Yasuko Namba might be a familiar name if you have watched the 1997 TV movie, Into Thin Air where her role was played by Akemi Otani. Naoko Mori also played her role in the 2015 popular movie called “Everest”. Yasuko Namba, a Japanese entrepreneur, ascended Everest in 1996 to become the second Japanese woman to scale the highest mountain on every continent. Prior to the 1996 Everest incident, she was also the oldest woman to complete all seven summits.
Yasuko had already conquered six of the Seven Summits, which are the highest peak on each of the seven continents, prior to her attempt on Everest.
In the Khumbu area of the Himalayas, Nepal, close to the Everest Base Camp (5,364 m), there is a memorial to the missing climber Yasuko Namba.
The rest of the crew was unable to take Beck Weathers and Yasuko Namba any further without endangering their own lives, so they were abandoned to perish on the mountain.
Weathers amazingly lived, but Namba passed away from her wounds.
Who was Yasuko Namba?
Yasuko Namba was the second Japanese woman (after Junko Tabei) to ascend all Seven Summits, including Everest, where she perished. She lived from February 2, 1949, until May 11, 1996. Namba traveled the world while she pursued her passion for mountaineering while working as a businesswoman for Federal Express in Japan. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro on the first day of the year in 1982, then Aconcagua precisely two years later. On July 1st, 1985, she reached the top of Denali, and on August 1st, 1992, she reached the top of Elbrus. Namba’s final peak to conquer was Mount Everest after acing the Vinson Massif on December 29, 1993, and the Carstensz Pyramid on November 12, 1994.
She joined Adventure Consultants, Rob Hall’s guiding business, and started becoming acclimated to the highest peak in the world in April 1996.
How did Yasuko Namba die?
The oldest woman to climb Everest was 47-year-old Namba on May 10, 1996. Later, Anna Czerwiska of Poland, who summited the mountain aged 50, broke Namba’s record. She was descending from a high point on the mountain when a snowstorm hit while she was still there relatively late in the afternoon. Namba, another client Beck Weathers, their guide Mike Groom, and customers of Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness were stranded on the South Col due to a whiteout and were unable to locate their tent.
Later, according to Groom, Namba persisted on putting her oxygen mask on even though she was out of oxygen. The two guides (Groom and Neal Beidleman from Mountain Madness) had to help Namba and Weathers since they were both so frail. The guides concluded it was useless and unsafe to try to move the group toward the camp, so they instead waited for a break in the storm.
Anatoli Boukreev, one of Fischer’s guides, headed out into the night from Camp IV in search of the group of stranded climbers. After helping a number of other people, he returned once more to help Sandy Pittman and Tim Madsen. Madsen left the two alone because he believed that Namba was already dead and that Weathers was a “lost cause.”
The next day, a search team was put together by Stuart Hutchinson, one of Adventure Consultants’ customers, to look for both Namba and Weathers. Hutchinson chose to leave the two alone in order to conserve resources for the other climbers because they were both in a such a bad state and unlikely to survive long enough to be taken down to Base Camp.
While Weathers managed to stay alive and returned to camp on foot, Namba never did. She passed away on her own, in the dead of night, from tiredness and exposure to the mountain’s harsh elements. In his book Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer portrays the agony of Neal Beidleman, who felt regret for not being able to do more to save Namba. Boukreev’s “The Climb” novel showed her deep grief at being alone.
In his book “The Climb,” Boukreev expressed deep remorse over the small 90-pound woman’s lonesome passing, writing that someone ought to have hauled her back to camp so she could at least pass away with her friends.
Was Yasuko Namba’s body ever found on Everest?
On April 28, 1997, Boukreev discovered Namba’s body while climbing Everest with the Indonesian National Team. A few days later, he apologized to her widower for failing to save Namba’s life and built a cairn around her to protect her from scavenger birds. Her spouse paid for an operation to bring her body down the mountain later in 1997.
Legacy
Following the accident in 1996, the Sherpas constructed two memorial monuments next to Gorak Shep: one for Rob Hall and the other for Rob Hall’s comrades Doug Hansen, Andy Harris, and Yasuko Namba. By prayer flags, the two monuments are joined.
I’ve never encountered a female who was more driven, said John Taske of the diminutive lady. She weighed little more than about 100 pounds, but in terms of tenacity, she was twice as tenacious. However, given the nature of hypothermia and her little body mass, she would have become extremely cold considerably sooner than a person twice her weight would have. And under those circumstances, she had very little chance of living.
Yasuko was little, and some of her clothing choices reflected that, according to Beck Weathers. She had several titanium items because she could not physically carry the same amount of weight. She simply lacked physical strength.
She was a very quiet person who was reticent. She was a pleasant person to be around and was extremely proper. She was very self-contained, but once she got going, she was just completely focused on moving forward and achieving what she set out to do. In terms of pure focus, drive, and dedication to a goal rather than simply being there, she may have outdone everyone else on our team.
And I don’t think we appreciated how psychologically strong and concentrated she was at the time, when we were still in camp. Namba, a Japanese entrepreneur, ascended Everest in 1996 to become the second Japanese woman to scale the highest mountain on every continent. Prior to the 1996 Everest incident, she was also the oldest woman to complete all seven summits.
Yasuko had already conquered six of the Seven Summits, which are the highest peak on each of the seven continents, prior to her attempt on Everest.
In the Khumbu area of the Himalayas, Nepal, close to the Everest Base Camp (5,364 m), there is a monument erected to remember the missing climber Yasuko Namba.
The rest of the crew was unable to take Beck Weathers and Yasuko Namba any further without endangering their own lives, so they were abandoned to perish on the mountain. Weathers amazingly lived, but Namba passed away from her wounds.
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