(2 of 3)
Most Everest expeditions take place in early May, when the weather is best. Friday before last was temperate and clear, a day to rival the one in 1993 on which 40 people reached the top. Now 11 groups were swarming up the mountain's top 900 meters like ants on a piece of cake. Fischer's and Hall's parties set out at around midnight and eventually merged, pushing together through waist-high snow up Everest's last 75 meters. Despite delays due to the number of people crowding through narrow passes, the mood was good. The daughter of Washington State postal worker Douglass Hansen had earlier faxed in her support: "Come on, Dad, do it." By 2:30 p.m., he and more than 20 others had reached the peak.
But as Jonathan Krakauer, a journalist covering the climb for Outside magazine, stood at the top of the world, he noticed something ominous: clouds were approaching from the valley below. Within two hours they had arrived and metastasized into a monster: shrieking winds blew sheets of snow horizontally at 65 knots. A "whiteout" dropped visibility to zero, and wind chill plunged to -140[degrees] F. "It was chaos up there," says Krakauer. "The storm was like a hurricane, only it had a triple-digit wind chill. You don't have your oxygen on, you're out of breath, you can't think." In one horrifying vignette after another, the mountain began picking off its conquerors.
The first to die may have been Yasuko Nambo, 49, one of Hall's clients from Japan; her frozen body was discovered the next morning, 365 meters above the South Col, the valley between Everest and its neighbor Lhotse. Another guide, Andrew Harris, came within yards of the camp before apparently walking right off the 8,500-meter Lhotse face. Fischer, a vastly experienced climber known as "Mr. Rescue," lagged behind his clients, perhaps to help stragglers. Searchers found him two days later high above the South Col. In the same area they found Taiwanese climber Makalu Gau, half buried in the snow and mumbling. Gau could be awakened, but Fischer was comatose; and so, by the stark rules of mountain triage, the overtaxed rescuers saved whom they could.
Leader Hall, meanwhile, had stayed on the ridge to tend Hansen, who had expended all his energy on the summit. Exposed and out of oxygen, Hansen died during the night. Hall hung on: at 4:35 the next morning, his startled friends in camp heard his voice on the two-way radio. Rescuers tried twice but failed to reach him: his only hope was to make his own way to the South Col. "We tried to get him to move," mountaineer Ed Viesturs told Outside Online. "And we thought he was moving down the ridge. But after three hours, he mentioned, almost casually, 'You know, I haven't even packed up yet.'" Instead, Hall asked to be patched through to his wife, Dr. Jan Arnold, back in New Zealand and seven months pregnant with their first child. They talked for several hours. Arnold had reached the summit with her husband in 1993; now "she was right there with him, basically," says a friend. At a press conference later, she reported that his final words had been, "Hey, look, don't worry about me." Then he turned off his radio.