1996 Mount Everest Disaster

The 1996 Mount Everest disaster refers to the events of 10–11 May 1996, when eight people died on Mount Everest during summit attempts. In the entire season, fifteen people died trying to reach the summit, making it the deadliest single year in Mount Everest's history. The disaster gained wide publicity and raised questions about the commercialization of Everest.

Journalist Jon Krakauer, on assignment from Outside magazine, was in a party led by guide Rob Hall that lost four climbers, and afterwards published the bestseller Into Thin Air which related his experience. Anatoli Boukreev, a guide whose party lost no clients, felt impugned by Krakauer's book and co-authored a rebuttal book called The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest. Beck Weathers, of Hall's expedition and Lene Gammelgaard, of Boukreev's expedition, wrote about their experiences of the disaster in their respective books, Left For Dead: My Journey Home from Everest and Climbing High. The storm's impact on climbers on the mountain's other side, the North Ridge, where several climbers also died, was detailed in a first-hand account by British filmmaker and writer Matt Dickinson in his book The Death Zone (later republished as The Other Side of Everest).