public memory.

It also ignited a controversy. Krakauer questioned decisions by Anatoli Boukreev, Fischer's head guide, who had climbed without supplemental oxygen and descended ahead of his clients. Yet that night Boukreev went out from Camp IV into the blizzard alone, repeatedly, and brought three climbers back to the tents — rescues no one else was capable of attempting. He answered Krakauer in his own book, The Climb, and the American Alpine Club honoured him for heroism in 1997, months before he was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna. Most readers today treat the two books as complementary testimony rather than choosing a side. The 2015 film Everest, drawn from multiple survivors' accounts, brought the story to a new generation.

The disaster's practical legacy reshaped commercial climbing: expeditions now buy dedicated, mountain-specific weather forecasts, enforce turnaround times with far more discipline, carry more oxygen and better radios, and coordinate summit schedules between teams.

Landmarks of loss: Sleeping Beauty and Green Boots

Everest's later history holds other tragedies that searchers often connect with 1996, and they deserve to be told plainly and respectfully.

Francys Arsentiev became, in May 1998, the first American woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen. Descending the north side, she was forced into repeated nights above 8,000 metres and became separated from her husband Sergei; climbers found her dying high on the route, beyond rescue, and Sergei died in a fall trying to return to her. Because she lay near the route in her climbing suit, appearing peacefully asleep, passing climbers came to call her the "Sleeping Beauty" of Everest. In 2007, Ian Woodall — one of the climbers forced to leave her in 1998 — returned with an expedition to move her body out of sight of the route, wrapped in a flag, as an act of respect.

"Green Boots" refers to an unidentified climber — widely believed, though never officially confirmed, to be a member of the 1996 Indian expedition — who came to rest in a small limestone alcove at about 8,500 metres on the northeast ridge. For years, the fluorescent green boots visible from the trail made the alcove a grim navigational landmark for north-side climbers; in 2006, British climber David Sharp died in the same cave, prompting a painful public debate about the ethics of passing distressed climbers. Around 2014 the body known as Green Boots was reported moved from view.

Why did they remain there so long? Above 8,000 metres, recovering a body can cost tens of thousands of dollars and puts rescuers' lives at genuine risk — a frozen body and equipment can weigh well over 100 kilograms, at an altitude where climbers can barely carry themselves. Historically the mountain community accepted that those who died high on Everest stayed there. That is slowly changing: Nepali army clean-up campaigns have recovered several bodies in recent seasons, and families can sometimes arrange recoveries that were unthinkable in the 1990s.

Everest today — and what this means for trekkers

Climbing Everest remains dangerous — the death zone has not changed, and crowding in narrow weather windows caused new tragedies in 2019 — but the specific failures of 1996 are far less likely to repeat. Forecasting, oxygen logistics, communications and Sherpa-led rope-fixing are all vastly better organised; what a summit bid involves, and costs, is covered in our Everest expedition cost guide and the wider mountaineering in Nepal overview.

One important clarification, because many people searching this history are planning a trip: the Everest Base Camp trek involves none of the death-zone risks described on this page. Trekkers walk to base camp at 5,364 metres and the viewpoint of Kala Patthar — they never enter the Khumbu Icefall, never use ropes or oxygen, and never approach the altitudes where the 1996 storm struck. The trek's real risks are ordinary ones, chiefly altitude sickness, and a sensible itinerary manages them well. Standing at base camp, looking up at the route through the Icefall, is as close as a trekker ever comes to this story — and close enough to understand its weight.