BEFORE COMING to Base Camp, I'd been warned that interlopers who weren't there to conquer the mountain were often treated with hostility. Yet among the many hospitalities of Luxuristan, Schmoozistan, Bunnystan, and Inebria, we never encountered the unpleasantness we'd heard so much about.

"You know what I just realized?" McBride said to me one afternoon toward the end of our first week. "I love this place!"

And who wouldn't? Despite the frictions and tragedies, most folks bent over backwards to behave decently—a state of affairs that, given the combustible mix of nationalities and ambitions, we and others found quite remarkable.

"Like everybody else, I'd read Into Thin Air and thought this place must be an absolute shit hole," said Dr. Luanne Freer, Yellowstone National Park's medical director and the head of Base Camp's medical clinic. "It's a weird little place, but it turns out that climbers are pretty fascinating people. And, besides, it's really fun!"

Indeed it was, often in unexpected ways. Each morning, a special squadron of Nepalese workers fanned out to service the buckets beneath the toilet tents. Known as the Poop Doctors, they charged $1.05 per pound to gather up all the human excrement in camp (around 66 pounds per day). Whenever these men dropped by, the climbing Sherpas sounded off with a little song that went like so:

"Ah mo-mo, kekpa kelugkimi!"

Rough translation: "Holy shit, here come the Poop Doctors!"

Another important institution was the daily baseball game, which started around 4 p.m. and was played on a patch of ice that doubled as the Khumbu Klassic Golf Course. Base Camp also had its own mascot, a mutt named Shipton the Superdog. In late April, Shipton made canine history by undertaking an Incredible Journey through the Icefall to Camp II, where he allegedly stole 31 hard-boiled eggs from the IMG cook tent, then dug up a human skull somewhere out on the Western Cwm.

The only thing lacking in Base Camp was the kind of Club Med–style tent hopping that had prevailed two years earlier, when there were 17 women on the mountain and, recalls Dr. Luanne, all eight of the pregnancy-test kits she'd brought with her got used up during the season. Nobody seemed to know why, but the buzz about 2006 was that romance was clearly down.

"Some years, it can be a real sausage-fest up here," sighed one frustrated male expedition leader. "All I'm doing this season is sleeping in the dirt by myself."

If Base Camp had a town center, it was the Himalayan Rescue Association's medical center, run by Dr. Luanne and her assistant, a jolly emergency-room physician from Idaho named Eric Johnson. Dr. Luanne had started this service three years earlier, inspired by Tashi Tenzing, Tenzing Norgay's grandson, and it was a huge hit. In addition to patients, the clinic hosted a three-man BBC film crew shooting a documentary called Everest E.R. The BBC guys spent their days lounging on a thick piece of blue ensolite strewn with girlie magazines that always drew an appreciative crowd of Sherpas. The ensolite got warm in the sun, so it was known throughout camp as the Beach.

The best time to visit the clinic was 5 p.m., when Dr. Luanne closed shop, the Beach was rolled up, and everybody ducked into the HRA mess tent for a popcorn-and-cocktails gossip session. I dropped by one wind-whipped evening just after the generator for the Philippine satellite dish had been delivered—a breach of a long-standing tradition that restricted helicopter landings to medical emergencies.

"At the rate things are going up here," Dr. Eric joked as he sipped on a Bombay Sapphire martini, "pretty soon people will go on supplemental oxygen day and night, starting at Shangboche [a village and landing strip at 12,000 feet], and never even have to acclimatize. I bet we'll eventually see snow-machine shuttles and oxygenated suits up on the Western Cwm. And with all that nonsense, you know what? This place will still draw folks."

"Really?" said Dr. Luanne.

"Absolutely," he said. "The lure—the drive—of the world's highest mountain is irresistible. People just can't get enough of this place."