Eight dead on Everest as rescue efforts continue

Rescue teams continued to help climbers down from the upper reaches of Mount Everest on Monday, and eight others are confirmed dead following a severe storm that slammed the mountain Friday.

Expedition leaders Scott Fischer and Rob Hall are now officially reported as dead, along with six other climbers. Efforts to recover the bodies and rescue survivors have been stalled by dangerous conditions.

Monday's announcement makes the climbers' tragic deaths official, but loved ones were already expecting the news. Fischer's business partner, Karen Dickinson, had said Sunday evening there was no hope he was still alive.

"Scott has been up there two days now. When he was last seen, he was near death after just two hours in the storm. So there's no way he could still be alive," she said from the Seattle office of Mountain Madness, an expedition company.

Plans are now being made for a mountainside burial of the 40-year-old climber. "The proper thing to do is to move his body away from the main route, possibly to a crevasse that will serve as the burial site," she said. Fischer, who lived in Seattle, is survived by his wife, Jean Price, and his children, Andy, 9, and Katie Rose, 5.

The Japanese Mountaineering Association reported that the bodies of 47-year-old Yasuko Nanba of Japan and Andrew Harris of New Zealand have been found near Camp IV. American climber Douglas Hansen, 44, is also missing and presumed dead.

"She was in great condition and I was not too worried. I was sure she would come home," Kenichi Nanba told Reuters news service on Sunday.

Seaborn Beck Weathers of Dallas, reported missing Saturday, was found alive at Camp IV. Members of Weathers' family say they received reports Saturday that he was found dead on the South Col, revived, and then carried down to a lower camp.

The other climbers in Fischer's expedition--Klev Schoening, Sandy Pittman, Lene Gammelgaard, Tim Madsen, Charlotte Fox, Martin Adams, and guides Neal Beidleman and Anatoli Boukreev--were in good condition with relatively minor cases of frostbite. They arrived in base camp Sunday.

Additionally, reports relayed from Hall's office in New Zealand indicate that Jon Krakauer of the United States and Michael Groom of Australia were in good condition at Camp II.

Rob Hall and Garry Ball

Hall, leader of the New Zealand expedition and the only Westerner to have climbed Everest five times, was in radio contact with other climbers relating his situation--no tent or sleeping bag, and severe frostbite--to other climbers.

Saturday night, the 35-year-old climber was patched through to his wife, Jan Arnold, in New Zealand, with whom he had climbed Everest in 1993. She is pregnant with their first child.

"He said: 'Hey, look, don't worry about me.' The man knew that there was an expedition, a rescue launched for him," said Madeleine David, Hall's assistant at his New Zealand-based guide company, Adventure Consultants.

"Various other people in the expedition teams who had two-way radio were encouraging him, talking to him, and it seemed like he was in reasonably good spirits," she told Reuters.

Eventually Hall stopped responding to calls and is now officially reported as dead. Hall was trapped near the summit with severe frostbite on his arms and legs, a condition that made it impossible for him to climb down through the technically difficult Hillary Step and on to Camp IV (26,000 feet).

Three Indian climbers who reached the top of Mount Everest from the north on Friday were found dead by a Japanese expedition, according to United News of India. The climbers were the first Indians to summit Everest from the north. They are identified as T. Samanla, Tsewang Paljor, and Dorje Morup.

Members of Ed Viesturs' Everest expedition reported Saturday night (10 p.m. Pacific time) from base camp that their climbers were safe at Camp III.

Fischer was last seen as the team started down from the summit Friday afternoon, said Beidleman in a satellite telephone call from base camp to the Mountain Madness office in Seattle on Sunday.

As they were climbing down Friday evening at about 6 p.m., a freak storm blew in with blizzard force and white-out conditions. Beidleman, Boukreev, and the other climbers were forced to bivouac out on the mountain for most of the night in a desperate effort to survive. They managed to reach Camp IV at midnight.

Fischer was discovered missing the next morning. A group of Sherpas went back up and found him unconscious and barely alive some time Saturday.

Fischer and Makalu Gao, leader of the Taiwanese expedition, were discovered about two hours above Camp IV at roughly 27,000, both clipped to a fixed rope. Rescuers managed to revive Gao, but Fischer remained in a deep coma, barely breathing.

"Neal [Beidleman] said it looked they had sat down to wait out the storm at about the same time the rest of the team realized they would have to spend the night out. They must have been in an exposed area, or the shared heat from two bodies was not enough," said Dickinson, relaying the accounts from Beidleman.

The rescue party concluded that Fischer's chances of survival were slim and decided to concentrate their flagging strength on getting Gao to a lower camp as quickly as possible. They bundled Fischer up and left him on the mountain with oxygen before descending to a lower camp, she said.

"They had to choose between the two and they took the one that might live," Dickinson said.

Repeated efforts to reach Fischer were unsuccessful Saturday and Sunday.

On Monday morning, Gau and Weathers were airlifted from the mountain by a Nepalese helicopter. They were retrieved from just above Camp I at approximately 19,100 feet. Pilots estimated that some 50 climbers were at the camp waiting to begin the climb down to base camp, or for a recovery team to help them down.

The combination of the violent storm and a high concentration of climbers on the peak--all attempting to summit during a period of historically decent weather--resulted in what may be recorded as one of the deadliest days in Everest history.

In most years, the jet stream shifts off Everest in early May, typically resulting in a two-week period of relatively calm weather. Temperatures are moderate and winds decrease. As a result, most climbing expeditions plan to make their final summit bid on or around May 10, said Ed Viesturs in a recent interview from base camp, (381K .wav file) in which he described plans for reaching the summit.

The disaster followed a period of great celebration Friday afternoon when both Hall and Fischer successfully led their groups to the summit.

It's unclear what caused Fischer to remain above high camp, although there is some speculation that he may have gone out to assist another expedition or may have been overcome with exhaustion from weeks of hauling equipment and leading clients up and down the mountain in preparation for the summit bid.

"We just don't know," Dickinson said on Saturday.

Prior to leaving on this expedition, Fischer described the importance of returning from the summit to Camp IV before dark. (486K .wav file)

Fischer's team spent 31 hours climbing from Camp III to the summit--including a six-hour break in Camp IV--pushing through extremely deep snow that had turned back other climbers.

The success of the two teams on Friday followed the death on Thursday of a climber from Gao's 13-member Taiwanese team.

Chen Yu-Nan, a 36-year-old steelworker from Taipei, died after losing his footing and falling 80 feet.

In an interview with Outside Online earlier this year, Fischer said he had been taking fewer risks in the Himalayas, hoping to maintain his climbing lifestyle for years to come.

And what scared him the most? "Making a bad decision and dying in the mountains, to be perfectly honest. Not coming home from a trip, leaving my kids without a dad. That scares me. We can control a lot of things [on expeditions] but even so, things happen."

This story compiled by Outside Online staff.