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By 8:30 p.m., the blizzard had smothered the mountain, bringing paralyzing cold, 70-m.p.h. winds and needles of snow and sleet. At base camp, Paula Viesturs and others huddled together in the empty tents that Hall's expedition had left behind, calling into the radios to the imperiled climbers. At Camp 2, Breashears and Ed Viesturs did the same. No one got any response more than electrical-storm static. For eight hours the blizzard played out, with no word at all from the peak. Finally, at 4:45 a.m., as the storm began to quiet, there was a crackle in the base-camp radio. "Is someone coming to get me?" Hall's voice called weakly from above.
According to Krakauer's account, Caroline Mackenzie, a camp doctor, seized the radio and asked how he was feeling. "I'm too clumsy to move," he said. "How is Doug?" Mackenzie asked. "Doug is gone," Hall responded simply.
Soon other grim reports began to trickle in. Harris was presumed dead; so was Fischer. Yasuko Namba, a Japanese climber, had apparently died in the snow outside Camp 4. Near her was Weathers; he was probably dead too. Even climbers who had managed to struggle back into Camp 4 were in grave danger. "The wind was howling, the tents had collapsed," says Breashears. "It was chaos up there."
For the filmmakers, encamped far down the face of the mountain, there was no way to reach the climbers in time. But there were other ways to help. Days earlier, Sherpas had climbed to Camp 4 and stocked a tent with batteries and oxygen canisters in preparation for the film crew's summit push. With so many climbers swarming about and theft not unheard of on the overpopulated Everest, the Sherpas had locked the tent flap shut. Now Breashears called Krakauer at Camp 4 and instructed him to rip open the tent, load the batteries into the radios, distribute the oxygen and get as many people as possible breathing and moving.
While Krakauer went to work, Breashears, Viesturs and Schauer set out for Camp 3, hoping to turn it into a field kitchen serving tea and soup to climbers who would soon be staggering down from Camp 4. Around noon, as they headed out, they got some good news about three other climbers they had all but given up on: Fischer and Makalu Gao Ming-Ho, the Taiwanese team leader, had been spotted above Camp 4, and a team of Sherpas was planning to hike up and rescue them. Another team was set to climb higher still in hopes of saving Hall. "I'll see you tomorrow," Viesturs happily radioed Hall as he trudged out of Camp 2.
Two hours later, much of that hope was dashed. The first team rescued Makalu Gao but found Fischer dead. The second Sherpa team climbed within 800 ft. of Hall but was beaten back by the weather. In a gesture both hopeful and hopeless, they left a ski-pole marker and a clutch of oxygen tanks at the highest point they reached--a lifesaving cache that turned out to be utterly beyond Hall's grasp. Reluctantly, someone in Camp 2 radioed the news to Hall, adding a hollow promise that another rescue attempt would be made sometime tomorrow. "I'll hang in there," Hall said grimly, but he knew Everest, and he knew what a second night on top of the peak would do to him. Nobody--least of all Hall --harbored any illusions that he'd be alive in the morning.