SNICKER IF YOU LIKE, but their idealism is sincere, and, at its best, ExplorersWeb is defined by it. The most compelling example is the story of the killing of 17-year-old Buddhist nun Kelsang Namtso at Nangpa La.

Nangpa La is a Himalayan pass a few miles to the west of Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest mountain in the world, and it's a common route for refugees fleeing Tibet for Nepal. On September 30, 2006, Namtso was killed with a long-range rifle by the Chinese border police as she tried to cross. The shooting happened within sight of Cho Oyu advance base camp, in full view of some 100 people.

Word got out two days later, on October 2. Tina checked her e-mail and found a note from Luis Benitez, a Boulder-based guide who'd taken blind climber Erik Weihenmayer to the top of Everest in 2001.

"There is a story that happened here on the 30th and the 1st that is not being told," Benitez wrote. He described glancing out of his team's dining tent to see a line of Tibetans headed up the pass, hearing gunfire, watching the Tibetans break into a run, and then seeing two people gunned down. Though the facts coming in were sketchy, Tom and Tina went ahead with a tentative story headlined "Cho Oyu ABC Swarmed by Chinese Army—Tibetans Shot at Nangpa La?"

"The next day we get an e-mail from the mountain urging us to remove the story," says Tina, declining to say who it was from. "There were commercial guides intimidating sources, saying that if they confirmed it, they would be detained at the border and that they wouldn't be able to climb in the future."

Benitez confirmed this to me, as did Kate Saunders, a spokeswoman for Washington, D.C.–based Save Tibet, a nonprofit that conducted extensive follow-up interviews with the climbers and refugees. To the Sjogrens, active suppression—not just silence—was typical of the way some big outfitters reacted to the events. "Why did they lie?" Tom asks. "To protect their business. It's like the mob. Follow the money and you will find your reason."

"We said, ‘No, the story stays,' " Tina says. "So we had the story up for two days, but nothing happens. Then all of a sudden we start to see media. Now we get more confirmation. Save Tibet met with the refugees and interviewed them. But China denied. They said they had no information about any of that. So we posted a call to climbers. We said, ‘Guys, we need pictures.' To our big surprise, three hours later, there are pictures in our mailbox from Pavle Kozjek, a Slovenian climbing a new route on the mountain. So we published the pictures and we sent them to Save Tibet. Now China turns around and says, ‘Yeah, OK, we did shoot them, but it was in self-defense.' We made another posting. We said, ‘Guys, we need video.' That's when Sergiu sent us the video." It arrived two days later.

Sergiu Matei is Romanian, and it's no surprise to Tina that the photos and video were sent by citizens of formerly Communist countries. "No one knows better how a toothache hurts than someone who has had his tooth pulled," she says.