FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ADVENTURE MAGAZINE
APRIL 2003

1996: AFTER THE STORM

By the time the survivors of the storm of May 10, 1996, returned from Everest, they'd been battered by months at altitude, by frostbite and hypothermia, and by the loss of eight of their fellow climbers, including guides Rob Hall and Scott Fischer. But for many the trauma was just beginning. The popularity of Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air," of the half-dozen competing accounts published subsequently, and of the IMAX movie filmed just days after the killer storm took place created an army of armchair experts—and placed those who had been on the mountain at the center of a heated public controversy. Adventure magazine publishes an update on the accidental celebrities of 1996. Page 74.

• With the help of an assistant, pathologist Beck Weathers, 56, is back at work and he remains on the lecture circuit. "These years have been the most interesting, stimulating and positive of my existence," he says. "Everest in many, many ways was one of the best things to happen to me."
  
  
• Rob Hall's head climbing Sherpa, Ang Dorjee, 33, has been sirdar to six more Everest expeditions since 1996—and now has summited the peak eight times. In spring 2002 he fell in love with Brown University researcher Michelle Gregory and joined her in Providence last October. "I'm thinking that I'm going to get two more years on Everest," says Ang Dorjee, who hopes to break the speed-ascent record set by the late Babu Chiri Sherpa. When the season is over, he'll make the two-day trek to his home village of Pangboche, where he and Gregory, who are expecting a baby in September, will have a traditional Sherpa wedding.
  
  
• Vilified as the Manhattan socialite who hauled her espresso machine to Base Camp, Sandy Hill, 47, was actually an experienced climber who, with her 1996 ascent, became only the second American woman to complete the Seven Summits. "I don't believe that the events of 1996 changed Everest mountaineering," Hill says. "The challenge of climbing it remains as formidable as ever. However, the media avalanche changed the common perception of Mount Everest. Unfortunately, very little of what was written was illuminating or instructive, much was sensationalism, and some wasn't even true." After her return to New York, Hill dramatically lowered her society profile, has remarried and currently lives in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Today she owns a California vineyard that makes wine under the label Oak Savanna Vineyard. She and husband Thomas Dittmer are also private sponsors of a Virgin Islands adventure race called 8 Tuff Miles.
  
  
• "I climb almost all my days off. I'm out cragging, or ice climbing, or ski mountaineering," says Aspen Snowmass ski patrol veteran Charlotte Fox, 45. Though Fox used to speak publicly about 1996 to help raise money for Access Fund, a climbing advocacy nonprofit on whose board she served, she's given that up. "I just wanted to go on climbing instead of talking about it," she says. "I hope 1996 is not the defining moment of my life."
  
  
• "Guiding above 8,000 meters is a very, very risky endeavor," says mechanical engineer and 1996 guide Neal Beidleman, 44. "It would take a very special person, a very special situation, for me to do that again." Beidleman's product-design work ranges from snow shovels to spacecraft; in the late 1990s he helped to design the AvaLung, the under-snow breathing device. "[Everest ‘96] wasn't just something that happened that people wrote about and then it went away," he reflects. "Those people are still dead; those families are still without their loved ones."
  
  
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  CONTACT: Caryn Davidson
  +1 212 790 9032
  cdavidso@ngs.org