Thirty years later, the deadliest chapter in Everest’s early commercial era still has lessons the mountain hasn’t stopped teaching.
On July 3, 2026, news broke that Nirmal Purja — “Nims Dai,” one of the most celebrated names in modern mountaineering — had died in an avalanche while descending Pakistan’s Broad Peak. It reignited a conversation the climbing world has had, in one form or another, for decades: how does someone so skilled, so experienced, still lose their life on a mountain?
There are no confirmed answers yet on Broad Peak. But the questions it raises echo almost exactly what happened on Everest exactly 30 years earlier — a tragedy that remains one of the most studied, debated, and misunderstood disasters in mountaineering history.
In just two days in May 1996, eight climbers died on Everest. Five of them in a single night. It became known as the 1996 Everest Disaster, and it changed how the world’s highest mountain is climbed, guided, and regulated — permanently.
This is the story of how it happened.
From Sacred Summit to Business Opportunity
Everest — Sagarmatha to Nepalis, Chomolungma to Tibetans — sits on the border between Nepal and Tibet. For decades after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa first reached its summit in 1953, climbing it was considered the domain of elite, highly trained mountaineers only.
That perception cracked in 1985, when American businessman Dick Bass, then 55 years old and without serious mountaineering credentials, reached the top with the help of a strong guiding team and a large budget. His success sent a message to the world: money and good guides could get almost anyone to the roof of the world.
By the early 1990s, that idea had become an industry. New Zealander Rob Hall, who summited Everest in 1990 after a decade of trying, co-founded Adventure Consultants with his climbing partner Gary Ball. Between 1990 and 1995, Hall’s company guided 39 paying clients to the summit — more people than had reached the top in the entire two decades following Hillary and Norgay’s first ascent. By 1996, a spot on his team cost $50,000, worth tens of millions of Nepali rupees today.
He wasn’t alone. In Seattle, Scott Fischer had been running his own outfit, Mountain Madness, since 1984, and had summited Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1994. Between them, Hall and Fischer represented the new face of Everest: a mountain that had quietly become a business.
Two Teams, One Mountain, One Season
In late March 1996, Hall’s team left Kathmandu for Lukla by helicopter, eight clients in tow — among them lawyers, cardiologists, a pathologist, and journalist Jon Krakauer, on assignment for Outside magazine. Krakauer’s account of what followed, Into Thin Air, remains the defining record of the disaster and one of the main sources for this story. Guiding the group were Hall himself, New Zealander Andy Harris, Australian Mike Groom, and four Sherpa climbers — men who had grown up with the training and instinct the Himalayas demand, yet who, within these Western-run expeditions, were largely confined to supporting roles.
Fischer’s Mountain Madness team, also eight clients strong, included New York socialite Sandy Hill Pittman, chasing her goal of the Seven Summits, and 68-year-old Pete Schoening, a living legend in the climbing world for a 1953 rescue on K2 remembered simply as “The Belay.”
Both teams spent weeks at Base Camp acclimatizing — climbing to higher camps and returning, over and over, to let their bodies adjust. It wasn’t smooth. One of Fischer’s Sherpas, Ngawang Topche, had to be evacuated with suspected High Altitude Pulmonary Edema. Another climber, Dale Cruz, developed High Altitude Cerebral Edema — brain swelling brought on by altitude. Early warnings, in hindsight, of how thin the margin for error really was.
By May, four expeditions — Hall’s, Fischer’s, a Taiwanese team, and a South African team — were preparing for a coordinated summit push. Thirty-three climbers in total.
The 1996 Everest Disaster Begins: A Death Before the Storm
On the morning of May 9, at Camp Four, Taiwanese climber Chen Yu-Nan stepped outside his tent without his crampons — the metal spikes that grip ice and snow — and slipped, falling 70 feet down the Lhotse Face into a crevasse. Sherpas pulled him out quickly and he seemed stable. Hours later, his condition collapsed. He died shortly after, the first death of that year’s season.
It cast a shadow over camp, but the climbers pressed on. That night, the summit push began.
The Bottleneck That Cost Them Everything
Near the top of Everest, climbers must cross a narrow, exposed section known as the Summit Ridge, protected only by a fixed rope anchored along the route. On May 9, that rope wasn’t finished in time. Dozens of climbers who had left camp at night found themselves stuck in a growing queue as the sun rose — precious hours burning away.
Both Hall and Fischer had set a turnaround time for their clients — 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. — a hard rule meant to force descent regardless of how close the summit looked, because time spent in the “death zone” above 8,000 meters is time spent dying. By 11:30 a.m., three of Hall’s clients had already given up and turned back, unwilling to risk what the delay was setting up.
The rope finally got fixed, but the backlog remained. Climbers queued past the Balcony, past the South Summit, past the Hillary Step — the last real obstacle before the top — moving at a crawl.
Jon Krakauer reached the summit around 1:12 p.m. But confusion over whether the cutoff was 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. meant many climbers kept climbing well past both. As he later wrote, the summit looked so close that people simply stopped weighing the risk.
Then the sky changed. Clouds that had been nowhere in sight an hour earlier began swallowing the peaks of Pumori and Ama Dablam to the south.
Doug Hansen’s Unfinished Business
Rob Hall still hadn’t summited. He was waiting on his client, Doug Hansen — a man he’d turned back just short of the top the year before, in 1995, when the turnaround time had already passed. Hansen had told Hall at Camp Two that this time, he needed to “get this thing done” — no matter what.
So when Hansen finally appeared on the summit ridge around 4:00 p.m., exhausted and slow, Hall went down to meet him, put Hansen’s arm over his shoulder, and physically pulled him the final stretch to the top. They stood on the summit together — but hours past any safe turnaround time, with a storm already closing in.
Scott Fischer, visibly unwell and repeating that he was “too tired” and “sick,” reached the summit even later, around 3:40 p.m., and inexplicably removed his oxygen mask on the way down despite having plenty left in the tank. At almost the same moment, Doug Hansen’s oxygen ran out completely.
The Night Everything Fell Apart
What followed was a cascade of small failures compounding into catastrophe. Hall radioed urgently for oxygen; two full cylinders were sitting at the South Summit, but the guide who took the call, Andy Harris, was already suffering from hypoxia — confusion and impaired judgment from oxygen deprivation — and mistakenly radioed back that the bottles were empty. Another guide who knew the truth couldn’t correct it: his radio was broken.
Meanwhile the storm hit full force. Visibility collapsed. Climbers scattered across the upper mountain in the dark, some unable to tell which direction led to safety. Beck Weathers, another of Hall’s clients already struggling with blurred vision from a prior eye surgery, was left alone at the Balcony, shaking uncontrollably.
At Camp Four, Fischer’s guide Anatoli Boukreev — who had summited early and returned to camp well ahead of the others — eventually went out alone to search, got disoriented in the whiteout, climbed 600 feet in the wrong direction, and had to turn back empty-handed. It wasn’t until after midnight, when a surviving group staggered into camp with information on where others were trapped, that Boukreev located and began pulling stranded climbers to safety one by one — including Yasuko Namba, who was found collapsed and unresponsive in the snow. She died that night. She had been on track to become the second Japanese woman to summit all Seven Summits.
Beck Weathers regained consciousness on his own hours later and walked back into camp — alive, but so severely frostbitten that he later lost his hands, feet, and nose to amputation.
Below the summit, Scott Fischer could no longer walk. Sherpa Lopsang Jangbu tied himself to Fischer with a rope and tried to drag him down, but the weight was too much for one person. Fischer told Lopsang to leave him and get help. Lopsang eventually had no choice but to descend alone. By the time a rescue team climbed back up, Fischer was dead.
Rob Hall and Doug Hansen never made it off the summit ridge. Hall wouldn’t leave Hansen behind, even as his own condition deteriorated over the radio, in conversations that were, heartbreakingly, patched through to his pregnant wife back home. Hall’s body was recovered twelve days later. Doug Hansen’s body was never found. Andy Harris was never found either — only his crampons were later recovered.
By dawn, five people connected to Hall’s and Fischer’s teams were dead: Rob Hall, Scott Fischer, Doug Hansen, Andy Harris, and Yasuko Namba. On the Tibetan side of the mountain that same night, a separate Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition was caught in the same storm while descending from their own summit success. Three of its members died: Dorje Morup, Tsewang Smanla, and Tsewang Paljor. One of those men would go on to become the mountain’s most famous — and most misidentified — landmark, a body in lime-green boots that climbers used as a waypoint for the next three decades. We told his full story, and India’s 2026 mission to finally bring him home, here.
Eight lives lost in one 24-hour span — one of the deadliest single events in Everest’s history.
The 1996 Everest Disaster: Whose Fault Was It?
The world wanted someone to blame, and the debate that followed has never fully settled.
British climber Graham Ratcliffe later wrote in A Day to Die For that forecasts had already warned of intensifying May winds, and that both Hall and Fischer knew about them but underestimated how serious the timing was. He also argued that professional rivalry between the two men — both running competing guiding businesses chasing the same wealthy clientele — added pressure to push for the summit rather than turn back, in order to protect their success rates and reputations.
Jon Krakauer’s own conclusion was that no single cause explained the disaster. It was the ignored turnaround times, the unfinished ropes, the commercial pressure to deliver a summit at any cost, and a long chain of individually small decisions that added up to catastrophe.
Anatoli Boukreev’s choice to rest at camp instead of immediately searching for stranded climbers drew heavy criticism at the time — he defended it by saying his own oxygen had run out and that returning to the death zone would have likely cost him his life too. That criticism faded considerably once he went out alone into the storm and personally rescued several climbers, an act many in the climbing community came to regard as genuinely heroic.
Edmund Hillary, the first man to ever stand on the summit, didn’t hedge his opinion. He called the tragedy inevitable, laying the blame squarely on commercial expeditions and the overcrowding they caused.
Everest After 1996 Disaster: Safer, But Still Deadly
The disaster didn’t end commercial climbing on Everest — if anything, the mountain’s fame only grew. Over the past seven years, Nepal has issued between 300 and 500 Everest permits annually, with roughly 1–2% of climbers losing their lives each season. Seventeen people died in 2023 alone; five each in 2024 and 2025; five more so far in 2026. In spring 2026, Nepal issued a record 495 permits.
That scale of activity raises the same question 1996 forced onto the world: should commercial climbing on Everest be scaled back to reduce deaths? There’s no easy answer. The mountain now supports the livelihoods of thousands of Sherpas, guides, porters, lodge owners, and expedition companies. In the 2026 spring season alone, the Nepal government collected more than 700 million rupees in royalties from Everest permits — before counting the additional income from expeditions, trekking, and local hospitality.
Nepal’s government is now moving toward new regulations, including a proposed rule requiring climbers to have already summited a peak above 7,000 meters in Nepal before qualifying for an Everest permit, along with proposals that expedition guides be Nepali citizens. Permit fees have also risen by 30%.
The goal isn’t to close Everest to commercial climbers — that ship sailed with Dick Bass in 1985. It’s to manage the mountain more responsibly than it was in May 1996, when a fixed rope delay, a missed deadline, and the unwillingness to turn back cost eight people their lives in a single night.
Thirty years on, as news of another mountaineering death on Broad Peak circulates, that lesson still hasn’t fully landed. The mountains haven’t gotten any less dangerous. The only thing that can change is how carefully people choose to respect that danger.
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