JENKINS: I want to throw something out here: I've always seen it as the responsibility of a guide, part of what you're paying your guide for, is to make the very difficult decisions, kind of like a general has to make very difficult decisions about the life and deaths of his troops, same thing with a guide. And that, in fact, a guide is there to make a decision about whether you are capable of continuing on. Is that not one of the toughest parts of being a guide?

HAHN: You bet, you bet. But I think it's easy for the public to have a simplified view of that—as if it all happens on summit day. And, of course in the real Everest situation, you're climbing together for a month and a half, two months before that day, and so that kind of decision-making and helping someone know whether they're ready for the thing or not, can—or probably should—come long before that summit day.

That's not to say there wouldn't be pressures on you that, against your better judgment, somebody ends up on a summit day that shouldn't be there, and maybe you have that tough decision to make, 100, 200 feet from the top, that really sets everything up to the boiling point.

But you know, to add a little to what we were just saying, these pressures aren't just on Everest, they're on all of the mountains we work on. It costs a heck of a lot for get people down to Antarctica. They want summits. But if you're in this for the long run, it comes down to your own fingers and toes, and yeah there is financial pressure, but to my knowledge, nobody I know is getting rich off of this business.

If you take a billionaire up, it's not like he's going to give you a couple of million for getting him up! [Laughs]. Not to me at least.

HAHN: (Laughing), It's still just making a living. And yeah, that pressure can be immense, but maybe not the way people seem to think it is.

VIESTURS: If I could make one comment. A lot of the people—especially in the higher-end expeditions where the people are paying a lot, and paying for the quality services, and the organization of those more expensive trips—as Guy said, there's not that many people who can really afford those, and the ones that have enough money to afford it are quite often very successful, very influential in whatever field of business that they're in.

Quite often, they're used to getting they're way. That can be difficult for them when someone else, rather than them, is calling the shots. And yes, even though they do sign up for a trip and at the beginning understand that they're going to get leadership from someone else, when it comes to being on the mountain and someone's telling them "no," they're often not used to hearing that word.

They're like "what do you mean no? This is what I want, and this is what I paid for." So sometimes, as a guide, when you have to make those tough decisions, you have not only be a guide, you have to almost be a psychologist and help these people slowly understand that they may not be capable.

So you don't come up and blindside them and say "listen, that's the end of the trip." The whole idea is to slowly let them know along the way, so hopefully they convince themselves before you have to come up and tell them. And of course there are some people that don't quite get it and you've got to then come up to them and literally just say "that's it." Hopefully for the most part, they'll agree, but then there are a few that are just like, "what do you mean? I don't understand."

So part of the thing that a guide needs to do is help these people understand their capabilities when they're climbing.

JENKINS: Dave, Guy, and Ed…and Neil as well too, have you all had to be in this situation and tell people to turn around?

VIESTURS: I've done it. And I've always had the attitude that, you know, I don't want to be taking somebody up high on the mountain that is a liability not only to themselves, but to me.

When it gets really tough up there, you could risk your life having to bring somebody down, so if there's any indication lower on the mountain that these people aren't performing…I mean, that's the whole idea of going to the mountains with these people, it's not like it's a guarantee that they're going to go to the top. It's a chance to try to see how they perform. And they should understand that climbing is not just going to the top, but it's the whole process and the whole journey, and to just experience and maybe learn along the way as well.

And if things go well, then maybe yeah, we get to go to the summit.

HAHN: . I'd say it's a constant part of guiding. I've turned guided folks 200, 250 feet from the top of Everest. And luckily the weather turned awful and you know, it looked like the right thing to do, but the weather might have turned for the better and we had still turned around short at the top.

It's got to be a huge part of the job, and on any mountain you're always trying to keep track of just that level of what's right for this person to be pushing in this dangerous environment, and when have we gone too far.

One of the reasons that none of us that you're speaking to this morning likes to point fingers too much (like after a '96 or something like that) is that we all know we could be in similar situations and be just a little bit on the wrong side of the right thing to do.

The same tragedies could happen to us if we keep working in that dangerous environment and working up near that limit. I mean, Rob Hall certainly knew the game, Scott Fisher knew the game, but yeah, those pressures are real, they're always there, and they can catch us.