After that, I hopped on airplanes that took me all the way back across the USA to my high school's 20th reunion in upstate New York. As I assume many people do at such junctures in their lives, I tried to assess my time out of school to see whether I'd done good. My profession had turned out to be among the oddest of those admitted to at the reunion, and I did a lot of explaining as to how I'd gone that way and why I was going to keep pushing in such directions. The Mallory story had been all over New York and even had oozed up the Hudson to my old hometown. That must have been why I got hit with this question a few times: "Hey... aren't you the guy who found that dead guy? That must have been awful... What?!? You were looking for him? What mountain was that on anyway?"

It was actually kind of refreshing to have to explain that Mallory's death had not been a mob hit at all, unlike some of the bodies found in that particular part of the Catskills. Sipping on a gluten-free beverage, I was proud, like everyone else at a high school reunion, to think I'd gotten some things done in 20 years. I was a little worried I'd be reminded over and over what a small, weak, socially backward boy I'd been in 1979. Now, of course, I'm much bigger.

But the reunion I liked best this summer was one arranged by Rainier Mountaineering Incorporated (RMI). The guide service contacted as many folks as they could find who'd ever worked for RMI or its predecessors and about 240 of us got together in October up at Paradise, Washington to tell lies and blush at old truths. All of those folks knew who George Mallory was, but we had so much good history to discuss amongst our own ranks that there was little need to venture into that of the British. There were a few tough guides from the 1930s present and plenty of well-known climbers from more recent decades. We danced into the wee hours on the side of the big volcano that had changed our lives.

I spent all of August and September and a bit of October guiding Rainier. The glaciers were relatively stable on our normal route this summer, in contrast to the last couple of seasons when we'd had to get it rigged like the Khumbu to make safe passage. The weather wasn't very stable and I was actually happy for that. It made things pretty interesting, I could rarely tell whether we'd luck out on a given day or not. I got up top for my 169th summit by the end of the season, which might convince some folks that I'm the repetitive sort — but certainly not as repetitive as George Dunn, who nailed his 400th Rainier climb in August.

This summer I found the need, with the Mallory media sometimes tracking me to Rainier, to justify my interest in guiding, as opposed to first ascents of unheard-of peaks. I was sometimes a little shocked by the assumptions, made even by writers who were supposed to know climbing well, that I could only be bored by guiding normal routes day in and day out. I guess I don't get bored easily. One of the stormiest days during which I was able to eke out a summit this summer was the day we bumped into Vice President Gore up on the crater rim. I had been very preoccupied with the storm we were in and the need for getting down out of it, and so when we passed the government ropes on the way down I hadn't looked in many faces as I'd exchanged pleasantries. My climbers had, and at our next rest stop they were all happily recounting their conversations with Al Gore.

I talked Mallory with a ton of people on Rainier climbs this summer. Magazine articles kept popping out all season and the interest seemed to just keep growing. Many of my clients were aware of the story and interested in it when they came to Rainier, but only occasionally was there someone who knew ahead of time that I'd had some involvement with the trip. Of course everybody would eventually ask whether I thought Mallory had topped out before dying. This was often asked with a certain look that suggested, "You can tell me the truth." That look got me laughing every time. We members of the Mallory & Irvine expedition don't have some hidden truth, and we don't have some party line. We get to make our own guesses like anybody else.

I found that it was really fun to be in Salt Lake City for the Outdoor Retailer show in August where Eric and Conrad, Jake, Tap, Jochen and Larry Johnson were assembled to thank our expedition sponsors and to preview the books we worked on about the climb. We found that we still have differing opinions on such things as summits in 1924, but that isn't a problem. After all, it was kind of a big story, there are lots of ways to tell it.

And many people are telling it. I have to admit that our experiences this spring and summer have made me much more cynical in regards to the media. Being close to a story, feeling that you know a little about it, and then seeing the way it gets mangled in the telling can be an eye opener. The photo hypocrisy got to me as well, bidding wars in various places where the losers either stole the images (pictures of competitor's pages...covering the coverage... yeah, sure) or reported the sinful amounts that the winners intended to pay (with a little extra thrown in for sensationalism).

And magazines that implied that they themselves were above displaying such photos or reporting on a commoner's mountain like Everest, but deciding in the next issue to see if a few more issues couldn't be sold using them, and it. Post-Mallory, my cynicism carried over into some of my views of the climbing "community" as well. Cliques and old-boy networks still wield a lot of clout; they still get to make a lot of the rules of our game.

When it came to telling the expedition story itself, "We" never owned the darn thing to begin with. But it has been interesting to see how many other folks try to acquire some share of the story and its supposed commercial value. Four books came out this month. One, Ghosts of Everest, is the one I and the expedition climbers and team historians had a hand in. Conrad went his own way in the book department, contributing to The Lost Explorer, but that should certainly not suggest hard feelings or more than the usual competition between us all in this regard. As I say, it turned out to be a big story, bigger than any of us anticipated, certainly big enough for multiple points of view.

We'll resist the temptation to take shots at each other now for remembering things differently. None of us is willing to forget that our team worked well together and looked out for each other through several hard and hazardous months. I'm sure that book writing and money and fame are truly wonderful things. Friendship tested under fire is far more valuable to me these days. That doesn't mean I wasn't excited to witness the process by which an adventure and a set of memories metamorphosed into a thing of paper and pictures that anybody could pick up and throw across the room. Now I'm interested to see what we got on film when the Nova special comes out in January.

Somebody will have to tape it for me. I'll still be in the Ellsworth Mountains of Antarctica then, doing "normal" things on the Vinson Massif, my home for the next two-and-a-half months. A few good storms down there ought to cleanse me of cynicism and any lingering excess pride in my accomplishments. Antarctica is one of those inconvenient places that I can't quite seem to get enough of.

I will be happy to get a little distance from George Mallory's story for a time, if only because it is one I am genuinely very interested in. The perspective one gains with distance and time away from such an intense story can sometimes be valuable. We'll see. In any case, it is time to get reading about Ernest Shackleton again and the history of the bottom of the Earth.

— Dave Hahn, MountainZone.com Columnist