NO SINGLE INCIDENT better captured the weirdness of Henry Todd's troubles last year than the fracas with Finn-Olaf Jones, a bizarre bit of Base Camp history that to this day seems to have left both men seething. "I've still got these scabs on my face," Jones told me in early November on the phone from his home in suburban Washington, D.C. "I'm hoping they'll go away. I don't want to be thinking of Henry all of my life."

In the fall of 1999, Jones, a 37-year-old climber and adventure writer, had contracted with the Discovery Channel's Web site to file text and video dispatches from Everest Base Camp. But Jones did not merely intend to join the burgeoning contingent of new-media journalists at the foot of the tallest mountain in the world. Having already summited Aconcagua, Mount McKinley, Mont Blanc, and the Matterhorn, he intended to combine his reporting gig with a push to the top of Everest. Yet even with Discovery.com's backing, Jones was working within a tight budget. A little research turned up Himalayan Guides as a no-frills option.

By early March 2000, Jones was posting twice-weekly dispatches from Base Camp. To Web surfers, he came off as a quick-witted scribe who kept readers amused with tales of high-altitude nuttiness. But in camp, his reporting rubbed at least a few climbers the wrong way. In his first dispatch from the tent city, he lightheartedly mocked the many "themed" expeditions on the mountain, such as a trio of climbers who were vying to be the oldest men to summit. "I have proposed myself as the 'First Danish-American Ascent of Everest Without an Appendix Expedition,'" he wrote. One morning, according to John Leonard, the Rainier ranger, "Jones greeted climbers emerging from their tents with a rolling camera. 'Do you have the fever?' he asked. 'Do you have the summit fever?'"

From his point of view, Jones told me he was merely broadcasting a "lighthearted perspective" on Everest. "I knew everyone was reading this at home," he asserted. "It wasn't my intention to humiliate anyone in front of their families."

The kind of critical, cheeky reporting that Finn-Olaf Jones was undertaking isn't anything Paul Theroux hasn't pursued in half a dozen travel books. But when Theroux's witticisms see print, his subjects are two years and 2,000 miles away. Some of Jones's characters, a few tents over and mere minutes removed, apparently didn't appreciate the scrutiny. In an incident witnessed by several climbers and described by Jones in one of his Web dispatches, Jones struck a climber who had absconded with his camera. "I don't think I've hit anyone in 20 years...and I sent him sprawling," Jones wrote. The climber he hit later said that he pinched the camera because he'd grown weary of Jones's reporting.

One Discovery.com posting in particular estranged Jones from Todd and from climbers in a different expedition. In a dispatch titled "Paying for the Honor," Jones described Henry Todd as an "Everest caterer" who "has not even been to the summit of Everest." In the same story, he criticized an expedition known as Inventa 2000. Named for an Internet consulting firm that had paid $300,000 for the title sponsorship, the group was there to climb the mountain and also to clean it up. (Inventa 2000's leader later reported that his team had removed 632 discarded oxygen cylinders from the peak.) "Most climbers up here, including myself, have ethical qualms about these expeditions," Jones wrote, "especially as they are siphoning off much-needed contributions toward real environmental concerns in the populated Khumbu Valley below Base Camp."

Then, on about May 12, Jones e-mailed his editor at Discovery advising him that he was looking into the legitimacy of the Inventa team. He also wanted his employers to check into information he'd received that Discovery might be helping to sponsor Inventa's climb. "Finn intends to write something about these guys, but he wants to make sure there isn't really any connection to Discovery," his HQ contact wrote to other Discovery employees in an e-mail obtained by Outside. As it turned out, there was no such funding arrangement in place. But two days later, that second e-mail, which paraphrased Jones's suspicions about Inventa's agenda, made its way back to the foot of Everest. It eventually landed in the in-box of Inventa 2000, whose members were waiting at Base Camp for the weather to clear before making their summit bid.

Whatever his faults and merits might be, Finn-Olaf Jones did not lack a reporter's nose for news. After all, Everest is no longer a giant heap of discarded oxygen bottles, and there are legitimate questions about the necessity of cleanup expeditions there. Still, a few days before a team risks death on the Big E may not be the best time to question its mission, whether one intends to or not.

Having read the e-mail, a group of angry Inventa climbers went looking for Jones. He happened to be away from camp that day, resting with Todd at Pangboche, a nearby lower-altitude Sherpa village. When Todd and Jones returned to the tent city, word reached Todd that the Inventa team was upset with Jones. Todd visited the Inventa camp to investigate.

"I'd gone over to say, 'Look, leave this guy alone, he's an absolute twit,'" Todd recalls telling them.

"Henry," one of the Inventa team members is said to have replied, "have you got any idea what he's saying about you?"

That's when Todd says he read the "Everest caterer" bit. "They showed me what he said," asserts Todd, "and I thought, 'That's it—he's out of here.'" He stalked out of the Inventa tent and went looking for Jones. According to Jones, who was drinking a cup of tea in front of the Himalayan Guides mess tent when the Scotsman approached, Todd charged at him, leapt upon him, and punched him in the face. "I ended up sprawled on the moraine," Jones wrote in his statement about the incident. "Henry sat down on my chest and pummeled me repeatedly against the rocks.... I had been so stunned and surprised that I did not offer any resistance or fight back." After the alleged attack, Jones writes, "[Todd] told me to 'Get the f—- out of camp or I'll kill you.'"

For his part, Todd told Outside that the scrap never got past a shove. Jones stumbled on the moraine, Todd says, and then fell against a wall, bruising and cutting himself.

Scott Markey, a Canadian doctor and friend of Todd's, says he witnessed the incident and gave first aid to Jones after the scuffle. He is one of three climbers who backed Todd's version of the events after Todd's banning. "The very minor injuries sustained by Finn Jones were purely a result of Finn falling as he ran away from Henry," Markey wrote in a statement supplied to Nepal's Ministry of Tourism. "Henry did not physically strike Finn in any other way."

It didn't happen like that, Jones insists. "Henry just made a leap for me," he says. "The guy pounces on me, pummels me, punches me in the face. I'm stunned and thinking, 'What the hell, Henry?''' Dan Morrison, an American journalist covering Base Camp for Quokka.com, says that he encountered Jones shortly after the incident. "I did not witness the assault," he notes. "But Finn was bleeding, and was sincerely afraid for his life."

Jones later wrote that he felt he was in danger as long as he remained in Base Camp. "For the next two days and nights I was constantly protected by a group of Sherpas and climbers armed with ice axes," he wrote in the statement he supplied to Outside. On May 19 he took a helicopter out of camp, flew to Kathmandu, and went straight to the police.