that unusual for people to die in the attempt. What made the 1996 disaster so chilling â apart from the sheer number of dead â was the fact that it seemed uniquely inexplicable. The weather on the peak was not more perilous than usual. There were no sudden avalanches during the period when most of the climbers perished. The paying customers were all sufficiently skilled for the undertaking. Into Thin Air, controversially, attributed the tragedy in part to the stubbornness and arrogance of Anatoli Boukreev, a Kazakhstani climbing guide. There is some evidence for this, but it is ultimately dissatisfying as an explanation, too. Mountaineers, as a group, tend towards stubbornness and arrogance. Yet disasters on the scale of Everest in 1996 are mercifully rare.
In the end, what happened that year looked more like an outbreak of mass irrationality â an episode that reached its apogee around noon on 10 May at the Hillary Step, a wall of rock just 720 feet from the summit, in an event that has since become known as âthe traffic jamâ. Teams from New Zealand, the UnitedStates and Taiwan â thirty-four climbers in total â were all attempting the final stage of the ascent that day, from Camp Four, at 26,000 feet, to the summit, at 29,000 feet. The Americans and New Zealanders had co-ordinated their efforts, so as to ensure a smooth progression up and down the mountain. But the Taiwanese climbers were reneging on an agreement not to climb the same day, and an advance team of guides had failed to secure safety ropes at the Hillary Step according to plan, with the result that the smooth progression soon turned into a bottleneck.
Timing is one of the most important variables in any assault on Everest, and so climbers generally observe strict âturnaround timesâ. Leaving Camp Four at midnight, a climber can hope to reach the summit by midday, or soon after. But if he or she fails to make it there by the pre-arranged turnaround time â which might be anywhere from noon until two in the afternoon, depending on weather conditions, and the team leaderâs attitude to risk â it becomes essential to call off the attempt and turn back. Failure to do so means the climber risks running out of bottled oxygen and facing Everestâs most dangerous weather in the dark. Yet confronted with the traffic jam at the Hillary Step, the teams pushed on, disregarding their turnaround times. Back at Camp Four, the American mountaineer Ed Viesturs watched the climbersâ slow progress through a telescope, and found it hard to believe what he was seeing. âTheyâve already been climbing for hours, and they still arenât on the summit,â he remembered thinking to himself, with rising alarm. âWhy havenât they turned around?â
Members of all three teams continued arriving at the summit for two hours after two oâclock, the latest safe turnaround time. Doug Hansen, a postal service worker from Washington state who was a paying client of the New Zealand group, was the last to doso, at the astonishingly late time of just after four oâclock. He had ascended Everest the year before, but had been forced to turn back a few hundred feet from the top. This time, he never made it back down. Like seven others, he was caught in intense blizzards as darkness fell, which made navigation of the mountain impossible, and sent temperatures plunging to â40°F. They lay dying, unreached by the frantic rescue attempts that saved several other climbersâ lives. Years after climbing Everest had become a feasible project for amateurs as well as professionals, 1996 saw the highest recorded death toll in the mountainâs history. And even today, nobody clearly understands why.
Except, just possibly, Chris Kayes. A former stockbroker turned expert on organisational behaviour might seem to have little to contribute to the post-mortem of a mountaineering disaster. But the more Kayes
In the end, what happened that year looked more like an outbreak of mass irrationality â an episode that reached its apogee around noon on 10 May at the Hillary Step, a wall of rock just 720 feet from the summit, in an event that has since become known as âthe traffic jamâ. Teams from New Zealand, the UnitedStates and Taiwan â thirty-four climbers in total â were all attempting the final stage of the ascent that day, from Camp Four, at 26,000 feet, to the summit, at 29,000 feet. The Americans and New Zealanders had co-ordinated their efforts, so as to ensure a smooth progression up and down the mountain. But the Taiwanese climbers were reneging on an agreement not to climb the same day, and an advance team of guides had failed to secure safety ropes at the Hillary Step according to plan, with the result that the smooth progression soon turned into a bottleneck.
Timing is one of the most important variables in any assault on Everest, and so climbers generally observe strict âturnaround timesâ. Leaving Camp Four at midnight, a climber can hope to reach the summit by midday, or soon after. But if he or she fails to make it there by the pre-arranged turnaround time â which might be anywhere from noon until two in the afternoon, depending on weather conditions, and the team leaderâs attitude to risk â it becomes essential to call off the attempt and turn back. Failure to do so means the climber risks running out of bottled oxygen and facing Everestâs most dangerous weather in the dark. Yet confronted with the traffic jam at the Hillary Step, the teams pushed on, disregarding their turnaround times. Back at Camp Four, the American mountaineer Ed Viesturs watched the climbersâ slow progress through a telescope, and found it hard to believe what he was seeing. âTheyâve already been climbing for hours, and they still arenât on the summit,â he remembered thinking to himself, with rising alarm. âWhy havenât they turned around?â
Members of all three teams continued arriving at the summit for two hours after two oâclock, the latest safe turnaround time. Doug Hansen, a postal service worker from Washington state who was a paying client of the New Zealand group, was the last to doso, at the astonishingly late time of just after four oâclock. He had ascended Everest the year before, but had been forced to turn back a few hundred feet from the top. This time, he never made it back down. Like seven others, he was caught in intense blizzards as darkness fell, which made navigation of the mountain impossible, and sent temperatures plunging to â40°F. They lay dying, unreached by the frantic rescue attempts that saved several other climbersâ lives. Years after climbing Everest had become a feasible project for amateurs as well as professionals, 1996 saw the highest recorded death toll in the mountainâs history. And even today, nobody clearly understands why.
Except, just possibly, Chris Kayes. A former stockbroker turned expert on organisational behaviour might seem to have little to contribute to the post-mortem of a mountaineering disaster. But the more Kayes
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