THERE ARE THREATS, and there are threats. (For the record, Todd denies telling Jones that he'd kill him if he didn't leave Base Camp. "Intemperate I may be," he says, "but I am careful with my words.") Whether the threat was delivered or not, to understand how Todd's anger may have played in the head of Finn-Olaf Jones, you probably need to know about Henry Todd's "colorful past."

It's a doozy.

If you dropped acid in England in the midseventies, it's possible that Henry Todd counted you among his customers. Between 1970 and 1977, Todd helped market and distribute more than 20 million tabs of LSD manufactured in labs outside London. According to Operation Julie, a 1978 book coauthored by Dick Lee, Scotland Yard's leading drug investigator at the time, Todd was a natural leader who swaggered with the confidence of James Cagney.

Having climbed since the age of 13, Todd funneled some of his LSD earnings into rock climbing—particularly on the sea cliffs of north Wales—and in 1974 he traveled to Leysin, Switzerland, to climb with friends from the International Mountaineering School. He was constantly seeking new vertical challenges. On one occasion in 1976, according to Operation Julie, Todd sent a friend on a foray to northern California to scout the routes at Yosemite. Hearing that the big man was sending an emissary to America to "survey the ground," Scotland Yard had him tailed all the way to the foot of El Capitan.

On March 25, 1977, 15 officers crashed through the door of Todd's cottage in Hampton Wick, just outside London, and arrested him. A hundred and twenty people were eventually taken into custody in Britain's biggest drug crackdown ever. A year later, on March 8, 1978, a Bristol Crown Court judge convicted Todd of a variety of of charges, the primary offense being conspiracy to possess LSD (he pleaded guilty), and handed him and one of his colleagues the stiffest sentences of the lot: 13 years. Todd served seven and a half.

Once liberated from the confines of his jail cell, Todd threw himself back into mountaineering. By 1988, he was climbing Annapurna on a team led by Polish legend Jerzy Kukuczka, the man who nearly beat Reinhold Messner to the top of all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks. Todd first went to Everest in 1989 with a group of Polish climbers. "It was a very difficult expedition," he says, "not terribly well run, and afterwards I decided I wasn't going to go on any more big expeditions if I wasn't the leader. I felt they needed to be properly managed." Todd began organizing trips of friends mixed with paying climbers, and the business, soon called Himalayan Guides, grew largely through word of mouth. His first Himalayan Guides Everest trip was in the spring of 1995, when eight members of the team summited via the North Ridge.

A Todd expedition is a no-frills adventure for self-sufficient types. He provides base-camp tents, cooks, meals, full oxygen gear, and permits. Though many clients hire their own dedicated Sherpas, Todd also hires some of them each season. Their services are shared among clients, as are spaces in tents placed at camps higher up the mountain.

While the Toddfather doesn't exactly advertise his colorful past, his occasional offhand references to it have contributed to his edgy, tough-as-nails reputation. "Climbing now is a mainstream sport with clean-cut people like Ed Viesturs," says British alpinist Alan Burgess. "When people like Henry and I started, it was a fringe sport. When I was in the Alps in the early 1970s, it was like a camp of young renegade bandits. We have all aged a little gracefully since then."