On May 16 he began his summit attempt. The weather was clear, and he made good time: By 12:01 am on the 21st, he was less than four hours from the peak. The Hillary Step, a 40-foot wall of rock and ice and the last obstacle before the summit, loomed ahead. He started to move toward it when he heard a distress call from his climbing partner up above. “There’s a guy dying here,” the voice crackled over the radio. “What do I do?”
Hall ascended to the dying man’s position; it was a Bangladeshi climber from another group who had been left for dead. He was clipped into the same rope they were ascending, and he wasn’t moving. Hall’s sherpa grabbed the man’s hand. It was limp; he couldn’t tell if the man was breathing. “His position and posture symbolized absolute desperation and sadness,” Hall wrote later in a blog entry.
They were only an hour from the summit, and they debated whether to abort their climb to try to save the man. Hall’s partner was distraught — he wanted to help even if that meant abandoning the climb. Hall had no such ambivalence. “I thought I would have reacted differently, but when I looked at him, I realized that there was just nothing we could do,” Hall says. “I felt really sad, but I figured he was dead or he was about to die.” Hall persuaded his partner to keep moving, and they scrambled past the dying man. “It was a Day Z moment,” Hall says grimly. The man died, and his body was left behind, encased in snow and ice.