Скачать или смотреть A Climber Was Left for Dead on Everest and Walked Back to Camp With Frozen Hands

On May 10th, 1996, Beck Weathers joined a group of climbers attempting to summit Mount Everest. He was a 49-year-old pathologist from Dallas, Texas, an amateur mountaineer who had paid $65,000 to join one of the most respected commercial expeditions on the mountain. It was supposed to be the achievement of a lifetime. Instead, it became one of the most harrowing survival stories in mountaineering history.

Weathers had a secret. Eighteen months before the climb, he had undergone corrective eye surgery that left his corneas vulnerable to distortion at high altitude. As he ascended toward the summit, his vision began to fail. By 27,600 feet, he was nearly blind. He was forced to wait on an exposed ridge while his teammates continued upward. He sat alone for hours as the weather began to change.

That afternoon, a massive storm engulfed the upper mountain. Winds exceeded 70 miles per hour. Temperatures plummeted to minus 40 degrees. Visibility dropped to zero. Climbers became lost just yards from camp. Eight people would die that day and in the days that followed, including the legendary expedition leader Rob Hall.

Beck Weathers was caught in the storm. He collapsed on the South Col with a group of other climbers and lay exposed to the elements throughout the night. When rescuers found him the next morning, they checked for a pulse and found none. His face was blackened. His hands were frozen solid. His eyes were frozen shut. They left him for dead. His wife in Dallas was notified. Obituaries were prepared.

But Beck Weathers was not dead.

Twenty-two hours after he collapsed, he opened his eyes. Alone on the ice, nearly blind, with frozen hands and a destroyed face, he somehow rose to his feet. He walked 300 yards back to Camp Four, stumbling and falling, refusing to give up. When he arrived at the tents, the climbers there thought they were seeing a ghost.

Weathers survived the descent through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall and was evacuated by helicopter in one of the highest rescues ever performed at that time. He lost his right hand, all the fingers on his left hand, and his nose. He endured ten surgeries over the following years.

But the physical recovery was only part of the story. Weathers later revealed that before Everest, he had been running from his own life—escaping depression and a failing marriage through dangerous climbing. Surviving the mountain forced him to confront what truly mattered. He rebuilt his marriage, reconnected with his children, and became an advocate for mental health awareness.

This documentary tells the complete story of Beck Weathers and the 1996 Everest disaster. The storm. The night on the ice. The impossible walk back. And the second chance at life that followed.

This is a calm, factual, historically accurate account of real events. No dramatization. No sensationalism. Just the truth of what happened on the highest mountain on Earth in May 1996.