"Into Thin Air" Everest survivor Charlotte Fox dies

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Charlotte Fox’s eyes were frozen behind her contact lenses. The snow had begun falling as she and her fellow climbers descended from the top of the world, the peak of Mount Everest, where she could see for 100 miles in every direction. But now, trapped in the middle of a blizzard with the force of a hurricane, in temperatures somewhere south of 40-below, she couldn’t see anything. She was out of oxygen. Her feet were numb with frostbite. No longer able to stay moving, she scrunched herself into the fetal position, huddled with her climbing mates in the ice and snow, and waited for it all to end.

“I didn’t see how we were going to get out of it alive,” Fox told Jon Krakauer in his book “Into Thin Air,” which recounted the famous 1996 blizzard that stranded climbers for one freezing night, leaving eight dead. “The cold was so painful, I didn’t think I could endure it anymore. I just curled up in a ball and hoped death would come quickly.”

Instead, she would survive through the night and live 22 more years to scale myriad mountains around the world. The experience on Mount Everest the night of May 10, 1996, may have made Fox and her fellow climbers celebrities for a time, but for Fox it was but a rung on the ladder in a life of great heights.

That’s why, when she died last week at home in Telluride, Colo., from an apparent fall from the top of her stairs, her friends were in disbelief. She had turned 61 on May 10.

“Charlotte had survived so much up high,” her friend Alison Osius wrote in a tribute for Rock and Ice magazine this week, “it was stunning and profoundly sad that she died that evening of May 24 in a household accident.”

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