Charlotte Fox Survived Everest’s Most Notorious Catastrophe to Carry on Climbing

“I didn’t see how we had been going to get out of it alive,” Charlotte Fox mentioned in Jon Krakauer’s e-book “Into Skinny Air.” “The chilly was so painful, I didn’t assume I might endure it anymore. I simply curled up in a ball and hoped demise would come shortly.”

That distressing reminiscence was of the Could 1996 blizzard and subsequent tragedy on Everest that killed eight climbers as a part of two expedition groups. Fox was on lead climber Scott Fischer’s Mountain Insanity crew. After summiting on Could 10, Fox and a handful of fellow climbers started descending within the late afternoon as snow started to fall. Inside a number of hours, the climate had deteriorated into full-scale blizzard circumstances. Fox was a part of a crew that had turn out to be disoriented within the whiteout circumstances and winds screaming at over 70 mph.

I believed, ‘Nicely, outdated lady, it’s been a great experience. No regrets.’

Within the night, exhausted and freezing, Fox and firm shaped the now notorious “huddle,” sitting collectively for some small measure of heat and to maintain from wandering off the mountain. Whereas eight climbers both succumbed to publicity or fell into oblivion, Fox survived the night time. It was her 39th birthday.

She went on to climb two extra eight,000-meter peaks within the years to come back. However her terrifying expertise on Everest had scarred Fox. For years after the ordeal she drove round her Colorado residence with a customized license plate on her automobile that clearly communicated her emotions about climbing the best peak on this planet. It learn, merely: NEVEREST.

Whereas a number of of the climbers throughout that ill-fated expedition had little or no expertise tackling climbs above eight,000 meters, (together with Krakauer), Fox was not amongst them. When Fox summited Everest in 1996, she turned the primary American lady to efficiently climb three eight,000-meter peaks. In 1994, she’d cleared the highest of Pakistan’s Gasherbrum II; the following yr she summited Cho Oyu, alongside the China-Nepal border.

Not like many who climb Everest, or who test the world’s highest peaks off a life record, Fox wasn’t getting down to be a document holder. She’d by no means even critically thought-about climbing the world’s tallest mountain till invited on the 1996 expedition. “Mount Everest had by no means been a aim of mine,” she wrote within the American Alpine Journal in 1997. “I regarded it as an excessive amount of of a circus and overly standard with wannabes.”

Fox was born in 1957 about as removed from the mountaineering neighborhood as one may very well be—Greensboro, North Carolina. Her father was Jared Fox, founding father of attire firm Blue Bell, which finally created the Wrangler Denims empire. Fox went to varsity in Raleigh, North Carolina, however quickly lit out for the West. Dreaming of the mountains, Fox moved to Colorado simply after ending faculty. She’d deliberate, as so many do, to spend solely a yr or so there. Do some snowboarding, benefit from the alpine atmosphere after which transfer on. However then she by no means left. “That’s the place the mountaineering started,” mentioned her mom.

Fox was snug in alpine environments, pushing her physique in poor climate at excessive altitudes. For 30 years Fox labored in ski patrol in Aspen and Telluride, the place she was recognized to pores and skin as much as the highest of the mountain earlier than clocking in for a full day of labor on the slopes, simply because she might. Fox climbed each 14er in Colorado, all 54 of them. She climbed the tallest mountains South America has to supply, then went right down to Antarctica to scale Mt. Vinson on her method to nabbing all Seven Summits.

As one may count on from a lifetime spent pushing her limits within the mountains and surrounding herself with mates equally accustomed to life or demise expeditions, Fox endured her share of tragedies, even had her Everest climb gone with out incident. In 1993, her boyfriend Mark Bebie died throughout an ice climb. In 2004, Fox’s husband, Reese Martin, was killed whereas paragliding. “I’ve by no means been mad at Mark and Reese for dying of their pursuit of residing,” Fox advised Rock and Ice journal, “since I very a lot consider in having the identical depth of life.”

It could have been easy for Fox to have determined after that 1996 horror present on Everest that she was completed with excessive altitude climbing. Comprehensible, perhaps even commendable. However that wasn’t in Fox’s nature. A tricky, gritty climber, Fox understood and accepted the dangers of mountaineering. Even after staring down, and in the end coming to phrases with demise excessive on the frozen slopes of Everest, Fox continued to climb huge mountains. She summited the eighth highest peak on this planet, Manaslu, within the Nepalese Himalaya, in 2016. Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest peak, got here subsequent in 2017. In all, Fox discovered the roof of 5 eight,000-meter mountains in her climbing profession. If demise had been to come back, it might come.

“I believed, ‘Nicely, outdated lady, it’s been a great experience,’ ” Fox mentioned concerning the night time on Everest when she was huddled within the black of night time, too chilly and disoriented to push on. “No regrets.”

Fox, a girl for whom a dicey pitch at 25,000 toes was, if not routine, not less than well-practiced, died in 2018 when she fell from the highest of ice-slicked stairs at her Telluride residence. She was 61 years outdated, and only a yr faraway from her most up-to-date eight,000-meter climb.

Although she ended up climbing the world’s greatest peaks, Fox, a lady from North Carolina who got here out to the Rockies and had her thoughts blown and her entire life modified, simply cherished mountains. After her ordeal on Everest, she mirrored in her essay for the American Alpine Membership:

“I’m three for 3 on eight,000ers. Fairly rattling good odds. Time to go to some decrease peaks to climb extra technical routes with just some mates. You’ll be able to simply as simply get killed there, however with so many mountains on this world, why not combine it up? Altitude isn’t the whole lot. Besides on Everest.”

Prime picture: Binod Joshi/AP