Five Climbers Missing On Everest Washington Men Among Group Hoping To Send E-Mail From Top

One day it was champagne toasts at Mountain Madness after an expedition led by Scott Fischer, co-owner of the outdoor adventure company, reached the summit of Mount Everest.

The next there were tears as Fischer, 40, who had planned to send e-mail from the world’s highest peak, and four other climbers, including two other Americans, were missing and presumed dead.

They were heading for base camps as the light faded Friday afternoon when they apparently lost their way in a blizzard, said Hari Saran Shreshta, a spokesman for the Nepalese Tourism Ministry in Katmandu.

He identified three of the others as Seaborn B. Weather of Dallas, Yasuko Namba, 47, of Tokyo, and Andrew Michael Harris, 31, of Queenstown, New Zealand.

Relatives of Douglas Hansen, 44, of Renton, Wash., said he was the fifth.

Fischer had scaled three of the world’s four highest mountains: Everest in 1994, No. 2 K2 in 1992 and No. 4 Lhotse in 1990. The team he led two years ago removed 2.5 tons of garbage from the main route up South Col to the summit.

An Internet report from the Fischer group’s base camp Saturday was posted on the World Wide Web.

Ministry officials said Hansen, Weather, Namba and Harris were members of an International Friendship Expedition led by Rob Hall of New Zealand. Fischer led an eight-member group.

Fischer, also a professional outdoor photographer and motivational speaker, and his wife, Jean Price, have a daughter, Katie Rose, 5, and a son, Andy, 9.

Karen Dickinson, his business partner in the Seattle guide firm, said he dropped out of high school to learn mountain climbing after watching a television special on the outdoor school at age 14 in New Jersey.

Hansen, a postal clerk for 24 years in Kent, has a 24-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter. His sister, Diane Hansen, and Favian Hansen, his father, said they had few details.

“He was alive when they got to him, but he died,” his father said. “Something about his breathing went bad.”

“Frostbitten lungs,” his sister said.

A Web posting Friday said climbers who made it to the top with Fischer were Klev Schoenig, Sandy Pittman, Lene Gammelgaard, Tim Madsen, Charlotte Fox, Anagoli Boukreev, Martin Adams, Neal Beidleman and four of the six Sherpas accompanying them.

“Scott and Klev were not sick, but everybody else had something else going on healthwise: Khumbu cough, sinus infections, bronchitis,” the Web posting said. Khumbu refers to an ice field on Everest.

Fischer was last seen unconscious and barely clinging to life above 27,000 feet on the mountain at about 3 p.m. Saturday, or 4 a.m. PDT, Dickinson said.

The Web posting said others from his group bundled Fischer up and left him with an oxygen bottle to “concentrate their flagging strength” on getting another stricken climber to safety.

On Friday afternoon, before word arrived that the climbers had vanished, there was a champagne celebration at Mountain Madness.

Fischer’s wife told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at that time that he and two other guides, six Sherpas and six clients made the summit about 2:30 p.m. Friday. Two other clients stayed at a base camp because of altitude sickness. The clients each paid more than $60,000 to make the climb, the P-I reported Saturday.

A report from base camp Friday said Fischer made it down to Camp 4 at about 26,000 feet.

Dickinson said the report may have been misunderstood and the group was still heading down, or he may have headed back up the mountain to try to help someone in distress as he had done in past expeditions to the Himalayas.

“He’s known as Mr. Rescue,” she said. “A lot of people owe their lives to Scott.”

The summit climb was made during a break in the weather, she told the P-I Friday.

“There was still a lot of deep snow, so some of the other teams hung back just a bit,” Dickinson said. “It was a pretty gnarly move to blast for it while the weather window held.”

Fischer’s team brought laptop computers in hopes of sending e-mail dispatches to Outside Online, an Internet magazine published by Starwave Corp. of Bellevue, Wash., on the Web.

That plan foundered, apparently because of satellite problems, so the progress of the expedition was reported by satellite telephone transmissions and film that was sent by runner and helicopter to Katmandu to be flown to Seattle, the P-I reported.