JENKINS: Well, here's a question that came from one of Outside's editors: What is the guide's responsibility to this client and to himself in extreme situations? I think we're probably talking here in the death zone, above 8,000 meters, in a difficult situation. What are the guide's responsibilities to his client and to himself? Anybody can answer that.

COTTER: Well, I might jump in the air and say that obviously our responsibilities are to try and get ourselves and the people we're with back safely from an attempt. And whether the summit is involved or not, is kind of irrelevant.

For those of us who are here talking today, the reason we're talking is because we are capable of making that call, of being able to say "ok, this is the place to turn around, we want to get you back down first and foremost."

I think that to be in this game and to be a successful mountain guide, that's got to be your first priority. And it's quite simple really. We all know that standing on top of a mountain is really just reaching a geographical high point, nothing more. But we've made it seem a lot more to us, and it means a lot to our clients and people in general, especially Mount Everest.

But at the end of the day, we all want to go back and tell people about our experiences, so our motivation is to get back down. And this brings us back to the question we were just discussing. In my view, a big part of what our role on the mountain is—instead of just being there to turn people around—to coach people to succeed which is a process that often happens throughout an expedition.

So we are with people for a long time, and a lot of what we can provide to our clients is our skills and experience and help a lot of our people get through struggles they might have acclimatizing and just working at how to get up this huge mountain. And again, that is part of what defines the difference between the $65,000 expedition and the $20,000 or the $15,000 expedition is having guides with the experience, with the will to see the clients succeed, work through a lot of their issues, so that they can succeed on the mountain and not give themselves trouble on summit day when they find themselves strung out, in the middle of nowhere, running out of gas and not knowing how to deal with things.

I think for all successful guides, one of the personal traits we have to have is our own will to succeed. We don't get clients up these mountains by being blasé about it. We really have to want to succeed ourselves, and the decision-making processes we go through are definitely driven by our own will.

We all want to get up the mountain when we're there and this personal drive pulls as well. But we also want to get back down, and those of us who have been around for a few years have proved that we can most of the time make that decision pretty well, whereas some of the teams that will go to Everest, some of these first-timers or one-time-only guided trips, you know, their decision-making is kind of blurred because of personal ambition that hasn't been tempered by time.

JENKINS: This kind of moves us on to the next question and that's kind of the biggest question of all in some ways, and that is, can Everest be guided? Now, I think now we're seeing some differentiation between different types of commercial trips, and clearly when the weather is good and you have a good system involved, Everest can go fairly well. Guy, I think you told me you just came back and your team put 28 people on the summit, no frostbite, no death, no nothing…isn't that what you said?

COTTER: Yup, that's what I said. And that was over two summit days. Yes, it did go well for us and it went well for a lot of people. It is certainly a lot easier when you do get good weather; that means that there is less to have to deal with. Not only for our own team, but dealing with other people and their issues that we often get caught up in.

You know, this palaver over what happened on the north side this year, this sort of stuff does happen every year all the time, it's just that for some reason this time the media has gotten a hold of it and is running with it.