Anne Parmenter and Heidi Blum make their way up to a hanging glacier on Ama Dablam during their attempt on the summit. Blum, whose toes were frostbitten during a previous attempt to climb the mountain, turned back, but Parmenter continued on to the summit after another guide volunteered to lead Heidi down.

Anne Parmenter works her way across a wall of granite and snow that hangs a mile in the air above the Base Camp on Ama Dablam.

Anne Parmenter sinks her crampons into the hard, blue ice above Camp Three on her attempt to reach the summit of Ama Dablam with Heidi Blum, an experienced skier and climber Parmenter was helping to lead up the mountain.

Brendan Cusick, a mountain guide climbing solo on Ama Dablam, hangs where he fell into the giant crevasse that is the final obstacle to the summit headwall. Cusick broke bones in the fall and his rescue, conducted by the photographer and mountain guide Anne Parmenter, dangerously delayed the climbers' summit bid.

Anne Parmenter developed a dangerous altitude sickness after summiting Ama Dablam and had to race down the mountain to the safety of lower elevation along a knife edge of hardened snow called The Mushroom Ridge.

A monk from the temple in Pangboche stands below Ama Dablam, right, and looks over the Khumbu Valley, where Mount Everest and many others of the highest mountains in the world rise. The Pangboche Gompa was the first Buddhist temple in Nepal and is a traditional stop for expeditions to Everest and Ama Dablam.

Heidi Blum, on her way to climb Ama Dablam, a 22,494-foot-peak in the shadow of Mount Everest, in Nepal, has a protection cord tied around her neck during a puja - a Buddhist ceremony to bless members of her expedition - at the temple in Pangboche, a village in the shadow of the peak.

Arriving at Camp One, on Ama Dablam, the mountain the Sherpa people see as a woman with outstretched arms, Anne Parmenter takes in the view of the highest mountain range in the world.

Anne Parmenter cooks dinner for Heidi Blum, the client she is leading up Ama Dablam, at Camp Two on top of the Yellow Tower on the southwest ridge of the mountain.

Anne Parmenter leads Heidi Blum to The Gray Tower, at 20,000 feet on Ama Dablam, one of the most difficult and dangerous sections of the climb.

Anne Parmenter, a field hockey coach at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, has a second career as a mountain guide. While guiding on Ama Dablam, in Nepal, she carried a pack nearly as heavy as she was to Camp One, at an elevation of 19,000 feet.

Mount Everest from the summit of Ama Dablam, a 22,494-foot peak in the Solo Khumbu of Nepal.