Sandy Hill (mountaineer)

Sandra Hill (born April 12, 1955,^[1] formerly Sandra Hill Pittman) is a socialite, mountaineer, author, and former fashion editor. She survived the 1996 Mount Everest disaster shortly after becoming the 34th woman to reach the Mount Everest summit and the second American woman to ascend all of the Seven Summits.^[2][3][4]

Personal life[]

Sandy Hill grew up in Los Gatos, California.^[5] Her father ran a successful business that rented portable toilets to construction sites.^[5] She graduated from UCLA^[2] before moving to New York for her first job, working as a buyer for the now defunct Bonwit Teller.^[5] After meeting an editor at Mademoiselle, she landed her second job as Merchandising Editor of the magazine,^[2][5] and then became beauty editor of Brides magazine. Hill then served until 1986 as president of a division of RJR Nabisco called "In Fashion" where she produced television shows about fashion and style. One of those shows was , which was the first TV program to feature fashion commentary, videos and runway footage. Hill has also been a contributing editor to Vogue and Condé Nast Traveler, and written feature articles for other publications.

Hill was briefly married to Jerry Solomon, who worked in the sport business and was a graduate student of Columbia at the time; the couple were divorced by the time she was 23.^[5] Solomon later went on to marry figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. In July 1979, Hill married MTV co-founder and media executive Robert Pittman;^[2] they have one son, Robert T. "Bo" Pittman.^[6] The couple divorced in 1997, and Hill received a settlement of $20 million from Pittman.^[6][7] Hill met snowboarder Stephen Koch while climbing Mount Everest in April 1996, and they lived together in New York until 1997.^[8]

In 1998, Hill attended the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York to study architectural preservation and restoration. She graduated in 2000.

Hill married commodities trader in April 2001, and they purchased a ranch and vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley. Hill filed for divorce in 2008, and attempted unsuccessfully to invalidate legally the couple's prenuptial agreement.^[7]

Mountaineering[]

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Hill began mountaineering as a teenager; her first summit at age 13 was Disappointment Peak in the Teton Range. In 1992 she began a quest to become the first American woman to scale the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent. She summitted Aconcagua (1992), Denali (1992), Vinson Massif (1993), Mount Elbrus (1993), Mount Kilimanjaro (1993), Mount Kosciuszko (1994), and Puncak Jaya (1995). Hill finally reached the Mount Everest summit in 1996, thus becoming the second American woman to scale the Seven Summits, following .

Hill had attempted Everest twice before her successful ascent in 1996. In 1993, she reached 23,500 feet (7,200 m) on a guided expedition following the traditional South Col route. Then in 1994 she raised corporate sponsorship with $200,000 from Vaseline for an attempt climbing the difficult Kangshung Face, personally guided by Alex Lowe, but the expedition was turned back by avalanche danger on the mountain. Upon descending, Hill ripped a cross from her neck and threw it into the wilderness. Her third visit to Everest, she had a cross necklace custom-made by jeweler to bury on the mountain, but no one has reported if this ceremony took place. ^[9]

1996 Everest disaster[]

Hill was one of the survivors of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.^[6][10][11] As part of the Mountain Madness expedition headed by Scott Fischer, during what was her third attempt to climb Mount Everest, she made an agreement with NBC Interactive Media, which streamed the information to schoolchildren in the United States, to do a daily video blog and talk about her journey, for which a sherpa carried a 40-pound satellite phone to Camp IV, where it didn't work. ^[12][13][14] Other expeditions dubbed Hill's team the "NBC Everest Assault," despite Hill's team members' refusal to participate in the sponsorship. On May 10, 1996 at roughly 2:30 pm, Hill summitted as the final member of Mountain Madness, where she exchanged high fives with others on the peak before descending Hillary Step holding her ice ax in the wrong hand and entangling her crampons in rope, alerting Neal Beidleman to assist her down the step. Hill was short-roped up the mountain by a sherpa between Camp IV and the summit, and was in weak conditions that worsened on the way back to Camp IV. Beidleman continued to walk with Hill and her teammates, including and Charlotte Fox, to find camp. Stopping to check on others, Beidleman then noticed Fox giving Hill a shot of dexamethasone that Hill had asked for. Beidleman rushed to Lene Gammelgaard and asked her to trade oxygen with Hill to adrenalize her, as Gammelgaard's tank had more oxygen left. On a saddle called the South Col, Hill was clipped to Biedleman's harness as he slid down the fixed lines. At the bottom, the group joined with , a guide from Adventure Consultants, and his clients Yasuko Namba, who was brought down the lines by Beidleman, and Beck Weathers, who had not summitted due to lethargy, but had been waiting for Rob Hall, an Adventure Consultants guide, to return, along with from Mountain Madness and two sherpa. Not knowing which direction to go due to the storm, they huddled in the snow. Around midnight, stars came out as the storm subsided, prompting Beidleman, Schoening, Gammelgaard, and Groom to find help and make it to camp. Madsen stayed behind with Fox and Hill who were not able to move, and Namba and Weathers, who were both supposedly unconscious. Upon reaching Camp IV, Anatoli Boukreev, a guide for Hill's team, Mountain Madness, set out to rescue the remaining climbers alone. Reaching the group, he gave Hill oxygen, leaving her with Madsen, and assisted Fox to the camp before returning to half-carry, half-drag Hill to Camp IV. Descending to Camp III, Hill asked Beidleman to give her another dexamethasone shot. On May 12, Camp IV was evacuated for Camp III, where three days earlier, Chen Yu-Nan, an expedition member of a Taiwanese group led by Malaku Gau Ming-Ho, had fallen off the Lhotse Face from the wind without crampons or a tie-in. Descending between Camp III and Camp II, a sherpa was hit by a falling rock. On May 13, they reached base camp. The morning of May 14, they hiked to Pheriche, the town below base camp, before Hill chartered a helicopter to Kathmandu for Friday. ^{[15] [14]}

Eight people died, and the disaster was covered in numerous magazine articles and interviews with other survivors. Jon Krakauer, who was sent on the climb to report on the commercialization of Everest and the increasing number of rich clients without expertise,^[16] later expanded his September 1996 Outside Magazine article into a book with the same title, Into Thin Air (1997).^{[2][3][10][17]} However, Hill and the others all had previous climbing experience.^[18] Hill rebutted negative claims in various media outlets, including an interview with Newsweek, wherein she stated, "We behaved like a team at all times."^[19] Highly visible in the media before the climb, she believed she was "pigeonholed as a rich New Yorker", which "painted such an easy picture of a villain right there."^[20]

In a 2006 interview with Outside, Hill defended Boukreev's decisions on Everest and attacked the media and various authors and journalists who covered the disaster, saying that "most of what was reported in 1996 was prejudiced, sensationalist, and overblown—thrilling fiction at best—but not journalism."^[21] On May 20, Fisher's Mountain Madness team met at the Yak and Yeti Hotel garden in Kathmandu to honor Fisher. Hill was seen keeping her distance from Beidleman and Boukreev, who she failed to mention during an interview and background session with Newsweek as her rescuers. ^[22] Boukreev was given an award for heroism by the Alpine Club, and he recounted his story in the book, The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest (1997), which was at least partly a response to Krakauer's account, in which Krakauer had laid some of the blame for the disaster on Boukreev, Hill, and a few others.

In the August 1997 issue of Vogue, Hill wrote about the whole experience, and went into detail about her long history as a climber and her passion for mountain climbing that developed when she was young.^[5] She talked about the difficulties she experienced during her climbs of the Seven Summits and about the real dangers she experienced during her final climb of Everest.^[5]

In the TV movie Into Thin Air: Death on Everest (1997), based on Krakauer's book, portrays Sandy Hill.^[23]

David Breashears interviewed Hill in the documentary film Storm Over Everest (2008), which was aired on PBS Frontline on May 13, 2008.^[20][18]

In the 2015 feature film Everest, Hill is portrayed by Vanessa Kirby.

Books[]

Hill is the main author of the book Fandango: Recipes, Parties, and License to Make Magic (2007), which talks about Sandy Hill's lifestyle and includes various recipes co-authored by and advice on how to decorate and host, using 18 parties that Hill designed and hosted as examples.^[24] The book received praise from The New York Times and other authors.^{[citation needed]}

Hill's second book, Mountain: Portraits of High Places (2011), is a compilation of photographs and art with rarely seen images from prominent nature photographers, including Galen Rowell, Peter Beard, Ansel Adams, and Frank Smythe.^[25]

References[]

External links[]

Mitchell, Deborah (1997-06-11). "Media Circus". Salon. Salon.com, LLC. Retrieved 25 July 2021.