Rob Hall

Robert Edwin "Rob" Hall (14 January 1961 – 11 May 1996) was a New Zealand mountaineer best known for being the head guide of a 1996 Mount Everest expedition in which he, a fellow guide, and two clients perished. A best-selling account of the expedition was given in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and the expedition has been dramatised in the 2015 film Everest. At the time of his death, Hall had just completed his fifth summit of Everest, more at that time than any other non-Sherpa mountaineer. Hall met his future wife, Jan Arnold, a New Zealand physician, during his Everest summit attempt in 1990. Hall and Arnold climbed Denali for their first date and later married. In 1993, Rob Hall summited Everest along with Arnold. In the catastrophic 1996 season, Arnold would have accompanied Hall on his Everest expedition, but she was pregnant. Two months after Hall died on the descent from Everest, she gave birth to their daughter Sarah Arnold-Hall. In 2002, Jan Arnold married German cabinet-maker Andreas Niemann, had another daughter with him, and currently resides in Nelson, New Zealand.