BRICE TRIED TO TELL his side of the story that summer by releasing a detailed statement about what had transpired. But before things had died down, he was drawn into the shooting of the Tibetan nun on Cho Oyu by Chinese border guards.

Nangpa La, a pass near the mountain at 19,000 feet, has long been used as a trade route between Nepal and Tibet. Since the Chinese occupation of Tibet, in 1951, Tibetans have also used it to flee the country. The main path over the pass is visible from Cho's advance base camp, and some 70 refugees were crossing it on the morning of September 30 when climbers heard rifles firing across the valley. As an anonymous post on ExplorersWeb reported, "Without warning, shots rang out. Over and over and over. Then the line of people started to run uphill... Apparently the Chinese army was tipped off about their attempted escape, and had showed up with guns."

The morning had been busy for Brice. He was stationed at ABC while his clients were higher up, attempting to summit. One of them had fallen, and Sherpas were evacuating him to a lower camp. A climber with another team, organized by the Tibet Mountaineering School, had also fallen, injuring his leg. The Tibetans had called Brice—who provided financial support for the school—and he was hiking to their camp when he heard the gunfire. Such sounds weren't unprecedented in the area, given that China had guards stationed near the pass. In fact, Brice himself had been shot at a few years earlier, when he was mistaken for a refugee.

When Brice reached their tents, he found some of the soldiers, a few of whom were Tibetan, suffering from snow blindness. He gave them medical attention. "They were human beings who were suffering," he told me. "I've always helped such people in the past." He didn't realize that anyone had been killed until later that day, he said, when he was returning to the Himex camps and saw a body—that of a 17-year-old Tibetan nun—lying in the snow.

Many climbers on Cho Oyu had witnessed the shooting. A Romanian had even captured video; he smuggled it out of the country and later circulated it to the media. The earliest reports, however, had been filed directly from Cho Oyu by Luis Benitez, a seasoned Everest guide from Denver who worked for New Zealand–based Adventure Consultants. After watching the shooting, Benitez had whipped off an e-mail to ExplorersWeb. He asked that his name be deleted from the dispatch, fearing arrest—or worse—if the Chinese found out about his posts.

When Brice learned about the e-mail, he stormed into Benitez's camp and raised hell. "Are you trying to get us kicked out of the country?" he said, according to Benitez. "Are you fucking crazy?"

Critics argued that not only had Brice turned his back on the atrocity and come to the aid of the soldiers who'd committed it; he had also tried to stop the news from ever leaving the mountain. Brice countered that he had legitimate reasons for his actions, pointing to his long yet fragile relationship with the Chinese. On almost every expedition in Tibet, he dealt with some regulatory obstacle; he often offered favors to smooth out permit roadblocks. "We're in a privileged situation, being given permission to go to Cho Oyu, which is a fairly delicate area," Brice told me. "We don't want to abuse that or we won't be able to go back; the Chinese won't let us. We've been building up that trust for years."

While he didn't want news being broadcast from Cho Oyu, he wasn't insensitive to the issues at hand, particularly the plight of the Tibetans and the tensions involving border security. But things were more complicated than people realized, Brice said. If the Chinese were to revoke his climbing permit, he could lose his livelihood. For better or worse, he tended to work within the system rather than in defiance of it.

Benitez, who now works as an instructor for Outward Bound, still doesn't buy it. "Business-wise, I'm sure he felt that his hands were tied," he says. "But morally? When you're faced with doing the right thing or doing what supports your self-interest, that's a moral choice."