Seaborn Beck Weathers thought his chances of success were good. Mount Everest is a tough climb, to be sure, but not the monster it once was. Weathers, 50, a wealthy pathologist from Dallas, is not a professional mountaineer. But he was in the best shape of his life. He had clothing designed to protect him to 80 degrees below zero. And he had paid $60,000 to Rob Hall--a renowned New Zealand climber and guide who had seen 39 people like Weathers to the top of the world in the past four years. "Rob felt we all had a very good chance of reaching the summit," Weathers would say later. "We had prepared correctly and were climbing at the right time. We knew what we were doing. What occurred later was really a total surprise."
Three days after Hall's optimistic assessment, Weathers, face burned black and arms nearly useless, would be one of the surprise survivors of one of the worst alpine disasters in recent memory. On the night of May 10 a storm swept the summit's fearsome "Death Zone" with snow, bitter cold and hurricane-force winds. Within 24 hours, eight of the more than 30 climbers on the peak were dead, among them Hall and Scott Fischer of Seattle, who was also running a commercial tour.
By May 1996 Everest had become the accessible behemoth, or so it seemed. Never as murderously tricky to climb as K-2, the world's second-highest peak, its challenge lay in the brute facts of its extreme altitude, occasional storms and inaccessibility. As clothing and equipment manufacturers mitigated the first problem, and a sprawling base camp sprang up at 5,340 meters to provide warmth and food to dozens of would-be peak beaters, the issue for elite climbers was no longer whether they could reach Everest's pinnacle but rather how many paying customers they could take with them. It was not exactly a risk-free ticket to Disneyland, but for less than $100,000 a wealthy and dedicated amateur could buy a decent chance at summiting: money could buy altitude.
Communications breakthroughs increased the impression that Everest was accessible to nearly anyone. Climbers call home from the summit using satellite phones. They send E-mail. Over the past two months, socialite-alpinist Sandy Hill Pittman has been describing her ascent with Fischer's group on the Internet and throwing in remarks about books and recipes. One of her cyber correspondents inquired as to whether there were "any permanent markers at the summit. Flags, or plaques, or anything like that? A gift shop, perhaps?" Pittman didn't tell her new friend that the most enduring mementos on Everest's higher reaches are the bodies of dead climbers.
Weathers realizes that now. So do a lot of other people. Says Jeff Blumenfeld, editor and publisher of Expedition News: "You can be hooked up to a Website, you can call anyone on a sat phone, you can have the latest high-tech gear, and the mountain can still win."