"I couldn't sleep at night if I had passed him," mountain guide says

It was the kind of day most climbers dream about: blue sky, windless and the peak of Mount Everest — the goal of a lifetime — within a two-hour trek.

Dan Mazur and his group of four had been hiking all night and now, as the sun was coming up over the ridge and their destination loomed ahead, they saw him.

A half-dressed man sat cross-legged, untethered by any rope, without a coat, hat, gloves, sleeping bag, oxygen, food or water, on a knife-edge of a cliff at the 28,000-foot level of the world's tallest mountain. He had spent the night in temperatures of 20 to 30 below zero and was alive and talking!

The distressed climber, who turned out to be famed Australian mountaineer Lincoln Hall, asked the group if they were surprised to see him.

"I said, 'We are surprised. Where did you come from?' " Mazur recalled by telephone Wednesday. "He said he didn't know. The last thing in my mind was that there would be a person sitting on top of this knife-edge ridge where he could have fallen off, just sitting there with his hands in the air and his jacket off."

Mazur, 45, of Longbranch, Pierce County, realized that Hall was hypothermic, hallucinating and seriously ill. Mazur's assault on the summit of the world's tallest peak, and that of the team he was leading, was over.

"I couldn't sleep at night if I had passed him," Mazur said.

The chance encounter early in the morning of May 26 set in motion a series of events that would balance climbing glory and monetary gain against ethics. In the view of some in the climbing community, the commercialization of summiting Everest has brought out the worst in many. Unfit climbers can still find someone to haul them up and — if they are lucky — down the mountain. Teams that arrive at base camp improperly equipped have to mooch gear from others, and vital supplies are sometimes stolen.

Most disturbing, however, is that the allure of the mountain's summit means that climbers pass by others to avoid losing their own chance at the summit.

On May 15, British climber David Sharp died on Everest after 40 people on their way to the summit walked past without helping him. Several days later, his climbing teammate, Vitor Negrete of Brazil, whose last dispatch complained of thefts from his tent, died on the slope.

But Mazur's decision to help Hall and thus end his group's quest offered a counterpoint to the recent tragedies at the top of the world and has thrust the Washington state native into the spotlight.

Mazur, a mountain guide and owner of SummitClimb of Olympia, returned home Wednesday night following TV appearances with Hall in New York.

Despite his fame for doing the right thing, he still frets over how his decision to help Hall — and forgo his clients' dreams of reaching the summit — will affect his business.

In the competitive guiding profession, clients always ask about a guide's success rate.

"People are not going to ask what your rescue rate is, in fact, because it's a negative," he said.

But for Mazur and his team, who were all understanding, there was no summit worth the loss of Hall's life.

Other climbers had passed Hall, insisting that they had too little oxygen and were in a hurry to reach the summit. Hall was obviously in distress.

Myles Osborne of England, one of the members of Mazur's team, wrote on a climbing Web site: Hall's "fingers looked like 10 waxy candle sticks. His head wagged and jerked around, his beady eyes embedded in a frosty face, trying to focus on something. ... He seemed to be in deep distress, shivered uncontrollably, and kept trying to pull himself closer to the edge of the cornice, to the point that we physically held him back and eventually anchored him to the snow. Lincoln later told us that he believed that he was on a boat, not a mountain, and that he wanted to be overboard."

The team got him dressed, fed him their snacks and hot water, and gave him oxygen. They then waited for members of Hall's team to retrieve him. By then, the worsening weather made summiting the peak impossible. On the way back down the mountain, the first feelings the team members had were ones of disappointment at not making the summit.

When the team visited Hall the next day in base camp and reintroduced themselves, they had no regrets, Mazur said.

Mazur, who summited in 1991, and will lead expeditions again, said there is only one Lincoln Hall. But the mountain will always be there.

Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522