"My name is David Sharp, I'm with Asian Trekking, and I just want to sleep."

VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: LEFT FOR DEAD ON EVEREST During a season when Everest climbers seemed more focused on the summit than ever, guide Dan Mazur made headlines by stopping to help abandoned climber Lincoln Hall. Watch a video of Mazur telling the story of finding Hall  >>

With those words, on May 15, at around 27,500 feet (8,382 meters) on the Northeast Ridge of Mount Everest, a 34-year-old British mountaineer responded to a Sherpa who had paused to ask who he was. Sharp had likely summited the day before, run out of steam on the descent, and was now holed up in a cramped rock cave, where he was beginning to succumb to hypothermia and frostbite.  Some 40-odd climbers apparently gave Sharp his wish, marching past him on their way to the summit rather than trying to rescue the failing Englishman. By May 16 Sharp had frozen to death.

Ten days later a team of four, led by American mountaineer Dan Mazur, 45, came upon a man sitting in the snow at 28,000 feet (8,534 meters) also on the Northeast Ridge, near an outcrop called the Mushroom Rock. It was 7:30 a.m. and the man had obviously been on the mountain all night.

"I imagine you're surprised to see me here," the climber said to Mazur's SummitClimb team. Considering the circumstances, this seemed to be a fairly lucid statement. By now, the man had on neither hat nor gloves. His down suit was unzipped to the waist, his arms out of the sleeves. He had no sleeping bag, no ice ax, no oxygen apparatus, no sunglasses, no food, no water. Unanchored to the mountain, he was sprawled on a cornice, a mere two feet (0.6 meters) from the 8,000-foot (2,438-meter) precipice of the Kangshung Face.

The man turned out to be 50-year-old Lincoln Hall, one of Australia's most experienced Himalaya climbers. The day before, he had reached the summit with a team of Sherpas but developed cerebral edema on the way down. After a desperate struggle to save him, the Sherpas had concluded that he was dead, then, under orders via radio from their team leader, had pushed down to Camp III in the night to save their own lives.

On the morning of May 26, oxygen-starved and still in the hallucinatory grip of edema, Hall was convinced he was on a boat, not a mountain. Salvation, he believed, lay in going overboard, down the Kangshung Face. As British climber Myles Osborne, one of Hall's rescuers, later reported, "He seemed to be in deep distress, shivered uncontrollably, and kept trying to pull himself closer to the edge of the cornice, to the point that we physically held him back and eventually anchored him to the snow."

In 1852, the year in which a Bengali surveyor recognized that Designated Peak XV was the highest mountain in the world (it would not be named Mount Everest for another 13 years), Karl Marx penned the famous aphorism that we now know as: "History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

If the spring of 1996 on Everest—the season that inspired Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air—was unmistakable tragedy, the spring of 2006 was steeped in farce. During a year remarkable for good weather, far more climbers than ever reached the top. (The count is wildly uncertain, but estimates hover around 500 individual summits.) More absurd records, arcane "firsts," and outright gimmicks were performed on Everest than ever before. Yet during the spring campaign, 11 climbers died on the mountain, only one fewer than during the disastrous season of '96. Mixed in with the ludicrous antics were episodes of genuine tragedy as well as that even rarer phenomenon on Everest today: bona fide heroism, by far the largest part of which was demonstrated by the mountain's perpetually unsung heroes—the Sherpas.

Continue reading Part II: 2006: The Mad Season:  1 |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  Next >>

Part I: Ed Viesturs: 1996: Turn Around, Guys! >>

Everest Map: The 2006 Cast of Characters >>

Everest Main Page >>

Adventure's September 2006 issue features 31 amazing adventure towns; chaos at the top of Mount Everest; an inside look at surfing California's Lost Coast; 11 fall weekend getaways near you; the best high-tech footwear, world class adventure travel; hiking the Alps, and more!