What actually happened? What was the disaster? I couldn’t understand from Wikipedia
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The disaster was a blizzard. There were a lot of tourists [inexperienced climbers] that were guided up by two mountain climbing companies at the peak that day. The blizzard came in fast and the climbers took too long getting down. 8 people died. “Disaster” was the term used by news at the time and the label stuck.
A series of mistakes/poor luck
1. too many people
2. too many of them inexperienced or unprepared
3. hubris on the part of guide services and clients
4. decision making being impaired by altitude and fatigue
5. bad weather conditions which can change rapidly
All of these factors can compound making a bad situation quickly become a deadly one.
About everything that could go wrong or complicate things happened: bad weather, hubris, inexperience, summit fever, and just some bad decisions. There’s some good media out there on it. Krakauers book “into thin air” namely.
“Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer (who was there) is a good reference for this. Essentially the summitting was later than planned (for a variety of reasons) and later than was considered safe, and weather moved in during the descent.
You never want to play around at those elevations.
Read the Krakauer book. He was on the expedition and he is a great writer who has done a lot of writing about his alpine adventures and other true stories
It had a couple factors which complicate it. It was at the beginning of the era when professional guide companies started up, which meant that the mountain became accessible to serious amateurs. It should be noted that these people are all probably in the top 10% of fitness in the general world population, it’s still a massive undertaking. But they weren’t necessarily the extreme top 1% professionals who had done most of the climbing from the 1950s-1980s.
There’s only a two week window in the spring and another in the fall where the weather makes climbing possible, and there can still be surprised blizzards. The way it works is that they will spend a month or so on the mountain doing partial trips up and down, acclimating to the altitude and pre-positioning gears and supplies at a series of “high camps” between base camp (the lowest camp) and the summit.
Then, when the weather looks like it will be OK for long enough, they try to summit. The typical summit attempt looks like a couple days to get to Camp 4, the highest camp. They arrive at Camp 4 in the morning, take a nap, then sometime around midnight they depart for the summit. The idea is that they will hit the summit around noon and then be back to Camp 4 in the evening. They only carry about 18 hours of oxygen, enough to summit and get back to Camp 4. As part of that, most of the teams enforce a strict turn around time where no matter where you are, even if it’s only 10 minutes from the summit, you need to turn back to make sure you can get back to Camp 4 with oxygen and daylight. Surviving outdoors without oxygen overnight above Camp 4 is very risky.
In ’96 there were two American led teams going for the summit. They had good weather and most of them summited, many stayed out past the turn-around time they had agreed upon, because they hadn’t prepped as many ropes as they thought they would and the amateur climbers were slower than normal. Then a surprise blizzard rolled in in the early evening, when most of them were still out on the mountain. Both of the team leaders, a number of the professional guides, and about a third of the amateur clients died, including a group that actually made it back to Camp 4 but couldn’t find the tents and spent the night outside. There was some miscommunications and controversies after it, with several people writing books and a movie that came out in the 2010s that is pretty solid.
Asking Google Gemini to explain in language easy to understand:
In 1996, a bunch of climbers (around 17 teams!) all tried to reach the top of Mount Everest at the same time. It was kind of like a crowded rush hour on the world’s tallest mountain!
Two important things happened that made it dangerous:
1. **Too many climbers:** With so many people on the mountain, things got slow and backed up. This meant climbers spent more time in the “Death Zone,” an area super high up where there’s very little oxygen and it’s super cold.
2. **Surprise blizzard:** Just as climbers were trying to come down from the summit, a HUGE storm hit. Imagine climbing down a mountain in a whiteout with freezing wind and almost no air to breathe!
Sadly, 8 climbers got caught in the storm and died. This became known as the 1996 Everest disaster, the deadliest day on the mountain at that time.
This event raised a lot of questions about safety and ethics on Everest. Should so many people be allowed to climb at once? Who’s responsible when things go wrong? The story of the 1996 disaster is a reminder of the dangers of Everest and the courage of those who attempt to climb it.
Here are some extra things to remember:
* It wasn’t just the storm that caused the deaths. The delays caused by the crowded mountain played a big role too.
* Not everyone died. Some climbers, like Anatoli Boukreev, made it down safely despite the storm.
* The story of the disaster was made famous by the book “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer, who was on the mountain that day.
I hope this explanation helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
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