What actually happened? What was the disaster? I couldn’t understand from Wikipedia
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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.
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