TLDR: In May 1996, eight climbers died on Mount Everest during a storm.
Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book “Into Thin Air” blamed guide Anatoli Boukreev for abandoning clients. Boukreev’s book “The Climb” blamed Krakauer for incompetence. Boukreev died in an avalanche in 1997 before the debate could be settled.
Meanwhile, the Sherpas who actually saved lives got erased from the story, and the commercial guiding industry that created the disaster learned absolutely nothing.
Thirty years later, we’re still arguing about what happened.
On May 10, 1996, thirty-three climbers were attempting to summit Mount Everest from the South Col.
By the morning of May 12, eight of them were dead.
What happened in those 48 hours has been the subject of books, documentaries, a major Hollywood film, and three decades of bitter argument among the people who survived.
The problem is simple: everyone tells a different story, and the people who could have settled the argument are dead.
The Narrative War: Krakauer vs. Boukreev
Jon Krakauer was on the mountain on assignment for Outside magazine. He survived. His book “Into Thin Air” became an international bestseller and defined how the world understood the 1996 disaster.
In Krakauer’s version, guide Anatoli Boukreev made reckless decisions that endangered his clients. Boukreev climbed without supplemental oxygen, which Krakauer argued diminished his mental acuity.
Boukreev descended to camp ahead of his clients instead of staying with them. When the storm hit, Boukreev was in his tent resting while clients were dying on the mountain.
Boukreev saw it differently.
In his book “The Climb,” published as a direct rebuttal to Krakauer, Boukreev argued that climbing without oxygen kept him strong enough to perform rescues. Descending early allowed him to rest and prepare hot tea and oxygen bottles. When the storm hit, he went back out into the blizzard three separate times and saved three lives. Meanwhile, Krakauer was incapacitated by exhaustion in his own tent, helping no one.
The climbing community split over this feud. Some sided with Krakauer, the experienced journalist whose detailed account seemed authoritative. Others sided with Boukreev, the Kazakh mountaineer who had successfully summited Everest multiple times and whose rescue efforts were undeniable.
In December 1997, Boukreev died in an avalanche on Annapurna. He was 39 years old. His death permanently ended his ability to defend his version of events.
Krakauer’s account became the official story by default.
The Commercial Pressure That Killed People
By 1996, climbing Everest wasn’t about exploration anymore. It was about business.
Two commercial guiding companies were competing for clients: Adventure Consultants, led by Rob Hall, and Mountain Madness, led by Scott Fischer. Both charged approximately $65,000 per person to guide clients to the summit.
Rob Hall had successfully guided 39 clients to the summit in 1994. But in 1995, none of his clients made it. He was under enormous pressure to deliver results in 1996 or risk losing his business to competitors like Fischer.
Both companies had high-profile media clients on the mountain. Krakauer was there for Outside magazine to write about Hall’s expedition. Sandy Hill Pittman was there with Fischer’s team, bringing media attention and sponsorship dollars.
The mountain had become a stage for a marketing war. If one team summited and the other didn’t, the loser faced potential business ruin.
This competitive pressure directly influenced the fatal decision to ignore the 2:00 PM turnaround time.
The turnaround time was a safety protocol. If you haven’t summited by 2:00 PM, you turn around no matter how close you are. This ensures you get down before dark and before your oxygen runs out.
On May 10, 1996, multiple climbers summited after 2:00 PM. Some as late as 4:00 PM.
Doug Hansen, a postal worker who had spent his life savings on a second attempt, reached the summit at 4:00 PM with Rob Hall. Hall had offered Hansen a discount to return after his failed 1995 attempt. The emotional and financial bond between them made it nearly impossible for Hall to enforce the turnaround time.
Hall and Hansen both died on the descent.
The Sherpas Who Saved Lives and Got No Credit
While Western accounts focus on the drama between guides and clients, the people who actually did most of the rescuing were Sherpas.
Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa was Scott Fischer’s sirdar. At 23 years old, he had already summited Everest four times without supplemental oxygen. He was probably the most capable climber on the mountain that day.
Krakauer criticized Lopsang for “short-roping” Sandy Hill Pittman for hours, arguing this wasted energy that should have been used to fix ropes. But Sherpa perspectives suggest Lopsang was acting on loyalty to Fischer, who wanted his highest-profile client to summit for marketing purposes.
When Scott Fischer collapsed during the descent, Lopsang physically tried to drag him down the mountain. Fischer eventually ordered Lopsang to save himself. Lopsang’s heroism gets overshadowed in Western narratives that focus on Rob Hall’s final radio calls to his pregnant wife.
Ang Dorje, the sirdar for Adventure Consultants, was described as sobbing inconsolably after Hall and Hansen died. From a Sherpa cultural perspective, the sirdar’s role is to ensure the group’s safety. Ang Dorje felt he had failed, despite the fact that the deaths resulted from clients and leaders ignoring safety protocols.
The systematic erasure of Sherpa voices from the 1996 narrative is an institutional failure of mountaineering literature, which remains fundamentally framed through a Western colonial lens.
The People Who Were Left to Die
On the morning of May 11, rescuers found Beck Weathers and Yasuko Namba collapsed near Camp IV, encased in ice.
Both appeared to be in hypothermic comas. Stuart Hutchison, a client on Hall’s team, and several Sherpas assessed their condition and made a brutal calculation: they were beyond help. Attempting to rescue them would risk the lives of the rescuers and waste resources that could save people who were still responsive.
They left them to die.
Hours later, Beck Weathers woke up. He stood up, walked into camp, and survived. He lost both hands, his nose, and parts of his face to frostbite, but he lived.
Yasuko Namba died where she lay.
Weathers’s survival raises an uncomfortable question: if he could survive being left for dead twice, could Yasuko Namba have been saved if more effort had been made?
The 2015 film simplifies this into a story about Weathers’s willpower. What it actually reveals is how medical assessment under extreme duress can fail catastrophically.
The Bottleneck That Killed People
Every death in 1996 can be traced to specific decisions and systemic failures.
The most critical failure was at the Hillary Step, a technical rock face near the summit. The plan was for lead Sherpas to depart at midnight to fix ropes ahead of the climbers. This didn’t happen, creating a bottleneck of 33 climbers waiting to ascend.
The delay consumed nearly two hours of daylight and oxygen at an altitude where every minute matters.
Another systemic failure was radio communication. In 1996, only guides and sirdars carried radios. Clients were essentially climbing blind. When the storm hit and visibility dropped to zero, separated clients had no way to call for help.
This technological bottleneck directly contributed to the disorientation that led to Namba’s death and Weathers’s abandonment.
Krakauer’s Admission (2025)
Even 29 years after the disaster, the story continues to evolve.
In 2025, digital investigators forced Krakauer to admit to specific factual errors in “Into Thin Air.” In Medium posts, Krakauer acknowledged making a “reckless and irresponsible” decision to continue to the summit before retrieving a necessary oxygen bottle.
These admissions matter because they reveal that even the most “official” account contains errors and misremembered timelines that fundamentally alter perceptions of who’s responsible for what.
If Krakauer got details wrong in his own decisions, how reliable is his account of other people’s decisions?
The Industry That Changed Nothing
If the 1996 disaster was supposed to be a wake-up call for the commercial guiding industry, the industry stayed asleep.
The bottlenecks that caused deaths in 1996 have only gotten worse. In 2019, eleven people died on Everest due to massive traffic jams at the Hillary Step. Photos from that season show hundreds of climbers standing in line waiting their turn to summit.
Despite the 1996 tragedy, the Nepalese government has continued to increase the number of permits to maximize revenue. More permits mean more climbers, which means more bottlenecks, which means more deaths.
The 1996 disaster didn’t break the commercial business model. It proved the model works. For $65,000, death is an acceptable risk for the client and a manageable cost for the industry.
Why We Still Don’t Know the Truth
Thirty years later, we have multiple incompatible versions of what happened on May 10-11, 1996.
Krakauer’s version blames Boukreev for abandoning clients.
Boukreev’s version blames Krakauer for incompetence and delays.
Beck Weathers’s version emphasizes survival against impossible odds.
Sherpa accounts, when they’re included at all, emphasize the heroism of high-altitude workers who risked their lives for clients.
The 2015 film chose one narrative and presented it as truth, largely sidestepping the Krakauer-Boukreev feud entirely.
The reason we can’t settle this is simple: the people with the most important perspectives are dead. Rob Hall died on the South Summit. Scott Fischer died on the Southeast Ridge. Anatoli Boukreev died on Annapurna. Doug Hansen died with Hall. Yasuko Namba died on the South Col.
The survivors who are left have reputations to protect, books to sell, and reasons to present their version of events in the most favorable light possible.
Meanwhile, the Sherpas who did most of the actual saving get marginalized in narratives written by and for Western audiences.
What the Story Is Really About
The 1996 Everest disaster isn’t a story about nature’s power or human courage in the face of the elements.
It’s a story about commercial pressure overriding safety. It’s about ego and competition killing people. It’s about an industry that commodified extreme risk and then proved the business model works even when people die.
It’s a story where we still don’t know the truth because everyone who survived has reasons to lie or omit or emphasize certain details over others.
It’s a story where the people who actually saved lives, the Sherpas, get systematically erased from Western narratives.
And it’s a story where nothing changed. Thirty years later, the industry is still selling summit attempts to unqualified clients. The bottlenecks are worse. The death toll continues.
The 1996 disaster didn’t teach the industry to change. It taught them that people will keep paying $65,000 to risk their lives, and that’s good enough for business.
