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Ranking in 7summits list, either CP or K | : | 9 |
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Ranking in Carstensz Pyramid list | : | 22 |
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Ranking in Kosciuszko list | : | 9 |
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First name | : | Rob |
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Family name | : | Hall |
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Gender | : | male |
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Country of origin | : | New Zealand |
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Date of Birth | : | 1961-01-14 |
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Name of first summit | : | Vinson |
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Date of climbing the first summit | : | 1989-12-00 |
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Name of final summit in Carstensz list | : | Carstensz |
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Date of final summit in Carstensz list | : | 1994-11-11 |
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Name of final summit in Kosciuszko list | : | Aconcagua |
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Date of final summit in Kosciuszko list | : | 1990-11-21 |
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Date of climbing Kilimanjaro | : | 1990-08-17 |
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Date of climbing Elbrus | : | 1990-08-08 |
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Date of climbing Aconcagua | : | 1990-11-21 |
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Date of climbing Denali | : | 1990-06-28 |
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Date of climbing Vinson | : | 1989-12-00 |
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Date of climbing Everest | : | 1990-05-10 |
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Date of climbing Carstensz Pyramid | : | 1994-11-11 |
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Date of climbing Kosciuszko | : | 1990-08-26 |
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Climbed Carstensz Pyramid? | : | Yes |
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Climbed Kosciuszko? | : | Yes |
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Total time including Carstensz Pyramid | : | 04y,345d |
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Total time including Kosciuszko | : | 00y,214d |
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Age when finished with CP | : | 33y,301d |
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Age when finished with K | : | 29y,310d |
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Website | : | http://www.adventureconsultants.co.nz/ |
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Additional Info | : | "I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don't worry too much." -- Rob Hall's last words, from Everest
Books:
About Rob and Gary Ball: Hall & Ball : Kiwi Mountaineers from Mount Cook to Everest:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/093856742X/the7summitscom
"To turn around that close to the summit ..., That showed incredibly good judgment on young Goran's part. I'm impressed-considerably more impressed, actually, than if he'd continued climbing and made the top. ... With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill. The trick is to get back down alive." -- Rob Hall about Goran Kropp, aborting his first summit bid (he made it on his second)
Rob Hall, 14 Jan 1961 - 11 May 1996 (died age 35).
Well, what more is there to says about Rob Hall? Made (in)famous in Krakauers book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375502807/the7summitscom); dying on Everest in May 1996, being the owner of Adventure Consultants and having climbed the 7 summits in just 7 months with Gary Ball and playing the lead role in the may 10 1996 drama which ended his life.
Adventure Consultants begins as the brain-child of best mates and climbing partners Rob Hall and Gary Ball in 1991. They’ve already ascended Everest the previous year with Peter Hillary, son of Sir Edmund. They’ve already bagged the “Seven Summits” in a record seven months, for which they received the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal. Now, looking for a new mountaineering challenge, they establish an office in Christchurch, becoming one of the first operations offering guided ascents of the world’s highest peaks. “They were pioneers in this new style of mountain guiding,” says Guy Cotter, one of the AC guides and now Director. “Till then it had hardly ever been done.”
Their price for guiding Everest is steep — initially $US35,000 per head — but the two men figure anyone serious about climbing in such an extreme environment will happily pay a premium for their expertise. Their formula is based on “a comfortable base camp, a quality menu, dedicated medical back-up, a communication system both on the mountain and by satellite to the world, Russian state-of-the-art aluminium/kevlar oxygen equipment, a realistic acclimatisation schedule and the all-important guide/Sherpa to client ratio,” according to climber-photographer Colin Monteath’s biography Hall And Ball: Kiwi Mountaineers.
It’s an immediate success. On May 12 1992, Hall, Ball and Guy Cotter — guiding in the Himalayas for the first time — steer six paying clients (another four don’t make it due to exhaustion) to the highest point on earth.
Hall and Ball run another expedition to Everest in 1993.
Gary Ball, bleeding from his sinuses, is forced to pull back.
Worse is to come: in October 1993 he collapses and dies from pulmonary edema, a swelling of the lungs brought on by high altitude, on the way up Dhauligiri in Nepal. His body is buried by Hall in a crevasse at 6500 metres.
Though devastated, Rob Hall resolves to keep Adventure Consultants going, and successfully leads another expedition to Everest in 1994. Without either Ball, who is dead, or Cotter, who is unavailable, Hall turns to the well-known American Ed Viesturs — recently rated by Outside magazine as America’s greatest climber — to be his guiding partner. Together they herd six clients and three Sherpas to the top in smart time, making Hall the first westerner to claim four successful Everest ascents.
Hall’s reputation grows. He adds Lhotse (8511 metres) and Makalu (8463 metres) to his impressive tally of 8000 metre Himalayan peaks, which already includes the two highest, Everest and K2. And aside from the 39 climbers he guides up Everest from 1990-1995, his company takes clients to the top of Carstensz Pyramid (4884 metres) in Indonesia, Vinson Massif (4879 metres) in Antarctica, and Cho Oyu (8153 metres) in Nepal. Small wonder, then, that Adventure Consultants becomes the most highly sought-after guiding company in the mountaineering world. Though he bumps his price for Everest to $US65,000 a head — three times as much as some of his competitors — Hall has no trouble filling places on the expedition booked for May 1996. Eight clients sign up.
Hall’s group is one of three to set out for the summit of Everest on May 10 1996. All told there are more than 30 climbers making their way to the top. American journalist Jon Krakauer, a client of Hall whose best-selling account of the tragedy, Into Thin Air, will become an instant classic, looks down the Hillary Step shortly after beginning his descent from the summit and is “greeted with an alarming sight. Thirty feet below, more than a dozen people were queued up at the base of the Step. Three climbers were already in the process of hauling themselves up the rope that I was preparing to descend. Exercising my only option, I unclipped from the communal safety line and stepped aside.”
The traffic jam causes long delays, and results in some climbers running out of oxygen. For reasons unknown, Hall and the other expedition leaders allow their clients to continue pressing on for the summit until late in the afternoon. (Conventional wisdom dictates that to allow yourself enough daylight to descend in safety, one should turn around at 2pm, regardless of whether or not you’ve reached the summit.) Hall summits at 2.25pm, his fifth ascent. One of his clients, Doug Hansen, is still pushing steadily upwards. A Sherpa from another expedition later reports seeing Hall drop down and begin escorting Hansen by the arm towards the summit.
“At 4.30pm,” Colin Monteath reports in Hall And Ball, “Rob was overheard by base camp staff radioing urgently for someone to bring fresh oxygen cylinders up to him from the South Summit depot. Something had gone badly wrong. Out of life-sustaining gas, yet still above the Hillary Step, Doug had collapsed.”
The weather closes in — a sudden storm, with hurricane gales and wind chill temperatures as low as minus 100 degrees. Hall and Hansen are forced to spend the night exposed just below the summit. Further down the mountain, several other climbers spend the night huddled together in the blizzard a mere hundred metres from camp, barely alive and unable to navigate their way in the whiteout.
At the same time, Guy Cotter — guiding an expedition of his own up Pumori, a smaller nearby peak — monitors Hall’s radio transmissions and grows increasingly concerned. Krakauer describes the situation:
At 2.15pm [Cotter] talked to Hall on the summit, and everything sounded fine. At 4.30 and 4.41, however, Hall called down to say that Doug was out of oxygen and unable to move, and Cotter became very alarmed. At 4.53 he got on the radio and strongly urged Hall to descend to the South Summit. “The call was mostly to convince him to come down and get some gas,” says Cotter, “because we knew he wasn’t going to be able to do anything for Doug without it. Rob said he could get himself down OK, but not with Doug.”
But 40 minutes later, Hall was still with Hansen atop the Hillary Step, going nowhere. During radio calls from Hall at 5.36, and again at 5.57, Cotter implored his mate to leave Hansen and come down alone. “I know I sound like a bastard for telling Rob to abandon his client,” confessed Cotter, “but by then it was obvious that leaving Doug was his only choice.” Hall, however, wouldn’t consider going down without Hansen.
Two of Hall’s Sherpas make a bold attempt to reach him, but are turned back by the weather.
During the radio calls to Base Camp early on May 11, Hall revealed that something was wrong with his legs, that he was no longer able to walk and was shaking uncontrollably. This was very disturbing news to the people down below, but it was amazing that Hall was even alive after spending a night without shelter or oxygen at 28,700 feet in hurricane-force wind and minus-100-degree windchill.
At 5 A.M., Base Camp patched through a call on the satellite telephone to Jan Arnold, Hall's wife, seven months pregnant with their first child in Christchurch, New Zealand. Arnold, a respected physician, had summited Everest with Hall in 1993 and entertained no illusions about the gravity of her husband's predicament. "My heart really sank when I heard his voice," she recalls. "He was slurring his words markedly. He sounded like Major Tom or something, like he was just floating away. I'd been up there; I knew what it could be like in bad weather. Rob and I had talked about the impossibility of being rescued from the summit ridge. As he himself had put it, 'You might as well be on the moon.'"
By that time, Hall had located two full oxygen bottles, and after struggling for four hours trying to deice his mask, around 8:30 A.M. he finally started breathing the life-sustaining gas. Several times he announced that he was preparing to descend, only to change his mind and remain at the South Summit. The day had started out sunny and clear, but the wind remained fierce, and by late morning the upper mountain was wrapped with thick clouds. Climbers at Camp Two reported that the wind over the summit sounded like a squadron of 747s, even from 8,000 feet below.
About 9:30 A.M., Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri ascended from Camp Four in a brave attempt to bring Hall down. At the same time, four other Sherpas went to rescue Fischer and Gau. When they reached Fischer, the Sherpas tried to give him oxygen and hot tea, but he was unresponsive. Though he was breathing-barely-his eyes were fixed and his teeth were clenched. Believing he was as good as dead, they left him tied to the ledge and started descending with Gau, who after receiving tea and oxygen, and with considerable assistance, was able to move to the South Col.
Higher on the peak, Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri climbed to 28,000 feet, but the murderous wind forced them to turn around there, still 700 feet below Hall.
Throughout that day, Hall's friends begged him to make an effort to descend from the South Summit under his own power. At 3:20 P.M., after one such transmission from Cotter, Hall began to sound annoyed. "Look," he said, "if I thought I could manage the knots on the fixed ropes with me frostbitten hands, I would have gone down six hours ago, pal. Just send a couple of the boys up with a big thermos of something hot-then I'll be fine."
At 6:20 P.M., Hall was patched through a second time to Arnold in Christchurch. "Hi, my sweetheart," he said in a slow, painfully distorted voice. "I hope you're tucked up in a nice warm bed. How are you doing?"
"I can't tell you how much I'm thinking about you!" Arnold replied. "You sound so much better than I expected.... Are you warm, my darling?"
"In the context of the altitude, the setting, I'm reasonably comfortable," Hall answered, doing his best not to alarm her.
"How are your feet?"
"I haven't taken me boots off to check, but I think I may have a bit of frostbite."
"I'm looking forward to making you completely better when you come home," said Arnold. "I just know you're going to be rescued. Don't feel that you're alone. I'm sending all my positive energy your way!" Before signing off, Hall told his wife, "I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don't worry too much."
These would be the last words anyone would hear him utter. Attempts to make radio contact with Hall later that night and the next day went unanswered.
After hanging on for a day and a night, with his client Hansen already dead, Hall slips into a hypothermic coma and never awakes.
Twelve days later, when Breashears and Viesturs climbed over the South Summit on their way to the top, they found Hall lying on his right side in a shallow ice-hollow, his upper body buried beneath a drift of snow.
Two other members of Hall’s expedition lose their lives: Japanese client Yasuko Namba, and Queenstown-based guide Andy Harris. By the end of 1996 Everest claims 12 people, the most fatalities ever recorded in a single season.
Hall’s widow, Dr Jan Arnold, sells Adventure Consultants to Cotter in June 1996. (“[Arnold considered Guy the only person she would sell the company to,” claims the Adventure Consultants website. Cotter’s partner Tracy says there is still “quite frequent contact. Jan’s always remained quite interested in the business”.)
(This info is merged from two sources:
from http://www.adventure.co.nz/articleTOTHELIMIT.htm about an interview with ine of Rob's guides Guy Cotter & the original outside mag story by Krakauer:
http://www.outsidemag.com/magazine/0996/9609feev3.html)
Other link:
- http://www.steponline.com/everest/ rob_hall.asp
(see also Gary Ball's info)
(Gary Ball & Rob Hall climbed the 7summits in 7 months (minus 6 hours, for all you people who want to break the record), but that was counting Hall's second ascent of Mt Vinson.) |
