She survived horrific Everest disaster.. only to die falling down 77 stairs at her home
Charlotte Fox spent her 39th birthday on top of the world as she fulfilled her dream of climbing Mount Everest. But hours after reaching the summit, the passionate mountaineer would find herself huddled in the foetal position, praying “death would come quickly”.
She feared she would lose her life on the peak like so many others before her.
Charlotte was made of sterner stuff than she thought, however, and after two days battling unimaginable conditions, she made it down the mountain.
It was just one extraordinary day for a woman who spent her life travelling the world and scaling the world’s most beautiful, and dangerous, peaks.
Tragically, she died last month after falling down steps outside her home, at the age of 61.
By the time she took on the challenge of the world’s tallest mountain, Charlotte had already scaled all 53 of the 14,000ft peaks in western
US state Colorado.
Her amazing survival story was immortalised in 2015 film Everest, starring Jake
Gyllenhaal as Scott Fischer, a mountain guide, Keira
Knightley, plus Amy Shindler as Charlotte.
It was on May 10, 1996, now infamous in the mountaineering world, that Charlotte and 11 other climbers who had scaled the 29,029ft mountain were caught in a blizzard as they began their descent.
The party were well aware that on Everest, rapidly changing weather isn’t just an inconvenience, it can be a death sentence. They found themselves caught in a whiteout, meaning it was impossible to tell which way they were going.
Despite having rapidly depleting supplies of oxygen, used to help them breathe in the thin mountain air, the group had no option but to stop.
The freezing winds caused Charlotte’s contact lenses to freeze on to her eyes.
It was then, as the temperatures dropped to -50C and the winds roared at 70mph, that Charlotte curled up and waited for the end.
For two days the mountaineers battled to survive as snow battered them on the Southeast Ridge. Charlotte later recalled: “We waited for that warm fuzzy feeling that accompanied hypothermia and death.”
The storm eventually cleared, but eight of the men and women who had journeyed up the mountain would never come down again, including Fischer.
It remains one of the worst disasters to happen on Everest. More than 375 people have died trying to climb it.
Writing in the American Alpine Journal, Charlotte described the relief that followed the storm’s passing.
“Miraculously, the storm abated. Halffrozen we staggered to our feet and made an attempt to shuffle off.
“My knees kept buckling and I couldn’t seem to make headway.” Just yards from the relative safety of her tent, Charlotte
We waited for that fuzzy feeling that accompanied hypothermia and death charlotte fox ON THINKING DEATH WAS IMMIMENT ON CLIMB
collapsed. It was Russian climber Anatoli Boukreev, who returned with an oxygen tank and dragged her back to camp, who saved her life.
Later, people blamed the tragedy on the commercialisation of Everest.
But for Charlotte, it was a dark episode during a life dedicated to mountaineering.
During the summer before her ordeal she had tackled two other climbs in the Himalayas exceeding 26,300ft, Gasherbrum II and Cho
Oyu. An only child born in North Carolina, Charlotte was a self-described “Southern belle” with a lifelong love of the outdoors and adventure.
After graduating from university, she fell in love with the Rocky Mountains and made the state of Colorado her home. There, she became a talented waterskier and found a job in mountain rescue, living among the peaks that were her passion.
She described herself as an “eternal fun hog”.
Yet her disastrous descent from Everest was not the only time tragedy would strike in her life.
In 1993 her boyfriend Mark Bebie was climbing in the Canadian Rockies when he died in an avalanche.
Heartbreak would strike again in 2004 when her husband of four years, Reese
Martin III, died in a paragliding accident.
But the loss of two loved ones did not leave Charlotte bitter. “I was never mad at Mark or Reese for dying in their pursuit of living,” she said. And despite multiple tragedies on the mountainside, Charlotte refused to give up her thrill-seeking.
In the 22 years of her life which followed Everest, she scaled countless others but never returned to the mountain that almost took her life. But when asked to reflect on the tragedy which defined so much of her life, she said: “A bunch of people went climbing, each with his or her own reasons. There were no heroes or villains.”
Her friends were distraught when on May 24 she was found dead at her home in Telluride, Colorado.
She had celebrated her birthday just two weeks earlier.
Charlotte died after falling down 77 hardwood steps outside her four-floor house. It had a lift but, despite sometimes being injured from her many climbs, she refused to use it as she wanted to stay fit on the stairs.
Kim Reynolds discovered Charlotte’s body when she called round to visit her friend. She told a local newspaper: “Finding her body was a very shocking and difficult thing.
“She recently had a birthday, and she told me, ‘I’m happy to be 61’.”
“Those words, ‘I’m happy,’ might have gone right in and out of my ears if this hadn’t happened.
“To be the last person with her, with my hands on her heart, and to remember those last words she said to me, I have to look at it as a privilege rather than a horror. I got to send her off, with love.” And the cruel irony of the nature of Charlotte’s death was not lost on friends.
Writing in Rock and Ice magazine, fellow climber Alison Osius said: “Charlotte had survived so much up high that it was stunning and profoundly sad that she died in a household accident.”
But, right to the end, Charlotte Fox had one love affair which she could never shake off.
Earlier in the year, she had been forced to abandon an attempt to climb Mount Baruntse in the Himalayas.
Just a week before her death she was discussing climbing in Nepal again and reportedly told a friend, “I’m doin’ one more”.
At 61, just as at 39, Charlotte Fox longed to be on top of the world.