Beck Weathers. An American mountaineer caught in a disastrous monsoon blizzard on Everest in 1996. He'd had some early, experimental eye surgery, and since nobody had ever taken eyes that had undergone that procedure to those altitudes, nobody knew that he'd go blind above 27,000 feet until he lost his sight. Then the storm blew in, and he basically spent 26 hours frozen into a snowbank high up in the death zone on Everest. An expedition doctor found him so deep in a hypothermic coma that there was no point in a rescue attempt; he later said that Weathers was as close to dead as he'd ever seen a live human being.
A few hours later, Weathers says, he suddenly remembered that he had a wife and kids back home in Texas, woke himself up out of his hypothermic coma (which is exceptional; I have never heard of anybody doing this, ever), and started staggering back down the mountain, his arms frozen above his head. He made it into an upper camp, and was eventually rescued. He's still alive and well today, and later said that he'd realized that his climbing obsession had taken a real toll on his family, but that the rapprochement he'd had with his family as he recovered from Everest made the whole ordeal worthwhile and that he'd do it all over again.
And then there's Anatoly Boukreev, a Russian climber who'd summited Everest without oxygen earlier that day. When the storm blew in, he suited up, scrounged some oxygen cylinders from the Sherpas, who were refusing to go outside (when the Sherpas are wiggling out you know you're in trouble), and headed back up the mountain looking for climbers to rescue. He did this three times, bringing three other climbers back down the mountain in appallingly bad weather conditions. He died on K2 a few years later.
