#5 Beck Weathers – Missing Above The Death Zone On Mount Everest
On the night of May 10, 1996, Beck Weathers huddled with 10 other climbers on an exposed stretch of Mount Everest, 26,000 feet above sea level.
A blizzard churned the air into a slurry of ice and snow.Their supplemental oxygen was fully depleted, and they struggled for each breath.
Weathers, a 49-year-old Dallas pathologist, was worse off than most. Earlier that day, he'd gone almost entirely blind — the altitude-induced effect of a recent corneal operation — and as the sun set, his body temperature dropped and his heart slowed.
Anyway, Weathers started to descend with another guide when a storm disoriented the whole party. A guide came back to rescue Weathers and three companions, but by that point, Weathers had wandered off because people don’t make good choices up to that high.
More guides came to check on him and another man and believed Weathers to be near death and ‘unsaveable’, so they left him to die.
Weathers had a nap and woke up, making it to camp under his own steam, badly frostbitten. He was put in a tent by himself and again not expected to survive, but he survived another night and walked down to a lower camp to be medevac by helicopter.
He lost one arm, the fingers on the other, most of both feet and his nose.
It would prove to be the deadliest event in Everest's history up to that point, and it soon became the most famous, garnering headlines and being immortalized in Jon Krakauer's 1997 bestseller, Into Thin Air — and now, Everest, an Imax film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, and, as Weathers, Josh Brolin.