...(earlier this month) a British mountaineer desperate for oxygen had collapsed along a well-traveled route to the summit. Dozens of people walked right past him, unwilling to risk their own ascents.

Within hours, David Sharp, 34, was dead.

...Sharp's death also reflects something else: a changed ethic in what was, until a couple decades ago, a tiny community where only the most experienced climbers would be found that high on a mountain — and where a dying climber would be abandoned only when a rescue threatened other lives.

In Sharp's case, about 40 people are thought to have walked past him as he sat cross-legged in a shallow snow cave.