WHEN I FIRST SET OUT to report on Everest this year, my focus was the strange mix of horror and fascination the mountain seemed to have taken on—a high-altitude Wild West filled with summit-grubbing rogues and desperadoes. What I discovered when I landed in Kathmandu at the end of the spring climbing season was a story more bizarre, more complicated, and more human than anything I imagined. I sat in cafés with zoned-out climbers sipping sweet, milky tea. In the tourist bars, weather-beaten men shared drinks with frostbite victims dressed in bandages. Climbers told tales of jostling crowds, clients so clueless they'd hardly walked in crampons before, and one woman being taught how to rappel—on the Second Step of the Northeast Ridge.

True, there was no shortage of vaudeville on the mountain. On the south side, an ultra-fit former Polish Playboy cover girl named Martyna Wojciechowska reached the summit on May 18. Newspapers in the Philippines reported a bitter rivalry between maverick Dale Abenojar—who claimed the first Filipino ascent, via the

As the season wore on, Everest began to resemble a deadly reality show populated by self-obsessed contestants reaching for a prize discredited by their very attention.

Northeast Ridge on May 15—and a national team that summited from the south side two days later. A young Sherpa, Lakpa Tharke, was reported to have stripped naked for summit photos. (He actually only bared his torso, but the flash of flesh left some of his colleagues horrified.) A team on the north side had their ice axes and crampons stolen; other groups saw their tents looted and their oxygen filched.

In a frustrated May 16 dispatch to his expedition Web site, Brazilian Vitor Negrete—an independent who, like David Sharp, had gotten his permit from the cut-rate Asian Trekking—described reaching his cache at Camp II on the north side only to discover that thieves had taken his food and tent. Resupplied by fellow climbers, Negrete would summit without using oxygen, as he'd wanted to do, only to collapse and die of acute altitude sickness after his return to high camp, on May 18.

As the season wore on, Everest began to resemble a deadly reality show populated by self-obsessed contestants reaching for a prize discredited by their very attention. But then, in an instant, the whole crazy ride whipsawed, and Everest became a theater of heroism instead.

Early on May 26 on the Northeast Ridge, American guide Dan Mazur, his lead Sherpa, Jangbu, and two clients—Canadian Andrew Brash and Briton Myles Osborne—were approaching the Second Step when they saw a man sitting cross-legged just inches from the edge of the 10,000-foot Kangshung Face. He wore no gloves or hat, and his fingers were deeply frostbitten. "I imagine you're surprised to see me here," the man said.

His name, he told them, was Lincoln Hall. He was lucid enough to speak, but thought he was on a boat and, in his advanced stages of hypothermia, had started to shed his clothes. Mazur's team checked the logo on Hall's jacket and realized he was on Russian Alex Abramov's 7 Summits expedition. When they radioed Abramov at base camp, he explained that Hall had been left on the mountain the day before, after he'd collapsed and appeared lifeless, and Sherpas couldn't bring him down. Now the astonished Abramov dispatched 13 Sherpas to aid in the Australian's rescue. Unlike David Sharp, Hall could stand, and when help arrived, he was led down to safety. Unfortunately, Abramov's team had already called Hall's wife, Barbara Scanlan, and told her Lincoln was dead. When Scanlan answered the phone the next day, she could hardly believe the thin whisper she heard belonged to her husband.