In July 1979, Hill married MTV co-founder and media executive Robert Pittman;[2] who was a radio disc jockey and the Program Director of WNBC in New York when they met.
Hill married commodities trader Thomas Dittmer in April 2001, and they purchased a ranch and vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley.
[9] Then in 1994 she raised corporate sponsorship with $250,000 from Chesebrough-Ponds for an attempt climbing the difficult Kangshung Face, with her film production partner at the time, filmmaker David Breashears, and climbers Alex Lowe, Barry Blanchard and Steve Swenson but the expedition was turned back by avalanche danger above 25,000 feet.
[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, to stream journalistic dispatches from Base Camp to schoolchildren in the United States.
[12][13][14] Online, the website was referred to as The "NBC Everest Assault.” On May 10, 1996, at roughly 2:30 pm, Hill summitted and exchanged high fives with others on the peak before descending Hillary Step.
Eighteen hours later, one of the Mountain Madness guides, Neil Beidleman descended Hillary Step with Hill and her teammates, including Tim Madsen and Charlotte Fox, to find camp.
At the bottom, the group joined with Mike Groom, 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 poor eyesight, but had been waiting for Rob Hall, an Adventure Consultants guide, to return, along with Klev Schoening from Mountain Madness and two sherpa.
Around midnight, stars came out as the storm subsided, prompting Beidleman, Schoening, Gammelgaard, and Groom to make it to camp and find help, leaving Namba and Weathers, who were unconscious, and Fox and Hill, who were too exhausted to continue with Madsen.
Upon reaching Camp IV, the group alerted Anatoli Boukreev, a guide for Hill's team, Mountain Madness, on the location of the rest of the climbers.
The morning of May 14, they hiked to Pheriche, the town below base camp, where Hill, Fox and Madsen departed in a chartered helicopter to Kathmandu.
Jon Krakauer, who was sent to climb with another expedition, and to report on the commercialization of Everest and the increasing number of rich clients without expertise,[15] later expanded his September 1996 Outside Magazine article into a book with the same title, Into Thin Air (1997).
"[19] 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."
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] In the TV movie Into Thin Air: Death on Everest (1997), based on Krakauer's book, Pamela Gien [d] portrays Sandy Hill.