Everest 1996 - setting the scene

The 1996 Everest tragedy is a big subject and provides a fascinating insight into the world of high altitude mountaineering.

Each week for the next seven weeks I’ll be posting a book review by an author who was on the mountain that year and who observed or participated in the unfolding events.

Finally, in week eight of this mini-series and to mark the 11th anniversary of the tragedy on the 10th May, I’ll bring everything together and give you my final book recommendations.

Firstly I should set the scene for you … or better still let one of our authors, Matt Dickinson, do it for me:

“The timing was uncanny, as bad as it was possible to be. If the storm had struck in winter then no one would have been hurt. But as chance would have it, the tempest arrived on the busiest day of the Everest calendar”

Above 8000 metres “in the ‘Death Zone’ more than thirty climbers were fighting for their lives … The night that faced them was a night from hell. By the end of the following day, the three Indian climbers on the north side and five of the climbers on the south, were dead”

“The storm left a mountain of questions in its wake. How could world-class mountaineers like Rob Hall and Scott Fischer lose their lives on a mountain they knew so intimately? Why were so many inexperienced climbers high on the mountain when the storm hit? Why did a team of Japanese climbers and their Sherpas pass the dying Indian climbers and yet fail to try and rescue them?”

We’ll return to Matt’s book later in the series, but its more logical to start on the south side of the mountain with the first book published, Climbing High by Lene Gammelgaard and so that is where we will begin….