The YouTuber Obsessed with Trashing My Book: Chapter Two
A refutation of Michael Tracy’s dishonest videos discrediting “Into Thin Air” and spreading misinformation about the 1996 Everest disaster
On June 17, 2024, Michael Tracy posted a video titled “Everest 1996: Charlotte Fox’s account and the 1 PM turn-around time.” Twenty-four minutes into the video Tracy claims:
Rob Hall had made a deal with Outside magazine and was paying for Krakauer’s climb. Krakauer’s writing was nothing more than a corporate product placement for Adventure Consultants, so he couldn’t put all the blame [for the disaster] on Rob Hall. And there had to be some greater mystery for him to sell all of his books…. All of this seems perfectly obvious.
Two minutes into a video Tracy posted on August 13, 2024, “1996 vs 2024: Climbing the South-East Ridge Route of Mount Everest,” he repeats the same allegation:
Jon Krakauer was a paid promotional writer for Outside magazine and his initial article and subsequent book about the 1996 Everest disaster were pieces of corporate promotionalism favoring Outside magazine’s paying client, Adventure Consultants. As part of promoting Adventure Consultants, Krakauer tried to shift the blame onto everyone else other than Rob Hall’s team.
At the 12:38 mark in this video, Tracy mentions that Lou Kasischke, a client on Hall’s team, believed that on May 10
his oxygen regulator was malfunctioning, a not uncommon occurrence on Everest, and most high-priced Expeditions carry a backup regulator in case this happens to someone on the team. For instance, Scott Fisher’s team had such a backup regulator, however, Rob Hall’s team did not. Kasischke asked Hall about the problems with his oxygen system while they were climbing but Hall simply banged the mask and handed it back to him. The problem with Rob’s Hall team is that they did not have reserve oxygen equipment, most likely because they had a non-paying client along on the climb who was using what would have normally been their backup regulator.
On September 3, 2024, Tracy posted a video titled “South Summit on the Ascent,” in which he repeated a variation of this same false allegation multiple times. At the 1:27 mark Tracy opines:
At approximately noon on May 10th the bulk of the climbers were on the South Summit and the situation was looking good…. Five of the Adventure Consultants clients had turned around, but most of their oxygen was still brought up to South Summit. The exact oxygen situation for Adventure Consultants remains unknown because Rob Hall and Andy Harris unfortunately died, and they were the ones managing the oxygen. However, a fairly accurate view of the situation can be pieced together: Adventure Consultants’ oxygen problem started in February of 1996 when a last minute addition of a non-paying client named Jon Krakauer meant they would not be able to order extra oxygen, as oxygen needed to be ordered well in advance…. At noon on May 10th things were looking good for Adventure Consultants’ two remaining paying clients, Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba, and the non-paying promotional copywriter Jon Krakauer, who was there to write a promotional piece about Outside magazine’s newest client Adventure Consultants.
At the 4:12 mark in this video Tracy mentions that the only client on Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants team who reached the summit and survived was
the non-paying promotional writer Jon Krakauer who would go on to write a raving review of Rob Hall and Adventure Consultants that would turn into the best-selling book Into Thin Air. The conclusions of that promotional piece were that the bulk of the problems were caused by a social climber and a Kazakhstani guide on the Mountain Madness team, even though Mountain Madness has six clients reach the summit and make it back alive without serious injuries. As bizarre as Krakauer’s analysis sounds his promotional piece remains the accepted narrative to this day.
There is a lot to debunk in the video excerpts cited above, but before I address the overarching lie that Tracy is trying promulgate with this torrent of dishonest statements, I’ll refute four subordinate falsehoods intended to prop it up:
· Contrary to Tracy’s claim, Into Thin Air is far from a rave review of Rob Hall and Adventure Consultants, as I will thoroughly explain below.
· Tracy’s allegation that “Adventure Consultants’ oxygen problem started in February of 1996 when a last minute addition of a non-paying client named Jon Krakauer meant they would not be able to order extra oxygen” is false and defamatory. There is no credible evidence indicating that Rob Hall’s oxygen supply in 1996 was less than he intended it to be due to the addition of another client (me) to the roster a month before the expedition got underway.
· Tracy’s allegation that Rob Hall’s team did not have a backup regulator or reserve oxygen equipment is similarly false, and Tracy has likewise provided no credible evidence to indicate otherwise.
· Contrary to Tracy’s claim, Into Thin Air does not indicate that the 1996 disaster was “caused by a social climber [Sandy Pittman] and a Kazakhstani guide [Anatoli Boukreev] on the Mountain Madness team.” Instead of suggesting the disaster was caused by one or two factors, as Tracy alleges here and elsewhere, my book provides a much more nuanced analysis, explaining that the tragic outcome in 1996 was the result of multiple, complex, interrelated factors.
Here is the overarching lie: Tracy claims Rob Hall entered into an agreement with Outside stipulating that Hall would pay Outside for me to join Hall’s 1996 Everest expedition, and in return Outside would publish a promotional article written by me extolling Hall’s commercial guiding business, Adventure Consultants.
There is absolutely no truth to this claim. To understand the brazen dishonesty of Tracy’s allegation, it helps to read the excerpt below from Chapter 5 of Into Thin Air. It begins by discussing Mountain Madness, the commercial guiding business owned by Scott Fischer, Hall’s primary rival in the relatively new business of guiding paying clients up Everest.
Mountain Madness was a fiscally marginal enterprise and had been since its inception: in 1995 Fischer took home only about $12,000. But things were finally starting to look more promising, thanks to Fischer’s growing celebrity and to the efforts of his business partner–cum–office manager, Karen Dickinson, whose organizational skills and levelheadedness compensated for Fischer’s seat-of-the-pants, what-me-worry modus operandi. Taking note of Rob Hall’s success in guiding Everest — and the large fees he was able to command as a consequence — Fischer decided it was time for him to enter the Everest market. If he could emulate Hall, it would quickly catapult Mountain Madness to profitability….
A few weeks after Fischer returned victorious from Everest in 1994, I encountered him in Seattle. I didn’t know him well, but we had some friends in common and often ran into each other at the crags or at climbers’ parties. On this occasion he buttonholed me to talk about the guided Everest expedition he was planning: I should come along, he cajoled, and write an article about the climb for Outside. When I replied that it would be crazy for someone with my limited high-altitude experience to attempt Everest, he said, “Hey, experience is overrated. It’s not the altitude that’s important, it’s your attitude, bro. You’ll do fine. You’ve done some pretty sick climbs — stuff that’s way harder than Everest. We’ve got the big E figured out, we’ve got it totally wired. These days, I’m telling you, we’ve built a yellow brick road to the summit.”
Scott had piqued my interest — more, even, than he probably realized — and he was relentless. He talked up Everest every time he saw me and repeatedly harangued Brad Wetzler, an editor at Outside, about the idea. By January 1996, thanks in no small part to Fischer’s concerted lobbying, the magazine made a firm commitment to send me to Everest — probably, Wetzler indicated, as a member of Fischer’s expedition. In Scott’s mind it was a done deal.
A month before my scheduled departure, however, I got a call from Wetzler saying there’d been a change in plans: Rob Hall had offered the magazine a significantly better deal, so Wetzler proposed that I join the Adventure Consultants expedition instead of Fischer’s. I knew and liked Fischer, and I didn’t know much about Hall at that point, so I was initially reluctant. But after a trusted climbing buddy confirmed Hall’s sterling reputation, I enthusiastically agreed to go to Everest with Adventure Consultants.
One afternoon in Base Camp I asked Hall why he’d been so eager to have me along. He candidly explained that it wasn’t me he was actually interested in, or even the publicity he hoped my article would generate, particularly. What was so enticing was the bounty of valuable advertising he would reap from the deal he struck with Outside.
Hall told me that according to the terms of this arrangement, he’d agreed to accept only $10,000 of his usual fee in cash; the balance would be bartered for expensive ad space in the magazine, which targeted an upscale, adventurous, physically active audience — the core of his client base. And most important, Hall said, “It’s an American audience. Probably eighty or ninety percent of the potential market for guided expeditions to Everest and the other Seven Summits is in the United States. After this season, when my mate Scott has established himself as an Everest guide, he’ll have a great advantage over Adventure Consultants simply because he’s based in America. To compete with him we’ll have to step up our advertising there significantly.”
In January, when Fischer found out that Hall had won me away from his team, he was apoplectic. He called me from Colorado, as upset as I’d ever heard him, to insist that he wasn’t about to concede victory to Hall. (Like Hall, Fischer didn’t bother trying to hide the fact that it wasn’t me he was interested in, but rather the collateral publicity and advertising.) In the end, however, he was unwilling to match Hall’s offer to the magazine.
In his videos, Tracy repeatedly misrepresents the terms of the deal Rob Hall made with Outside. Hall did not pay Outside to have me write an article that would promote Adventure Consultants’ business interests. As the excerpt above explains, Hall agreed to let me join his expedition as a journalist if Outside paid his company in the form of credit for future advertising worth approximately $55,000, plus $10,000 in cash to cover the cost of what the government of Nepal charged for my climbing permit. I wasn’t a non-paying client as Tracy alleges; most of the payment to Hall was simply in the form of valuable future advertising.
Outside made it explicitly clear to Hall that the article I would write about the expedition would be fair and unbiased, and that my assignment was to report truthfully about whatever I experienced, regardless of the expedition’s outcome. Like most reputable magazines, Outside had a “firewall” between the editorial side of the operation and the business side. Advertisers understood that purchasing ads did not include a guarantee of favorable reporting in the magazine.
Furthermore, neither the article I ended up writing for Outside, nor my book, could be considered “promotional” in any reasonable understanding of the term. To the contrary, my reporting exposed how a number of bad decisions Hall made during the expedition were directly or indirectly responsible for the 1996 disaster. For example, in Chapter 11 of Into Thin Air I wrote:
Rob had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turn-around time on our summit day — in our case it would probably be 1:00 P.M., or 2:00 at the very latest — and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top. “With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.”
Despite the many times Hall emphasized the importance of setting a firm turn-around time, I reported in Into Thin Air that Hall failed to enforce any turn-around times whatsoever on May 10. Nobody on his team reached the summit before 1:00 PM. Only Andy Harris and I reached the summit before 2:00. And Doug Hansen didn’t arrive on top until after 4:00.
In Chapter 12, moreover, I reported that as we were ascending above the South Col in the pre-dawn hours of May 10, Hansen turned around and headed down on his own initiative. As Lou Kasischke told me in a tape-recorded interview on August 27, 1996:
All of a sudden [Doug Hansen] stepped out of line and just stood there. When I moved up beside him, he told me he was cold and feeling bad and was heading down.
After this quote, my book reveals the following:
Then Rob, who was bringing up the rear, caught up to Doug, and a brief conversation ensued. Nobody overheard the dialogue, so there is no way of knowing what was said, but the upshot was that Doug got back in line and continued his ascent.
Into Thin Air leaves little doubt that after Doug Hansen turned around and started to descend, Hall likely intervened and convinced Hansen to continue climbing to the summit instead. In both the article I wrote for Outside and in my book, furthermore, I reported that much later in the day, long after each of the potential turnaround times Hall had discussed with us had passed, Hall failed to turn Hansen around despite having multiple opportunities to do so — a failure that resulted in the deaths of Doug Hansen, Andy Harris, and Hall himself. The reporting I did in my Outside article and in my book is not something one would find in a promotional “puff piece.”
After the first paying clients were successfully guided up Everest in 1992, spawning what would soon become a full-blown industry based on ushering amateur climbers to the top of the world, the editor of Outside, Mark Bryant, was concerned about the potential ramifications. When he assigned me to join a commercial Everest expedition, Bryant’s primary interest was to report on the burgeoning guiding industry on Everest and warn against precisely the kind of tragedy that would occur in 1996. Needless to say, neither Bryant, nor I, ever imagined I would witness a disaster like this firsthand. But when I did, I reported truthfully about what I experienced and what I observed.
To wrap up this chapter, I’ve appended lengthy excerpts from Into Thin Air below. Reading them will allow you to decide for yourself whether my book was written to boost the prospects for Rob Hall’s guiding business, as Michael Tracy claims so insistently. Everything that follows in this chapter is taken verbatim from my book, without added commentary.
Excerpts from Into Thin Air:
As my sympathy for Taske, Weathers, and some of my other teammates mounted, I felt increasingly uncomfortable in my role as a journalist. I had no qualms when it came to writing frankly about Hall, Fischer, or Sandy Pittman, each of whom had been aggressively seeking media attention for years. But my fellow clients were a different matter. When they signed up for Hall’s expedition, none of them had known that a reporter would be in their midst — scribbling constantly, quietly recording their words and deeds in order to share their foibles with a potentially unsympathetic public.
After the expedition was over, Weathers was interviewed for the television program Turning Point. In a segment of the interview that wasn’t included in the version edited for broadcast, ABC News anchor Forrest Sawyer asked Beck, “How’d you feel about a reporter being along?” Beck replied,
It added a lot of stress. I was always a little concerned with the idea — you know, this guy’s going to come back and write a story that’s going to be read by a couple of million people. And, I mean, it’s bad enough to go up there and make a fool of yourself if it’s just you and the climbing group. That somebody may have you written across the pages of some magazine as a buffoon and a clown has got to play upon your psyche as to how you perform, how hard you’ll push. And I was concerned that it might drive people further than they wanted to go. And it might even for the guides. I mean, they want to get people on top of the mountain because, once again, they’re going to be written about, and they’re going to be judged.
A moment later Sawyer asked, “Did you sense that having a reporter along put extra pressure on Rob Hall?” Beck answered,
I can’t imagine it didn’t. This is what [Rob] does for a living, and if one of his clients got injured, that’s the worst thing that can happen to a guide.…
Rob Hall, Mike Groom, and Yasuko Namba reached the summit around [2:15], and Hall radioed Helen Wilton at Base Camp to give her the good news. “Rob said it was cold and windy up there,” Wilton recalled, “but he sounded good. He said, ‘Doug is just coming up over the horizon; right after that I’ll be heading down.… If you don’t hear from me again, it means everything’s fine.’”
Wilton notified the Adventure Consultants office in New Zealand, and a flurry of faxes went out to friends and families around the world, announcing the expedition’s triumphant culmination.
But Doug Hansen wasn’t just below the summit at that point, as Hall believed, nor was Fischer. It would in fact be 3:40 before Fischer reached the top, and Hansen wouldn’t get there until after 4:00 P.M….
Shortly after Fischer left the top, Gau and his Sherpas departed as well, and finally Lopsang headed down — leaving Hall alone on the summit awaiting Hansen. A moment after Lopsang started down, about 4:00, Hansen at last appeared, toughing it out, moving painfully slowly over the last bump on the ridge. As soon as he saw Hansen, Hall hurried down to meet him.
Hall’s obligatory turn-around time had come and gone a full two hours earlier. Given the guide’s conservative, exceedingly methodical nature, many of his colleagues have expressed puzzlement at this uncharacteristic lapse of judgment. Why, they wondered, didn’t he turn Hansen around much lower on the mountain, as soon as it became obvious that the American climber was running late?
Exactly one year earlier, Hall had turned Hansen around on the South Summit at 2:30 P.M., and to be denied so close to the top was a crushing disappointment to Hansen. He told me several times that he’d returned to Everest in 1996 largely as a result of Hall’s advocacy — he said Rob had called him from New Zealand “a dozen times” urging him to give it another shot — and this time Doug was absolutely determined to bag the top. “I want to get this thing done and out of my life,” he’d told me three days earlier at Camp Two. “I don’t want to have to come back here. I’m getting too old for this shit.”
It doesn’t seem far-fetched to speculate that because Hall had talked Hansen into coming back to Everest, it would have been especially hard for him to deny Hansen the summit a second time. “It’s very difficult to turn someone around high on the mountain,” cautions Guy Cotter, a New Zealand guide who summitted Everest with Hall in 1992 and was guiding the peak for him in 1995 when Hansen made his first attempt. “If a client sees that the summit is close and they’re dead-set on getting there, they’re going to laugh in your face and keep going up.” As the veteran American guide Peter Lev told Climbing magazine after the disastrous events on Everest, “We think that people pay us to make good decisions, but what people really pay for is to get to the top.”
In any case, Hall did not turn Hansen around at 2:00 P.M. — or, for that matter, at 4:00, when he met his client just below the top. Instead, according to Lopsang, Hall placed Hansen’s arm around his neck and assisted the weary client up the final forty feet to the summit. They stayed only a minute or two, then turned to begin the long descent.
When Lopsang saw that Hansen was faltering, he held up his own descent long enough to make sure Doug and Rob made it safely across a dangerously corniced area just below the top. Then, eager to catch Fischer, who was by now more than thirty minutes ahead of him, the Sherpa continued down the ridge, leaving Hansen and Hall at the top of the Hillary Step.
Just after Lopsang disappeared down the Step, Hansen apparently ran out of oxygen and foundered. He’d expended every last bit of his strength to reach the summit — and now there was nothing left in reserve for the descent. “Pretty much the same thing happened to Doug in ’95,” says Ed Viesturs, who, like Cotter, was guiding the peak for Hall that year. “He was fine during the ascent, but as soon as he started down he lost it mentally and physically; he turned into a zombie, like he’d used everything up.”
At 4:30 P.M., and again at 4:41, Hall got on the radio to say that he and Hansen were in trouble high on the summit ridge and urgently needed oxygen. Two full bottles were waiting for them at the South Summit; if Hall had known this he could have retrieved the gas fairly quickly and then climbed back up to give Hansen a fresh tank. But Andy Harris, still at the oxygen cache, in the throes of his hypoxic dementia, overheard these radio calls and broke in to tell Hall — incorrectly, just as he’d told Mike Groom and me — that all the bottles at the South Summit were empty.
Groom heard the conversation between Harris and Hall on his radio as he was descending the Southeast Ridge with Yasuko Namba, just above the Balcony. He tried to call Hall to correct the misinformation and let him know that there were in fact full oxygen canisters waiting for him at the South Summit, but, Groom explains, “my radio was malfunctioning. I was able to receive most calls, but my outgoing calls could rarely be heard by anyone. On the couple of occasions that my calls were being picked up by Rob, and I tried to tell him where the full cylinders were, I was immediately interrupted by Andy, transmitting to say there was no gas at the South Summit.”
Unsure whether there was oxygen waiting for him, Hall decided that the best course of action was to remain with Hansen and try to bring the nearly helpless client down without gas. But when they got to the top of the Hillary Step, Hall couldn’t get Hansen down the 40-foot vertical drop, and their progress ground to a halt. “I can get myself down,” Hall reported over the radio, gasping audibly for breath. “I just don’t know how the fuck I can get this man down the Hillary Step without any oxygen.”
Shortly before 5:00, Groom finally managed to get through to Hall and communicate that there actually was oxygen at the South Summit. Fifteen minutes later, Lopsang arrived at the South Summit on his way down from the top and encountered Harris. At this point, according to Lopsang, Harris must have finally understood that at least two of the oxygen canisters stashed there were full, because he pleaded with the Sherpa to help him carry the life-sustaining gas up to Hall and Hansen on the Hillary Step. “Andy says he will pay me five hundred dollars to bring oxygen to Rob and Doug,” Lopsang recalls. “But I am supposed to take care of just my group. I have to take care of Scott. So I say to Andy, no, I go fast down.”
At 5:30, as Lopsang left the South Summit to resume his descent, he turned to see Harris — who must have been severely debilitated, if his condition when I’d seen him on the South Summit two hours earlier was any indication — plodding slowly up the summit ridge to assist Hall and Hansen. It was an act of heroism that would cost Harris his life….
Guy Cotter, a longtime friend of both Hall’s and Harris’s, happened to be a few miles from Everest Base Camp on the afternoon of May 10, where he was guiding an expedition on Pumori, and had been monitoring Hall’s radio transmissions throughout the day. At 2:15 P.M. he talked to Hall on the summit, and everything sounded fine. At 4:30, however, Hall called down to say that Doug was out of oxygen and unable to move. “I need a bottle of gas!” Hall pleaded in a desperate, breathless voice to anyone on the mountain who might be listening. “Somebody, please! I’m begging you!”
Cotter grew very alarmed. At 4:53 he got on the radio and strongly urged Hall to descend to the South Summit. “The call was mostly to convince him to come down and get some gas,” says Cotter, “because we knew he wasn’t going to be able to do anything for Doug without it. Rob said he could get himself down O.K., but not with Doug.”
But forty minutes later, Hall was still with Hansen atop the Hillary Step, going nowhere. During radio calls from Hall at 5:36, and again at 5:57, Cotter implored his mate to leave Hansen and come down alone. “I know I sound like the bastard for telling Rob to abandon his client,” confessed Cotter, “but by then it was obvious that leaving Doug was his only choice.” Hall, however, wouldn’t consider going down without Hansen.
There was no further word from Hall until the middle of the night. At 2:46 A.M., Cotter woke up in his tent below Pumori to hear a long, broken transmission, probably unintended: Hall had been wearing a remote microphone clipped to the shoulder strap of his backpack, which was occasionally keyed on by mistake. In this instance, says Cotter, “I suspect Rob didn’t even know he was transmitting. I could hear someone yelling — it might have been Rob, but I couldn’t be sure because the wind was so loud in the background. But he was saying something like, ‘Keep moving! Keep going!’ presumably to Doug, urging him on.”
If this was indeed the case, it meant that in the wee hours of the morning Hall and Hansen — perhaps accompanied by Harris — were still struggling from the Hillary Step toward the South Summit through the gale. And if so, it also meant that it had taken them more than ten hours to move down a stretch of ridge that was typically covered by descending climbers in less than half an hour.
Of course, this is highly speculative. All that is certain is that Hall called down at 5:57 P.M. At that point, he and Hansen were still on the Step; and at 4:43 on the morning of May 11, when he next spoke to Base Camp, he had descended to the South Summit. And at that point neither Hansen nor Harris was with him.
In a series of transmissions over the next two hours, Rob sounded disturbingly confused and irrational. During the call at 4:43 A.M., he told Caroline Mackenzie, our Base Camp doctor, that his legs no longer worked, and that he was “too clumsy to move.” In a ragged, barely audible voice, Rob croaked, “Harold was with me last night, but he doesn’t seem to be with me now. He was very weak.” Then, obviously befuddled, he asked, “Was Harold with me? Can you tell me that?”
By this point Hall had possession of two full oxygen canisters, but the valves on his mask were so choked with ice that he couldn’t get the gas to flow. He indicated, however, that he was attempting to de-ice the oxygen rig, “which,” says Cotter, “made us all feel a little better. It was the first “positive thing we’d heard.”
At 5:00 A.M., Base Camp patched through a call on the satellite telephone to Jan Arnold, Hall’s wife, in Christchurch, New Zealand. She had climbed to the summit of Everest with Hall in 1993, and she entertained no illusions about the gravity of her husband’s predicament. “My heart really sank when I heard his voice,” she recalls. “He was slurring his words markedly. He sounded like Major Tom or something, like he was just floating away. I’d been up there; I knew what it could be like in bad weather. Rob and I had talked about the impossibility of being rescued from the summit ridge. As he himself had put it, ‘You might as well be on the moon.’”
At 5:31, Hall took four milligrams of oral dexamethasone and indicated he was still trying to clear his oxygen mask of ice. Talking to Base Camp, he asked repeatedly about the condition of Makalu Gau, Fischer, Beck Weathers, Yasuko Namba, and his other clients. He seemed most concerned about Andy Harris and kept inquiring about his whereabouts. Cotter says they tried to steer the discussion away from Harris, who in all likelihood was dead, “because we didn’t want Rob to have another reason for staying up there. At one point Ed Viesturs jumped on the radio from Camp Two and fibbed, ‘Don’t worry about Andy; he’s down here with us.’”
A little later, Mackenzie asked Rob how Hansen was doing. “Doug,” Hall replied, “is gone.” That was all he said, and it was the last mention he ever made of Hansen.
On May 23, when David Breashears and Ed Viesturs reached the summit, they would find no sign of Hansen’s body; they did, however, find an ice ax planted about fifty vertical feet above the South Summit, along a very exposed section of ridge where the fixed ropes came to an end. It’s quite possible that Hall and/or Harris managed to get Hansen down the ropes to this point, only to have him lose his footing and fall 7,000 feet down the sheer Southwest Face, leaving his ice ax jammed into the ridge where he slipped. But this, too, is merely conjecture.
What might have happened to Harris remains even harder to discern. Between Lopsang’s testimony, Hall’s radio calls, and the fact that another ice ax found on the South Summit was positively identified as Andy’s, we can be reasonably sure he was at the South Summit with Hall on the night of May 10. Beyond that, however, virtually nothing is known about how the young guide met his end.
At 6:00 A.M., Cotter asked Hall if the sun had reached him yet. “Almost,” Rob replied — which was good, because he’d mentioned a moment earlier that he was shaking uncontrollably in the awful cold. In conjunction with his earlier revelation that he was no longer able to walk, this had been very upsetting news to the people listening down below. Nevertheless, it was remarkable that Hall was even alive after spending a night without shelter or oxygen at 28,700 feet in hurricane-force winds and windchill of one hundred degrees below zero….
After struggling for four hours to de-ice his mask, Hall finally got it to work, and by 9:00 A.M. he was breathing supplemental oxygen for the first time; by then he’d spent more than sixteen hours above 28,700 feet without gas. Thousands of feet below, his friends stepped up their efforts to cajole him to start down. “Rob, this is Helen at Base Camp,” Wilton importuned, sounding as if she was on the brink of tears. “You think about that little baby of yours. You’re going to see its face in a couple of months, so keep on going.”
Several times Hall announced he was preparing to descend, and at one point we were sure he’d finally left the South Summit. At Camp Four, Lhakpa Chhiri and I shivered in the wind outside the tents, peering up at “at a tiny speck moving slowly down the upper Southeast Ridge. Convinced that it was Rob, coming down at last, Lhakpa and I slapped each other on the back and cheered him on. But an hour later my optimism was rudely extinguished when I noticed that the speck was still in the same place: it was actually nothing but a rock — just another altitude-induced hallucination. In truth, Rob had never even left the South Summit….
Around 9:30 A.M., Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri left Camp Four and started climbing toward the South Summit with a thermos of hot tea and two extra canisters of oxygen, intending to rescue Hall. They faced an exceedingly formidable task. As astounding and courageous as Boukreev’s rescue of Sandy Pittman and Charlotte Fox had been the night before, it paled in comparison to what the two Sherpas were proposing to do now: Pittman and Fox had been a twenty-minute walk from the tents over relatively flat ground; Hall was 3,000 vertical feet above Camp Four — an exhausting eight- or nine-hour climb in the best of circumstances.
And these were surely not the best of circumstances. The wind was blowing in excess of 40 knots. Both Ang Dorje and Lhakpa were cold and wasted from all the exhausting work they did just the day before. If they did somehow manage to reach Hall, moreover, it would be late afternoon before they got there, leaving only one or two hours of daylight in which to begin the even more difficult ordeal of bringing him down. Yet their loyalty to Hall was such that the two men ignored the overwhelming odds and set out toward the South Summit as fast as they could climb….
The day had started out sunny and clear, but the wind remained fierce, and by late morning the upper mountain was wrapped in thick clouds. Down at Camp Two the IMAX team reported that the wind over the summit sounded like a squadron of 747s, even from 7,000 feet below. Meanwhile, high on the Southeast Ridge, Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri pressed on resolutely through the intensifying storm toward Hall. At 3:00 P.M., however, still 700 feet below the South Summit, the wind and subzero cold proved to be too much for them, and the Sherpas could go no higher. It was a valiant effort, but it had failed — and as they turned around to descend, Hall’s chances for survival all but vanished.
Throughout the day on May 11, his friends and teammates incessantly begged him to make an effort to come down under his own power. Several times Hall announced that he was preparing to descend, only to change his mind and remain immobile at the South Summit. At 3:20 P.M., Guy Cotter — who by now had walked over from his own camp beneath Pumori to the Everest Base Camp — scolded over the radio, “Rob, get moving down the ridge.”
Sounding annoyed, Hall fired back, “Look, if I thought I could manage the knots on the fixed ropes with me frostbitten hands, I would have gone down six hours ago, pal. Just send a couple of the boys up with a big thermos of something hot — then I’ll be fine.”
“Thing is, mate, the lads who went up today encountered some high winds and had to turn around,” Cotter replied, trying to convey as delicately as possible that the rescue attempt had been abandoned, “so we think your best shot is to move lower.”
Pumori from Everest Camp 3. Photo copyright © Jon Krakauer
“I can last another night here if you send up a couple of boys with some Sherpa tea, first thing in the morning, no later than nine-thirty or ten,” Rob answered.
“You’re a tough man, Big Guy,” said Cotter, his voice quavering. “We’ll send some boys up to you in the morning.”
At 6:20 P.M., Cotter contacted Hall to tell him that Jan Arnold was on the satellite phone from Christchurch and was waiting to be patched through. “Give me a minute,” Rob said. “Me mouth’s dry. I want to eat a bit of snow before I talk to her.” A little later he came back on and rasped in a slow, horribly distorted voice, “Hi, my sweetheart. I hope you’re tucked up in a nice warm bed. How are you doing?”
“I can’t tell you how much I’m thinking about you!” Arnold replied. “You sound so much better than I expected.… Are you warm, my darling?”
“In the context of the altitude, the setting, I’m reasonably comfortable,” Hall answered, doing his best not to alarm her.
“How are your feet?”
“I haven’t taken me boots off to check, but I think I may have a bit of frostbite.… ”
“I’m looking forward to making you completely better when you come home,” said Arnold. “I just know you’re going to be rescued. Don’t feel that you’re alone. I’m sending all my positive energy your way!”
Before signing off, Hall told his wife, “I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.”
These would be the last words anyone would hear him speak. Attempts to make radio contact with Hall later that night and the next day went unanswered. Twelve days later, when Breashears and Viesturs climbed over the South Summit on their way to the top, they found Hall lying on his right side in a shallow ice hollow, his upper body buried beneath a drift of snow….
When I wobbled back to Camp Four around 7:30 Saturday morning, May 11, the actuality of what had happened — of what was still happening — began to sink in with paralyzing force. I was physically and emotionally wrecked after having just spent an hour scouring the South Col for Andy Harris; the search had left me convinced that he was dead. Radio calls my teammate Stuart Hutchison had been monitoring from Rob Hall on the South Summit made clear that our leader was in desperate straits and that Doug Hansen was dead. Members of Scott Fischer’s team who’d spent most of the night lost on the Col reported that Yasuko Namba and Beck Weathers were dead. And Scott Fischer and Makalu Gau were believed to be dead or very near death, 1,200 feet above the tents.
Confronted with this tally, my mind balked and retreated into a weird, almost robotic state of detachment. I felt emotionally anesthetized yet hyperaware, as if I had fled into a bunker deep inside my skull and was peering out at the wreckage around me through a narrow, armored slit. As I gazed numbly at the sky, it seemed to have turned a preternaturally pale shade of blue, bleached of all but the faintest remnant of color. The jagged horizon was limned with a coronalike glow that flickered and pulsed before my eyes. I wondered if I had begun the downward spiral into the nightmarish territory of the mad….
Throughout April and early May, Rob Hall had expressed his concern that one or more of the less competent teams might blunder into a bad jam, compelling our group to rescue them, thereby ruining our summit bid. Now, ironically, it was Hall’s expedition that was in grave trouble, and other teams were in the position of having to come to our aid. Without rancor, three such groups — Todd Burleson’s Alpine Ascents International expedition, David Breashears’ IMAX expedition, and Mal Duff’s commercial expedition — immediately postponed their own summit plans in order to assist the stricken climbers….
The gale that struck on Saturday evening [May 11] was even more powerful than the one that had lashed the Col the night before. By the time Boukreev made it back down to Camp Four the visibility was down to a few yards, and he almost failed to find the tents.
Breathing bottled oxygen (thanks to the IMAX team)…., I fell into a tortured, fitful sleep despite the racket produced by the furiously flapping tent. Shortly after midnight, I was in the midst of a nightmare about Andy — he was falling down the Lhotse Face trailing a rope, demanding to know why I hadn’t held on to the other end — when Hutchison shook me awake. “Jon,” he shouted above the roar of the storm, “I’m concerned about the tent. Do you think it’s going to be O.K.?”
As I struggled groggily up from the depths of my troubled reverie like a drowning man rising to the ocean’s surface, it took me a minute to notice why Stuart was so worried: the wind had flattened half our shelter, which rocked violently with each successive gust. Several of the poles were badly bent, and my headlamp revealed that two of the main seams were in imminent danger of being ripped asunder. Flurries of fine snow particles filled the air inside the tent, blanketing everything with frost. The wind was blowing harder than anything I’d ever experienced anywhere, even on the Patagonian Ice Cap, a place reputed to be the windiest on the planet. If the tent disintegrated before morning, we would be in grave trouble.
Stuart and I gathered up our boots and all our clothing and then positioned ourselves on the windward side of the shelter. Bracing our backs and shoulders against the damaged poles, for the next three hours we leaned into the hurricane, despite our surpassing fatigue, holding up the battered nylon dome as if our lives depended on it. I kept imagining Rob up on the South Summit at 28,700 feet, his oxygen gone, exposed to the full savagery of this storm with no shelter whatsoever — but it was so disturbing that I tried not to think about it.
Just before dawn on Sunday, May 12, Stuart’s oxygen ran out. “Without it I could feel myself becoming really cold and hypothermic,” he says. “I began to lose feeling in my hands and feet. I worried that I was slipping over the edge, that I might not be able to get down from the Col. And I worried that if I didn’t get down that morning, I might never get down.” Giving Stuart my oxygen bottle, I rooted around until I found another one with some gas left in it, and then we both began packing for the descent.
When I ventured outside, I saw that at least one of the unoccupied tents had blown completely off the Col. Then I noticed Ang Dorje, standing alone in the appalling wind, sobbing inconsolably over the loss of Rob. After the expedition, when I told his Canadian friend Marion Boyd about his grief, she explained that “Ang Dorje sees his role on this earth as keeping people safe — he and I have talked about it a lot. It’s all-important for him in terms of his religion, and preparing for the next go-around in life. Even though Rob was the expedition leader, Ang Dorje would see it as his responsibility to ensure the safety of Rob and Doug Hansen and the others. So when they died, he couldn’t help but blame himself.”
Worried that Ang Dorje was so distraught that he might refuse to go down, Hutchison beseeched him to descend from the Col immediately. Then, at 8:30 A.M. — believing that by now Rob, Andy, Doug, Scott, Yasuko, and Beck were all surely dead — a badly frostbitten Mike Groom forced himself out of his tent, gamely assembled Hutchison, Taske, Fischbeck, and Kasischke, and started leading them down the mountain.
In the absence of any other guides, I volunteered to fill that role and bring up the rear. As our despondent group filed slowly away from Camp Four toward the Geneva Spur, I braced myself to make one last visit to Beck, whom I assumed had died in the night. I located his tent, which had been blasted flat by the hurricane, and saw that both doors were wide open. When I peered inside, however, I was shocked to discover that Beck was still alive.
He was lying on his back across the floor of the collapsed shelter, shivering convulsively. His face was hideously swollen; splotches of deep, ink-black frostbite covered his nose and cheeks. The storm had blown both sleeping bags from his body, leaving him exposed to the subzero wind, and with his frozen hands he’d been powerless to pull the bags back over himself or zip the tent closed. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he wailed when he saw me, his features twisted into a rictus of agony and desperation. “What’s a guy have to do to get a little help around here!” He’d been screaming for help for two or three hours, but the storm had smothered his cries.
Beck had awakened in the middle of the night to find that “the storm had collapsed the tent and was blowing it apart. The wind was pressing the tent wall so hard against my face that I couldn’t breathe. It would let up for a second, then come slamming back down into my face and chest, knocking the wind out of me. On top of everything else, my right arm was swelling up, and I had this stupid wristwatch on, so as my arm got bigger and bigger, the watch got tighter and tighter until it was cutting off most of the blood supply to my hand. But with my hands messed up so badly, there was no way I could get the damn thing off. I yelled for help, but nobody came. It was one hell of a long night. Man, I was glad to see your face when you stuck your head inside the door.”
Upon first finding Beck in the tent, I was so shocked by his hideous condition — and by the unforgivable way that we’d let him down yet again — I nearly broke into tears. “Everything’s going to be O.K.,” I lied, choking back my sobs as I pulled the sleeping bags over him, zipped the tent doors shut, and tried to re-erect the damaged shelter. “Don’t worry, pal. Everything’s under control now.”
As soon as I made Beck as comfortable as possible, I got on the radio to Dr. Mackenzie at Base Camp. “Caroline!” I begged in a hysterical voice. “What should I do about Beck? He’s still alive, but I don’t think he can survive much longer. He’s in really bad shape!”
“Try to remain calm, Jon,” she replied. “You need to go down with Mike and the rest of the group. Where are Pete and Todd? Ask them to look after Beck, then start down.” Frantic, I roused Athans and Burleson, who immediately rushed over to Beck’s tent with a canteen of hot tea. As I hurried out of camp to rejoin my teammates, Athans was getting ready to inject four milligrams of dexamethasone into the dying Texan’s thigh. These were praiseworthy gestures, but it was hard to imagine that they would do him much good….
Of the six climbers on Hall’s expedition who reached the summit, only Mike Groom and I made it back down: four teammates with whom I’d laughed and vomited and held long, intimate conversations lost their lives. My actions — or failure to act — played a direct role in the death of Andy Harris. And while Yasuko Namba lay dying on the South Col, I was a mere 350 yards away, huddled inside a tent, oblivious to her struggle, concerned only with my own safety. The stain this has left on my psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a few months of grief and guilt-ridden self-reproach….
With so many marginally qualified climbers flocking to Everest these days, a lot of people believe that a tragedy of this magnitude was overdue. But nobody imagined that an expedition led by Rob Hall would be at the center of it. Hall ran the tightest, safest operation on the mountain, bar none. A compulsively methodical man, he had elaborate systems in place that were supposed to prevent such a catastrophe. So what happened? How can it be explained, not only to the loved ones left behind, but to a censorious public?
Hubris probably had something to do with it. Hall had become so adept at running climbers of all abilities up and down Everest that he got a little cocky, perhaps. He’d bragged on more than one occasion that he could get almost any reasonably fit person to the summit, and his record seemed to support this. He’d also demonstrated a remarkable ability to prevail over adversity.
In 1995, for instance, Hall and his guides not only had to cope with Hansen’s problems high on the peak, but they also had to deal with the complete collapse of another client named Chantal Mauduit, a celebrated French alpinist who was making her seventh stab at Everest without oxygen. Mauduit passed out stone cold at 28,700 feet and had to be dragged and carried all the way down from the South Summit to the South Col “like a sack of spuds,” as Guy Cotter put it. After everybody came out of that summit attempt alive, Hall may well have thought there was little he couldn’t handle.
Before this year, however, Hall had uncommonly good luck with the weather, and it might have skewed his judgment. “Season after season,” confirmed David Breashears, who has been on more than a dozen Himalayan expeditions and has himself climbed Everest three times, “Rob had brilliant weather on summit day. He’d never been caught by a storm high on the mountain.” In fact, the gale of May 10, though violent, was nothing extraordinary; it was a fairly typical Everest squall. If it had hit two hours later, it’s likely that nobody would have died. Conversely, if it had arrived even one hour earlier, the storm could easily have killed eighteen or twenty climbers — me among them.
Certainly time had as much to do with the tragedy as the weather, and ignoring the clock can’t be passed off as an act of God. Delays at the fixed lines were foreseeable and eminently preventable. Predetermined turn-around times were egregiously ignored.
Extending the turn-around times may have been influenced to some degree by the rivalry between Fischer and Hall. Fischer had never guided Everest before 1996. From a business standpoint, there was tremendous pressure on him to be successful. He was exceedingly motivated to get clients to the summit, especially a celebrity client like Sandy Hill Pittman.
Likewise, since he had failed to get anybody to the top in 1995, it would have been bad for Hall’s business if he failed again in 1996 — especially if Fischer succeeded. Scott had a charismatic personality, and that charisma had been aggressively marketed by Jane Bromet. Fischer was trying very hard to eat Hall’s lunch, and Rob knew it. Under the circumstances, the prospect of turning his clients around while his rival’s clients were pushing toward the summit may have been sufficiently distasteful to cloud Hall’s judgment.
