DURING TWO WEEKS of eye camps, Geoff and Ruit had performed 255 successful cataract surgeries. Some 2,115 other Nepalis had been treated for everything from mild conjunctivitis to minor tumors. This time, the climbers had been able to fully participate in the process.

The work done, it was time to have some fun—that is, if clawing your way up an enormous, lethal, frozen mountain in the middle of the night is your idea of a good time. At 7:30 the next morning, the team piled into an Mi-17 helicopter for the short hop through low clouds to Syangboche, where we'd start the approach to Cholatse.

You cannot set foot in the Khumbu—home to Everest, Ama Dablam, Cho Oyu, and other celebrity peaks—without pausing to admire the global village in action. In the hub of Namche Bazaar, a few hundred feet downhill from the airstrip, the main street was clogged with eager vendors—"Come in, come in! Big sale!"—peddling yak bells and jewelry and knockoff climbing gear, North Face logos slightly askew.

Despite the fact that tourism countrywide was down as much as 50 percent, the Khumbu still percolated with activity. Everest was experiencing its busiest season yet, with more than 300 people on the mountain.

"Poor Everest," Dawa sighed over pizza in Namche. "Why can't people leave it alone?"

Dawa was a stout five feet tall and could haul a pack as big as he was uphill at a pace so brisk I had to trot, with virtually no weight, just to keep up. He'd grown up in the Khumbu and gone to work on Everest as a porter at age 20, working his way up to climbing Sherpa. He spoke five languages. Of all the locals I met, Dawa seemed the most keenly aware of the plight of his people. In June, he would set out to mountain-bike over 30 of Nepal's 17,000-foot passes in honor of his eight-year-old son, Gelu, who has cerebral palsy, and to "inspire people toward peace, not war."

"We're chickens in a gold mine," Dawa told me. "But all we see is the grain. We should be mining the gold. If we had a real government, you'd be working for me instead of the other way around."

Empowering Sherpas was one of Conrad's big objectives as well. In February 2004, he and his wife, Jennifer Lowe, and writer Jon Krakauer established the Khumbu Climbing School, training Sherpas on the crags around Phortse, seven miles down-valley from Cholatse. Working in dangerous conditions without technical expertise, too many Sherpas, Anker believed, were dying in mountaineering accidents. But by the spring of 2005, every Sherpa fixing ropes on Everest's Lhotse Face had graduated from his school.

It was a three-day hike to base camp, 12 miles and more than 4,000 vertical feet up the Gokyo Valley. When we pulled into Cholatse base camp, at 15,500 feet, the team was a tad battered. I was feeling altitude's familiar vise grip squeezing my skull. Abby and Jordan were coughing and wheezing with colds. Kevin was grappling with intestinal issues. And Geoff was moving slowly. This was his first Himalayan peak in more than a decade, and he would have to leave Cholatse early for Bhutan to meet with the king about a new eye program there.

"My biggest training day for this was a two-hour run," he said as we turtled our way up the steep ravine that led into camp. "And I was sore for a week!"

Then there was the climb itself. To fix or not to fix ropes: That was the question. No alpinist worth his ice ax wants to be accused of climbing a mountain in lesser style than those who came before. Fixing ropes would give us a better shot at the summit, but it seemed tacky at best. Only 20 people had ever been to the top of Cholatse, and we didn't want to treat it like a popular North American trade route.

Still, the mountain demanded precaution. "Does that look like Rainier or Denali?" Conrad said one morning on the trek as we viewed recon footage of the mountain. We shook our heads.

"Are we treating it like Rainier or Denali?" he asked. We nodded.

"I just think getting so many people up a technical climb like this is presenting more risks than it's worth."

At dinner that first night in base camp, we mulled our options in the mess tent, the large dome glowing yellow under a spray of stars, the shadowy massif of Cholatse due east. At best we'd have a two- or three-day summit window, so, ultimately, how we climbed Cholatse seemed less important than whether we'd have a chance to do so at all. We decided to use fixed ropes—but only on the lower half of the mountain.

Mountaineering is dismal business. The higher you climb, the worse it gets. You learn anew each time to hate cold, hate gravity, hate darkness and snow and ice and rock, hate gray, rehydrated food. You hate peeing in a bottle and crapping in an ice hole. You hate, hate, hate 2 a.m. You hate putting on frozen boots. You hate your runny nose. You hate headaches, stomachaches, lethargy, dizziness, sleeplessness, sunburn, windburn, cottonmouth, cuts, bruises, and belayer's rigor mortis. You hate the ever-present, low-grade current of fear.

And yet you learn to love having climbed. Geoff was once asked at a slide show what qualities were essential to becoming a high-altitude mountaineer. "Great tolerance for pain," he responded, "and a lousy memory."

To climb on big mountains is to enter a realm of personal misery that's both severe and pointless—until you consider that the severity itself may be the point. Suffering begets enlightenment, say the Buddhists, and enlightenment begets compassion. In many ways, high-altitude climbing is the antithesis of what it means to be a Westie, which is to say it eschews the comforts and luxuries and entertainments that distance us from one another as well as from our own mortality. I can think of no image more relevant to our rapaciously self-absorbed world than that of two climbers tethered together on a knife ridge, living by the mountaineer's code: If he falls, I jump off the other side.

On May 12, after a 21-hour push, Conrad, Kris, Abby, Kevin, and John made it to the summit of Cholatse. I'd reached 17,500 feet a couple of days earlier before coming down with altitude sickness. Geoff nursed me through the night with diamox and ibuprofen, and then the next morning, as I descended, he went up. He climbed to 20,000 feet with Pete and Mike while Conrad and Kris punched out the route. After 24 hours, and a long ridge still to go, they turned around.