It was May 2007, at the end of the spring climbing season on Mount Everest, and Russell Brice was hosting one of his epic parties at base camp. Brice, who owns Himalayan Experience—a.k.a. Himex, one of the largest commercial outfitters on the mountain—had a lot to celebrate. The weather had been highly cooperative this year, and almost all of his 13 clients who were hoping to summit had made it to the top. "Some of our team were on the summit without gloves for more than an hour!!! Unbelievable!" raved a report on the company's Web site. Better yet, the season had concluded without the commotion of the year before, when Brice had found himself engulfed in controversy that continued to dog him.

I had joined the Himex expedition about a month earlier, and after reaching my climbing goal—the North Col, at 23,000 feet—I stuck around for the beer-and-whiskey-fueled farewell party, held in a big community tent known as the Tiger Dome. The night kicked off with "The Brice Is Right," a skit performed by a few of the Himex team members, one of whom pulled off an uncanny impersonation of their venerable expedition leader. After that there was an hour of limbo dancing under a trekking pole.

At one point, as I stood on the sidelines, Brice approached me. He wasn't particularly imposing—55, five foot eight, and 165 pounds—but he could be intimidating, with the air of a seasoned army general and a swift, unpredictable temper. Tonight he was in good spirits, the stress of the climbing season now behind him.

"This is what I love," Brice said. "Look at all these people here together—the Sherpas, the climbers, the people from other expeditions. I throw the best parties on Everest."

We stood talking for a minute, then Brice abruptly changed the subject. "You think anyone else would have done what I did for David Sharp?" he said, turning to me. "Do you think anyone else would have moved his body? Would anyone else have contacted his family, or brought them here? Or have lit a candle in his memory at the monastery, or have built the cairn or made the plaque?

"I live around death all the time," he went on. "Do you know how many bodies I've moved on the mountain? A lot! And you know what? I just found out that my auntie died today. You know what her last words were? 'Come down safe.' So now all of my family is dead, and I have to deal with that, and meantime keep all this running... So why am I the bad guy?"

"Because you're the big guy." I didn't know what else to tell him.

"Fuckin'-A right," Brice said. "No one else can do what I do here. They just copy me."

He had a point. After running trips in the Himalayas for more than 13 years, Brice was at the top of his game. To date, he had put more than 300 clients on the summits of 8,000-meter peaks. He'd developed his own niche, leading clients up 29,035-foot Everest—via the slightly less traveled Northeast Ridge, which, while treacherous, took the south side's deadly Khumbu Icefall out of the equation. He had one of the best safety records in the business, and his success had secured him a starring role in a Discovery Channel reality series, Everest: Beyond the Limit, reportedly accompanied by a contract worth millions.

Yet Brice's involvement in the David Sharp incident was still weighing him down. Sharp was the 34-year-old British engineer who died high on Everest in 2006, just a few feet from the route used by climbers. Sharp had come as part of a large expedition run by Asian Trekking, but he was climbing independently, without Sherpa support. On May 15, a team of Brice's clients, guides, and Sherpas encountered Sharp, incapacitated but still alive, lying in a rock alcove at around 28,000 feet. Several people interacted with him, but after determining that nothing could be done to save his life, they pushed on to the summit.

Sharp's death had come to define the 2006 season—if not the state of Everest itself—and many were pointing at Brice as the culprit. His critics characterized him as a callous tycoon who'd ordered his clients to ignore a dying man during their single-minded pursuit of a summit. ExplorersWeb, the popular expedition Web site run by climbers Tom and Tina Sjogren, called the Sharp debacle "the most shameful act in the history of mountaineering."

Brice's reputation wasn't exactly enhanced by his role in a second 2006 controversy. On September 30, on Cho Oyu, the 26,906-foot peak 20 miles northwest of Everest, Chinese soldiers shot and killed a young nun who was trying to escape Tibet by way of a snowy pass called Nangpa La. Brice was running a commercial trip on Cho Oyu at the time, and he chewed out a guide who was circulating news of the shooting, since it might jeopardize their climbing permits.

I'd become interested in Russell Brice—and the conflicting stories I kept hearing about him—while researching my book about the wicked season of 2006. While I didn't consider him a saint, I wasn't convinced he was the devil some had made him out to be, either. What I knew was that Brice had built a career out of an extraordinarily dangerous game and that high-altitude guiding came with its own set of rules and complications. By the time I saw him on the mountain in 2007, I was beginning to wonder whether guys like Brice represented the downfall of Everest or its last, best hope.