The Epic of Everest: The Mystery of 1924

One hundred years ago today, two young men set out on one of the most remarkable adventures in human history. 37 year old George Herbert Leigh-Mallory, the greatest climber of his generation, and 22 year old Andrew Comyn 'Sandy' Irvine, an expert at repairing the new fangled oxygen equipment they were using, left their camp 7000 metres above sea level, and attempted to be the first people to reach the summit of the highest mountain in the world. They were never seen alive again. 

The first person to be asked to climb Everest appears to have been a chap called Francis Younghusband. A Victorian British Army officer he made his name with various acts of daring-do in what came to be called the Great Game, a sort of  Cold War in the Himalayas between the British and Russian empires. The conversation took place in 1893, on the polo ground in Chitral, an obscure place on the northwest frontier that had just been the scene of one of the bloody little wars of empire. Captain Charles Grenville Bruce of the 5th Gurkha Rifles suggested it to Younghusband, although it could have been other way round. Grant, a volcano of a man in both size and temperament, is the person who introduced shorts to the British Army and had once commanded Younghusband's Gurkha escort during one of this Great Game expeditions.

It took nearly 30 years for the plan to come off, by which time both men were too old for the climb themselves. By this time Younghusband was president of the Royal Geographical Society. He was also a mystic who believed in free love, the unity of the world's religions and a cosmic intelligence living on a planet called Altair, but this didn't stop the RGS teaming up with the Alpine Club to launch a reconnaissance expedition to Everest in 1921. The team included Mallory, who spied out the terrain and chose the route he would use the next year to try for the summit. 

Prior to this expedition, British surveyors had only seen the top of Everest. They had no idea what the rest of it looked like, or even if they would be climbing rock or snow. What they saw was impressed them, but did not put them off. "An easy rock peak" was the verdict. Imperial arrogance, for sure, but also the voice of experienced Alpine climbers. Everest stands 10,000 feet above the Tibetan plateau. By contrast, Mont Blanc stands 14,000 feet above Chamonix. What makes Everest a challenge is not its prominence, but its altitude. Climbing at 29,000 feet is not the same as climbing at 15,000 feet.

The party could not do much about the weather, except pray that the monsoon was late, but they could do something about the lack of oxygen. When they returned in 1922, with the team by General Charles Bruce, as he now was, they brought oxygen cylinders with them, much to the chagrin of Younghusband, who thought they should have more faith in the human spirit. These early systems were heavy and unreliable, but they proved their worth.

But the 1922 attempt was ended by tragedy. Mallory and the climb team accidentally caused an avalanche that carried away seven Sherpas following up below. At this time the Europeans didn't appreciate that Sherpas were the key to Everest, instead using them as little more than high altitude pack animals. The compensation the families of the dead received was £13 a Sherpa, which seems insignificant, but is actually, when you allow for inflation, more is paid today. The reaction to this amongst the team was interesting: "Why was it not one of us?" said Mallory. This was the guilt of a survivor of the Great War.

The party returned home, defeated, and it would be two years before they could return. Mallory was now in his late thirties, and negotiations with China for access to Everest were getting difficult. All concerned knew this would be the last chance to reach the top of the world. So, on the morning of 8 June Mallory and Irvine set off for the summit from Camp VI, clinging to the mountain just below it's Northeast Ridge. Did they make it to the top?

At first glance it’s quite implausible. Compared to modern expeditions, Mallory and Irvine camped further down the mountain and started their final ascent after dawn, rather than in the night. Expedition barometer readings taken at Base Camp, when analysed with modern technology, suggest they were also attempting the summit in low pressure, which reduces the oxygen in the air and effectively makes the mountain a few hundred metres higher. They were also  hit by a snow storm for good measure, which in those conditions is often fatal even for climbers in modern clothing. They were going where no man had gone before and were having to invent their own route as they went. The odds were very much against them.

There are clues as to what happened. Noel Odell, who was one camp below them that morning and following them up the mountain, believes he saw two figures climbing the Northeast Ridge just before 1PM, when the swirling mists parted for a moment. A subsequent failed British attempt to climb the mountain found Irvine's ice axe just below the First Step on the ridge, then in 1999 a search party found one of their oxygen cylinders, and then, below the First Step, the body of Mallory himself, seemingly killed in a fall. They also found a mitten and a sock, all below the First Step. The body contained some clues. As well as confirmation of the number of oxygen cylinders they were carrying, Malloy was not wearing his goggles, which suggested he fell in the dark, and the picture of his wife he was to leave on the summit was not in his pocket. 

The physical evidence though doesn't put Mallory and Irvine any higher than that First Step on the ridge, still a thousand feet below the summit. The only hint that they went beyond this is Odell’s eye witness account, which is problematic. Odell was a one-man support expedition, and was nearly a mile away when he claims he saw two figures climbing one of the steps. He appears to have given in to pressure to say this was the First Step, but he seems to have always thought himself it was the Second, or maybe the Third. His diary entry of 8 June is unfortunately brief and ambiguous. 

The trouble is, almost nobody else thinks Mallory did climb the Second Step, as it's a technically very challenging section, and in the opinion of many climbers beyond his abilities. Even if he did climb it, he didn’t do it in the five minutes Odell says it took. Then there is the implausibility of the hundred-to-one chance that the clouds would part just at the moment Mallory was cresting the most challenging part of the climb.

The Second Step is the major technical challenge Mallory and Irvine faced on their route. Three days before their colleagues Teddy Norton and Howard Somervell had tried to get up a lower route, the Great Couloir, that bypassed the Second Step. This may have been Mallory’s intended route. If it wasn’t, it’s likely it became the intended route after Mallory saw it from the ridge. The Second Step looks intimidating at the best of times, and in 1924 pictures show there was a significant snow cornice. Mallory may have felt up to the challenge, but Irvine was a much less experienced climber. If Odell didn’t see Mallory and Irvine at the Second Step, then maybe it was the Third Step, almost at the base of the final pyramid. That puts them nearly at the top, but also means they would have made record progress from their camp to be there by 1PM.

This is where it all starts to get confusing. Odell went to his grave convinced the two had made it to the summit, but died there. Odell was almost the only one of his contemporaries who believed this, but in time it came to be the majority opinion amongst researchers. 

By modern standards Mallory and Irvine were woefully under-equipped, even for a walk in the Lake District. However, with over sixty years of Alpine experience to draw on, their gear was actually surprisingly practical. Their boots were thinner than those of today’s climbers, making them better for more technical ascents, and by not wearing bulky clothing they could see their feet, which makes a huge difference. They also carried far less gear than modern climbers. All told they were well equipped for a quick dash to the summit, but not for an extended stay on the mountain. That they’d climbed up, but not down again, was believable.

The discovery of Mallory’s body below the First Step changed all this though. Now the people who put him on the summit, also had to get him back down again, to within a few hundred yards of his camp. To climb for ten or so hours to the summit would have been an incredible achievement. To climb ten hours back down again, without oxygen and mostly in the dark, would be something else again. It just doesn’t seem possible but, how else do we fit where he was found with what Odell saw?

There are theories. One has Mallory leaving a possibly injured Irvine and returning alone along the lower Great Couloir route. But it seems unlikely that Mallory would return a different way to how he’d come up, in the dark, with Irvine above him. Another has Mallory and Irvine both ascending and descending via the couloir, a route that has rarely been used since, which would explain why so few traces of them have been found. But in that case, why is Irvine’s ice axe up on the ridge? And so on. Each new theory brings more problems. Until some hard evidence places either Mallory or Irvine beyond the First Step the balance of the evidence is that they did not reach the summit. They turned round at some point either on the Northeast Ridge, or in the Couloir, and then fell on the way back to their camp. Maybe 

But to the question of is it possible that Mallory, with or without Irvine, reached the summit of Everest 29 years before Tensing and Hillary the answer is, yes, it is possible. The vertical distance they had to cover was not much more than 650m, half the height of Ben Nevis, over terrain that Mallory would have tackled in the dark if it had been in the Lake District, travelling light and with the knowledge that if they stopped, they were dead. 

Mallory, it was said, was the most formidable enemy a mountain ever had. When Everest was tackled again in 1933 three climbers, on two successive days, retraced Norton and Somervell's route, and turned back at the same point. Also with the party was Odell, twenty years older than the other climbers, but still able to outpace them on the mountain. Odell, when ten years younger, had not been able to compete with Mallory, so there is no doubt the 1924 party was more capable than the 1933 one.

This would take nothing away from the 1953 achievement of Hillary and Tenzing. Mallory’s may be the better story, but Hillary and Tenzing’s was the greater achievement. That said, a Mallory who summits Everest and then dies only 300 yards from his camp is not the reckless fool who got up the mountain, but couldn’t get down again, as was believed until 1999. If proved to be true, this would be one of the most incredible adventures ever. Imagining them both on the top of the world, knowing that they only had themselves to rely on and that no help was ever going to come, is awe inspiring.

But the crucial question on this centenary day is does Everest have more secrets to give up? And the really huge question after that is ‘what do the Chinese know’? Chinese climbers have said, off the record, that they found evidence of Mallory and Irvine. Some of those accounts appear to refer to Mallory, but others describe a different 'English dead', in a different location and face up, rather than face down as Mallory was found. The location described has now been thoroughly searched, both on foot and by drone, and there is nothing there. Either the accounts were wrong, or the body has been moved. And if the body has gone, have other clues gone too?

Certainly there are rumours, Mark Synnott has described the search in his book The Third Pole, and has found out more since. There appears to be a private climbing museum in China, secretly recorded on a mobile phone, containing pre-war artifacts. There are even rumours that Irvine's camera was recovered, although attempts to develop the film failed. 

Why is China so paranoid and secretive about this? Chinese team climbed Everest from the Tibet side in 1960. This is a big deal in the country. It is their 'Moon landing'. The Communist Party would not want anyone to even suspect someone else had done this before them. They certainly wouldn't want proof that anyone ever had. So, is China just being careful, or do they actually know the answer to this puzzle and it's not the answer they want?