Everest's 1996 storm had been forecast before the summit push began
On 10 and 11 May 1996, eight climbers died descending Everest in a blizzard. Years later one mountaineer reported that forecasts of a major storm, building after 8 May and peaking on 11 May, had reached expedition leaders Rob Hall and Scott Fischer before they set out for the summit.
Twelve people died on Everest that season, then the deadliest on record; only the avalanches of 2014 and 2015 later exceeded it. On the South Col route, four members of Hall's Adventure Consultants team died, Hall among them, and Fischer was the only death on his Mountain Madness expedition. On the Tibetan side, the North Face claimed three Indian border police officers. The South Col story drew most of the attention.
The two expeditions were commercial ventures, each 19 people strong with eight paying clients. On Hall's team only Yasuko Namba had previously topped an 8,000-metre peak; she became the oldest woman yet to stand on the summit, then did not survive the descent. Hall leaned on his long guiding record to offset his clients' inexperience. He had also agreed to take Outside magazine's reporter Jon Krakauer at below cost in exchange for advertising space, having won him away from Fischer's team.
Graham Ratcliffe, who reached the South Col on 10 May, argued in his 2011 book A Day to Die For that the forecasts were delivered in advance. Climbers reached the top during what seemed a lull, then the storm returned in full as they came down late in the day. The event raised hard questions about selling Everest to paying customers and set off a long argument over blame.
That argument played out in print. Krakauer's Into Thin Air, published in 1997, became a bestseller. Anatoli Boukreev, a guide with Fischer, felt the book maligned him and co-wrote a rebuttal, The Climb. Beck Weathers, Lene Gammelgaard and Lou Kasischke later published their own accounts. A separate study of climbers since 2005 found their odds of reaching the top had nearly doubled compared with the 1990 to 2005 cohort, while their risk of dying dipped a little, and it linked the change partly to better weather forecasting and fixed ropes.
Source: 1996 Mount Everest disaster
