EVEREST MOUNTAINEER PHONED WIFE, THEN DIED.

Byline: John F. Burns The New York Times

Around dusk Saturday, with two American climbers and five others missing and probably already dead atop Mount Everest, a 35-year-old New Zealander made a satellite telephone call to his pregnant wife from a snow hole just below the summit of the world's highest peak.

His voice weak from frostbite, the climber, Rob Hall, murmured what may have been his last words before he died. ``Hey, look, don't worry about me,'' he said.

As news filtered through Monday of the worst single loss of life that has ever occurred on the 29,028-foot mountain, the last hours of Hall, a professional mountaineer who had reached the summit of Mount Everest a record five times, captured the drama that no amount of high technology has been able to strip from the challenge of ascending the world's highest peaks.

The eight climbers who died in a fierce blizzard that blew up Friday, shortly after they and at least a dozen others reached the mountain's summit, were doing something that has become almost routine in recent years.

Since the first successful ascent of Everest on May 29, 1953, more than 4,000 climbers have tried to reach the summit. Of these, before Friday, 615, including scores of Americans, had made it to the top. In 1993, 40 climbers achieved the feat in a single day.

But mountains like Everest sometimes bite back at their challengers, in ways that make those who love mountaineering question the fashionable turn their sport has taken in recent years, when high technology, clothing and equipment have made it far easier to climb the highest mountains, but also easier to get into situations that can suddenly become fatal.

The dead from this latest disaster included some who were highly experienced mountaineers, including Hall and a 47-year-old Japanese woman, Yasuko Nanba, who had climbed many of the world's highest peaks. But they also included some who were strictly amateurs, drawn to the venture by advertisements in climbing magazines that offer places on ``commercial'' Everest expeditions for about $60,000 each.

``Some of us have been asking: Is it right that an average climber can order an ascent of Everest out of a catalog?'' said Mark Bryant, editor of Outside, an outdoors magazine published in Sante Fe, N.M.

Partly to answer the question, Bryant had assigned an American outdoors writer and amateur climber, Jon Krakauer, to accompany the climbing group that was led by Hall, and it was to Krakauer's impressions on the Internet that many climbers were turning Monday as they pondered what occurred.

Krakauer, one of more than 20 climbers who reached the Everest summit before the storm hit Friday, was reported to be safely back at the Everest base camp Monday, along with other amateur climbers who survived the ordeal.

Among these was Sandy Hill Pittman, a former New York fashion editor who has used a radio link to relay dramatic accounts of her experiences on the mountain - ``It's bitterly cold tonight, the temperatures are subzero and it's pitch black'' - to Manhattan friends who accompanied her as far as the base camp. From there, Pittman's accounts have been passed by satellite link to an Internet Web site maintained by NBC.

Pittman, the 41-year-old estranged wife of Robert Pittman, one of the co-founders of MTV, previously has climbed six of the ``High Seven'' mountains around the world, one on each of the continents, and thus may have been better qualified than some of the climbers described by Krakauer in the accounts that have appeared on the Web site known as Outside Online. According to Bryant, Krakauer seemed shocked by the inexperience of some of the climbers he was grouped with at the Everest base camp.

``He mentioned that he was appalled - I think that was the word he used - when he looked around him,'' Bryant said. ``He said he wondered if he wasn't one of the people that didn't have any business being there.''

The picture that emerged from injured survivors who were helicoptered off Everest on Monday to Katmandu, the capital of Nepal, and from Internet reports, was of a storm that blew up in minutes Friday afternoon, turning what had been a good climbing day into a nightmare of temperatures that plunged to 40 degrees below zero, of swirling snowstorms that climbers call whiteouts, and fateful choices that determined which of the climbers died and which survived.

Apart from Hall, others presumed dead include Scott Fischer, 40, of Seattle, who was leading a group of 11 climbers on a commercial expedition put together by Mountain Madness, an expedition company in which Fischer was a partner.

The second American among the victims was Douglas Hansen, 42, from Renton, Wash., a U.S. Postal Service employee who reached the summit in Hall's group but died alongside Hall in the snow hole.

Also listed as dead was Andy Harris, 31, a New Zealander with extensive mountaineering experience who was a guide in Hall's group. Accounts of his death said he had successfully descended to a tented camp at a feature on Everest known as South Col, 2,600 feet below the summit, but had somehow missed the tents in the whiteout. When the blizzard lifted Sunday, the accounts said, Harris' footprints were found leading from the camp, with his body a little way beyond.

The three others who died were in a third expedition manned by members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Force, an Indian paramilitary organization. Unlike the Hall and Fischer groups, who reached the summit along what has become the ``highway'' to the summit, the South Col route from Nepal used by Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander, and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese climber, on the first successful attempt in 1953, the Indians reached the top from Tibet, up the north face of the mountain. When the storm struck, they too were overwhelmed.