Doug Hansen

Douglas J. Hansen (May 28, 1949 – May 10, 1996) was an amateur mountain climber who reached the summit of Mount Everest, but died during his descent, in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.

Biography

Hansen grew up in Aberdeen, South Dakota, with his two brothers and sister and moved with his family to Renton, Washington, as a teenager. He climbed Mount Rainier in his youth, graduated from Renton High School in 1967 and subsequently went to work for the United States Postal Service in Kent. He married, had a son and daughter and ultimately divorced, after which he turned his energies toward marathon running and climbing in the European Alps. In 1993 he unsuccessfully attempted to ascend Shishapangma as a paying client of Eric Simonson's International Mountain Guides. In 1995 he aborted a summit attempt on Mount Everest as a paying client of Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants. He returned to Everest in 1996 as Hall's client for a second attempt at summiting the mountain.

1996 expedition

On March 31, 1996, Hansen arrived at Kathmandu to join the Adventure Consultants Friendship Everest Expedition 1996. From there the group travelled by helicopter to Lukla where they hiked to Everest base camp, A journalist climbing with the expedition said that toward the end of April Hansen told him he had undergone minor throat surgery earlier in the year, was experiencing the after effects of frostbite But he continued with his ascent and it has been speculated that expedition leader Hall convinced him not to turn back. As one climber stated:

Five out of eight Hall expedition climbers had by then, at noon, made judgments independent of the leadership not to continue for the top. They were able to say no when they had to. These were the individual decisions Rob [Hall] said he expected us to make. They stuck to the turnaround time, as promised. That left the leaders and three Hall climbers - Namba, Hansen, and Krakauer—still on the long march into the nightmare. but Hansen shook his head and pointed upward toward the summit. Guide Michael Groom recalled looking back to the Hillary Step and seeing "Rob Hall standing up and Doug Hansen leaning into the slope resting on his ice axe," giving Hansen a thumbs up and Hansen giving him a thumbs up in return." the last to summit that day. who came down from the summit to escort him up the final stretch.

Descent

At around 5:30 p.m. Interviews with Adventure Consultants personnel afterward revealed that Hall characterized Hansen's condition as "weak" and "incapacitated" and the situation as "very serious." explained as an attempt to give Hall "the option to...decide that what I was saying was a good idea and he might have been thinking it in his own head but yet not being able to come up with that decision himself." Adventure Consultants employee Helen Wilton later stated that Hall "sounded a little annoyed" and is most likely to have fallen down the Kangshung Face into Tibet sometime between May 10–23.

One climber who turned around later asked "as Rob [Hall] a hero...for staying with Doug and trying to help him down...[or was he] just trying to put out a fire he'd started?" The subsequent narrative may thus have been crafted in an attempt to shield the company from wrongful death liability, which has to be regarded as mere speculation. Furthermore, the relevance of this theory is questioned due to the large number of Adventure Consultants clients known to have turned back prior to reaching the South Summit Jon Krakauer, the journalist reporting on the 1996 tragedy in his book Into Thin Air, subsequently refuted several of Tracy's claims in a series of eight blog posts.

Hansen was survived by his father and two adult children, The plaque reads: "Don't give up on your dreams. In memory of coworker Douglas Hansen who died May 10, 1996 descending the summit of Mt. Everest. - May 1997."

The disaster has been featured prominently in media. A 1997 television movie Into Thin Air: Death on Everest featured Jeff Perry as Hansen. He was portrayed by John Hawkes in the 2015 film Everest.