Rob Hall

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Rob Hall , MBE (born January 14, 1961 in Christchurch , † May 11, 1996 on Mount Everest ) was a New Zealand climber and entrepreneur. The company " Adventure Consultants ", which he co-founded in 1991, has been offering commercial mountaineering tours on Mount Everest since 1992. Hall was killed on May 11, 1996 in the disaster on Mount Everest .

climber

Hall came from a Catholic working-class family and had 8 older siblings. Even as a teenager he was a keen mountain hiker. He left school in 1976 at the age of 15 and started working for the Christchurch-based company " Alp Sports ", a manufacturer of mountaineering equipment. At this time he also began rock and ice climbing in the New Zealand Alps .

In 1980, Hall managed the second ascent of the 6,814 meter high Ama Dablam over the north ridge, at the age of 19 he was the youngest summit climber of the mountain, also known as "Matterhorn of Nepal". In March 1982 Hall succeeded in the second ascent of Numbur ( 6958  m ) over the southwest ridge.

Gary Ball, originally from Auckland , has been Hall's climbing partner since 1988, and Ball also became Hall's best friend. In 1990 they both managed to climb Mount Everest ( 8,848  m ). For Hall it was the third attempt on the highest mountain in the world, for Ball the second attempt. Also participating in the expedition was Peter Hillary, the son of the first ever climber Edmund Hillary .

The ascent of Everest was the reason for Hall and Ball to climb the other mountains of the Seven Summits (according to Dick Bass' list ) within the next seven months . In doing so, they managed to achieve the time window they had set themselves extremely closely - on December 12, 1990, they climbed Mount Vinson ( 4892  m ) just a few hours before the deadline .

In 1992 Hall climbed K2 ( 8611  m ) and a year later again Mount Everest. In 1993 he was also on the Dhaulagiri ( 8167  m ). During this expedition, his friend and climbing partner Gary Ball died of brain edema .

Together with Ed Viesturs, Hall climbed Cho Oyu ( 8188  m ) and Lhotse ( 8516  m ) in 1994, as well as Mount Everest and K2 again. Hall was the first person to climb four eight-thousanders within 5 months.

In the 1990s he also worked for the New Zealand Antarctic Research Program . In his honor, Mount Hall in East Antarctic Victoria Land bears his name.

Expedition leader

In 1991 Rob Hall and Gary Ball founded Adventure Consultants to offer commercial mountaineering tours on Mount Everest . As early as 1992 they took the first 6 customers to the highest mountain on earth. By 1995, Rob Hall had successfully led 39 mountaineers to Everest. With this, " Adventure Consultants " had an extremely successful record and rightly described itself as the world's leading company for Everest ascents. The participants last (1996) paid about $ 65,000 for the ascent.

During the expedition in the spring of 1996, however, a catastrophe occurred when more than 30 climbers from various expeditions were caught by a change in the weather while attempting to reach the summit of Mount Everest. A total of 8 climbers died in the snowstorm, including Hall himself as well as 2 customers (Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba ) and another mountain guide (Andrew Harris) from " Adventure Consultants ".

Hall had accompanied client Doug Hansen to the summit, but they both reached him long after the safe return time on the afternoon of May 10, 1996 after 4:00 p.m. In the upcoming snowstorm, exhausted and hypothermic with insufficient oxygen supplies, Hansen probably fell to his death on the subsequent descent on the " Hillary Step ". Rob Hall survived the night at a height of approx. 8,700 m below the south summit and died there on the evening of May 11, 1996. Rescue attempts were unsuccessful due to the bad weather. Hall's corpse lay on the direct climb to the south summit for a long time, then it was probably pushed down the Kangshung wall .

Although there are repeated fatalities when climbing Mount Everest, the events attracted worldwide media coverage in 1996, as several experienced mountain guides on commercial expeditions were among the victims (including Scott Fischer ) and some of the survivors published their experiences in the following years. The reports of the American journalist Jon Krakauer , who wrote a book about this disaster ( In icy heights ) , the British director Matt Dickinson and the Kazakh mountain guide Anatoli Bukrejew became particularly well known .

From the last hours of Hall there is a report from Jon Krakauer how several rescue attempts failed and Hall finally, consciously dying, said goodbye to his wife with a satellite phone call.

In view of the high number of victims in a single day, the practices of commercially operating organizations on Mount Everest were called into question after the accident.

For the events of May 10th and 11th, 1996 see also → Disaster on Mount Everest (1996) .

Private life

Hall met the New Zealand doctor Jan Arnold during the Everest expedition in 1990, who worked seasonally in a clinic in Pheriche (approx. 15 kilometers southwest of Mount Everest). The clinic specialized in the treatment of altitude-related diseases. Hall and Arnold married in 1992 and climbed Mount Everest together in 1993. Arnold was pregnant when Hall died on Mount Everest in 1996. Two months after his death, his daughter Sarah Arnold-Hall was born.

literature

Artistic implementations

  • "The Climber": Song by the New Zealand musician Neil Finn about Rob Hall's death

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A list of the people is available at https://www.adventureconsultants.com/expeditions/seven-summits/everest/ .
  2. ↑ Neil Finn: The Climber cf. Article in Bustle Magazine , accessed October 16, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Hall, Rob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION New Zealand climber
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Christchurch
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 1996
Place of death Mount Everest