DURING THE FINAL WEEKS of May, the north side turned into a high-altitude morgue. Two days before Tomas Olsson's fatal fall on May 16, an Indian climber named Constable Sri Kishan had toppled off the Second Step. A day later, David Sharp, the young mountaineer from Britain who'd been passed repeatedly as he huddled alongside the main climbing route, froze to death. On May 17, French climber Jacques-Hughes Letrange died from unknown causes. Two days after that, the Brazilian climber Vitor Negrete expired in his tent, probably from pulmonary edema. On May 22, Russian mountaineer Igor Plyushkin died in circumstances similar to Negrete's. And the last fatality of the season took place on May 25, when Thomas Weber, a semi-blind German climber, succumbed to exhaustion.

By this point, there was still a handful of teams tagging the summit from the south side, but the cheering was getting drowned out by the yells of porters dismantling tents, packing goods, and reversing the massive flow of luggage downvalley.

Meanwhile, Kalpana Dash, the suicidal Indian lawyer who had been safely escorted back to Base Camp, was crying inconsolably in her tent. She blamed her third failed summit try on her Sherpas for forcing her to descend, and she'd decided to file a formal complaint against them the moment she reached Kathmandu.

I dropped by to ask why it mattered so much, given that she was still alive.

"Why?" she wailed. "Because Everest is my life—it is my life! The summit of Everest is my dream. It is everything to me!"

Dash wasn't the only one upset. Two days earlier, the South Korean cleaning expedition had, with fanfare, swept through Inebria and Bewilderabad toting garbage bags and a video camera but somehow managed to miss a burlap sack and two ancient pairs of underwear lying in the rocks beside our cook tent.

"Tell me, is this cleaning or not?" fumed Kami Tenzing, who clearly had reached the limit of his tolerance for Base Camp high jinks. "You know what they will do now? They will go to the media and report that they have taken hundreds of kilos of garbage down from Everest. In their country and in the eyes of the world, they will be heroes. But look at this shit! I hate these ‘cleaning expedition' guys—it's such a scam, what they do!"

Then Kami's anger took a sharp, unexpected turn. "So many Western climbers achieve fame on Everest with the help of us Sherpas," he said. "But almost none of them ever give anything back."

"Oh?"

"Every movie or story I have ever seen about Everest focuses only on the Western climbers—there is never any depiction of the Sherpas. I know it's not necessary, but I wish they gave some credit for how hard we work, how heavy our loads are, how many times we go up and down, breaking trail between the South Col and the summit, or fixing the route on the Lhotse Face, and for the risks we take in doing these things. But they never do—the Sherpas are always the hidden story. You don't have to show everything, of course. But there should be some small credit given, no? Even just showing our faces? It's true that we are working for you and that you are paying us. But it's almost like we are slaves."

Later, McBride and I ran these comments past Rodrigo Jordan, the leader of the Chilean expedition and the man who had found Pavel Kalny before he died. Jordan was one of the smartest guys in Base Camp, and he nodded emphatically when I told him about Kami's remarks.

"They're paid for what they do, so they're not really slaves," he said. "But the commercial clients up here aren't mountaineers either, at least not real ones. Those that make it to the summit will unfurl their flags and take their photographs, and then the average American or German or Japanese who reads about it in the newspaper will never understand that 90 percent of the work was done entirely by the Sherpas. It's not exactly a secret, but people don't go out of their way to advertise this fact, either. So, yes, sometimes these men become very upset. And if you were one of them, you'd probably be pissed, too."