STILL, I DIDN'T have my ending. How does one end a farcical adventure documentary? "Let's go down to the glacier," Brown said. We scampered through the ice field, where he pulled off a five-foot-long icicle and yelled, "I keep telling you how to do things, and you don't do them the way I said. What's the matter with you?" I took his cue and grabbed my own ice saber while Ross rolled tape. "I've had it with your slave-driving filmmaking program," I cried. "Die! Die!!!" As mock adversaries heavily swaddled in fleece and down, we hardly resembled samurai in a Kurosawa battle scene. But the clash served a purpose, as all great fight scenes do. I had my ending.

All that was left, after descending, would be three days of postproduction in Boulder. I had considered this an afterthought, but the 15-hour days locked in a dark edit studio learning Final Cut Pro would prove otherwise. Back home, it would take me longer to format my 12-minute movie onto a DVD than it had to climb the mountain.

Atop Kilimanjaro, however, all of that frustration was still a pleasant abstraction. Forty minutes below the summit, we found Emeka clawing up the trail. He was pushing through ungodly pain. This is great! I thought, with film-school schadenfreude. Audiences love suffering!

By now I knew that Emeka, as a filmmaker, would want me to shoot, so I pulled out my camera and followed him back up. "It's been a long, long day," he wheezed as he reached the summit. Earlier, a number of people had shoved their way to the summit, but now we stood alone atop Africa. No amount of planning could have created this moment. In the end, the mountain writes its own drama.