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It took only a small misstep to trigger the whole chaotic accident. George Bell, who had lost all feeling in his feet, began downclimbing hard ice to aid in the maneuvering of Gilkey. He slipped, lost his balance, and started plummeting down the slope. The rope came tight to Streather and pulled him off his stance. Streather frantically tried to self-arrest but couldn’t get any purchase with the pick of his ax.

As the two men careened out of control down the mountain, their rope intersected with that linking Houston and Bates, pulling it tight. With no time to prepare, first Houston and then Bates were plucked off their feet. Four men were now hurtling toward what seemed certain death. Bates later wrote, “This is it! I thought as I landed heavily on my pack. There was nothing I could do now. We had done our best, but our best wasn’t good enough. This was the end…. Only thousands of feet of empty space separated us from the glacier below.”

The rope between Bell and Streather next snagged on the short tie-in between Molenaar and Gilkey, pulling Molenaar off his feet with a sudden jerk. Five men were now plunging in a tangled mess of ropes toward the 7,000-foot void. And two more were about to join them.

Dee Molenaar’s watercolor sketch of the complex accident of August 10, 1953, that nearly swept seven teammates to their deaths.

From 60 feet above Gilkey, Schoening saw what was happening. He threw himself on top of the ice ax he had jammed behind the small boulder and hung on to the rope with all his strength. The jolt came as Molenaar’s fall started to pull the helpless Gilkey down the slope. But Schoening held Gilkey in place, and the short tie-in stopped Molenaar’s fall.

Only the fact that the jolts came in a punctuated series kept seven men from being simultaneously swept to their deaths off the Abruzzi Ridge. Schoening held on, clinging to his rope with a death grip, and one by one, each of the falling men came to a halt. By the time the chain of events was over, Bell, the one who had fallen the farthest, lay 250 feet below Schoening. (See diagram.)

Pete Schoening’s “miracle belay” has become a legend. Nothing like it, before or since, has ever been performed in the mountains—one man with a single ax and a grip of steel stopping the otherwise fatal falls of six teammates and of himself. Schoening’s deed, which as a superbly trained climber he performed by instinct in a split-second reflex, is, simply, the most famous belay in mountaineering history.

The men were alive. But their predicament would now drain everyone’s last reserves.

Bell had lost his pack, his glasses, and his mittens in the fall. As he stumbled, half blind, up toward his teammates, he yelled, “My hands are freezing!” Bates and Molenaar had landed with one on top of the other, sprawled across a rocky outcrop. Before they could even guess what had happened, they heard a cry—probably from Schoening: “Get your weight off the rope!” Still holding his belay in that death grip, Schoening felt his hands starting to freeze, even with his mittens on.

Bates unroped, climbed down to Bell, and offered him a spare pair of loosely woven wool mitts that he had carried in his parka pocket. Bell’s fingers, already “an ugly fish-belly white,” were so stiff that he needed Bates to put the mitts on his hands.

The worst injured was Houston, whose head had struck a rock, knocking him unconscious. As Bates cautiously worked his way toward the “crumpled figure” below him, he was not sure whether his best friend was alive or dead. Bates touched Houston’s shoulder. Houston opened his eyes, then staggered to his feet. “Where are we?” he pleaded. “What are we doing here?”

No amount of explaining from Bates seemed to penetrate Houston’s fog. He kept saying, “Where are we?” He had suffered a bad concussion and lost his short-term memory. For the rest of his life, he would be unable to remember the accident. To motivate his friend, Bates brought his face close to Houston