So, with the hundredth anniversary of Mallory and Irvine disappearing into the silence on Mount Everest has passed. Hopefully, a few more people in the world now know their story, and the mystery that surrounds their fate.
Evidence on Everest
Mallory and Irvine died in the ’death zone’ of Everest. This isn’t just a turn of phrase, it’s literally true. Even if you have enough oxygen, and nobody ever has enough oxygen, and even if you eat and drink sufficiently, which is also impossible as the altitude destroys your appetite, your body is dying all the time you are at over 8000 metres. With altitude comes bad weather. Everest gives mountaineers just a few days a year when it is safe to climb. The rest of the time the summit is in the jet stream, meaning not just bad weather but bad weather at 100mph. Put those two facts together and any search of the summit will only have a brief window of time.
Then there is the nature of the summit itself. For all that Everest is a ‘non-technical summit’ it is technical enough. You are climbing and if you don’t pay attention to where you put your hands and your feet it's a long way down. Plus, the relative ease of the summit only applies to the main routes, which follow the ridges and are roped and laddered. To search the summit for Irvine you need to come off the ropes and risk your life on the face itself, in the death zone, in the weather.
This brings us to the organisational problems of a search. Every year thousands of people climb Everest, almost all with organised teams. The companies that run these climbs have one goal: to get their clients to the top and bring them home safely again. Clambering around off the ropes is not what they do. Nor is it what the Sherpas want to do. Sherpas earn decent money in a part of the world where that is very hard. They work tremendously hard and take stupendous risks to do this. The more times a Sherpa summits, the more money they can earn in a career that is obviously not going to be that long. To take all the risks of going into the death zone without summitting is asking a lot of them.
These problems can obviously be got round with sufficient time and money, but there is another problem: the Chinese authorities. Everest straddles the Tibet and Nepal, but Mallory and Irvine disappeared on the Tibetan side, so any search party will be on the part of the mountain that the Chinese manage. Now China runs a tighter ship than Nepal in many ways. Certainly, far fewer people die on the Chinese administered side. However, in part this is because the Chinese authorities don't let foreigners wander around wherever they want.
For all the problems I’ve described Everest is not the Moon. It’s not even the Sahara Desert. It’s a relatively small area of land that has been traversed pretty much every way it can be traversed and which has been surveyed by satellite, aeroplane, drone and every other imaginable way.
But what about Sandy Irvine? Following accounts by Chinese climbers, Everest expert Tom Holzel went over an eight-foot-long aerial photo of Everest he had in his basement with a magnifying glass, trying to trace the routes the people who claimed to have seen him. He identified a smudge just above where Mallory’s body had been found as the most likely location. In 2019 an expedition was launched and, after many difficulties mountaineer Mark Synnott finally made it to the ‘Holzel spot’, only to find nothing there. Slightly confusingly though, the spot was not a crevice, as thought, but just a dark patch if rock. The various accounts of the 'English dead' spoke of a body in a shallow hollow, which is also where you'd expect to find someone sheltering from the elements, so it's still possible this was not the right area. If he's still there it should be possible to find him with a bit of effort, although, as we'll see later, there is a big 'if' there.
Finally, the object that I would most like to find would be the picture of Mallory's wife, Ruth. Mallory said he would place the picture on the summit, and it wasn't on his body when it was found. Maybe he forgot it - he was like that - or maybe it was lost in the fall, or in the sixty plus years his body was exposed on the mountain. Most likely though he left it at the highest point he reached. Nobody has seen it on the summit and Sir Edmund Hillary, the most likely person to do so, spent some time looking in 1953. If there is one piece of evidence that would convince me Mallory did not stand on the top of the world, it would be a picture of Ruth found tucked away at the Second Step or in the Great Couloir.
Evidence in China
The next recorded sighting was by another Chinese expedition in 1975. Wang Hongbao wandered off the established route whilst trying to rejoin his team and came across the body of an old “English” dead. Hongbao told this story to a fellow climber in 1979. The next day Hangboa was killed in an avalanche so, once again, it was mostly ignored. China denied this story for years but then in 1986 the man who Hongbao had shared a tent with in 1975 confirmed it to mountaineer and Everest historian Tom Holzel.
Then, in 2021, came a claim, via a source at the British Embassy in Beijing, that a 1975 Chinese expedition not only found Irvine’s body, but retrieved a camera from it. The body had allegedly been found by Pan Dao, a remarkable woman who was the first to summit from the north side, and the first Tibetan to stand on top of the world. Pan Dao thought that Irvine had died of the cold, rather than a fall. What really made Pan Dao’s story stand out though was the claim that she had found and retrieved a camera from the body.
Why would China be doing this? Well, their 1960 ascent, the first to summit Everest from the north, is to China what putting Yuri Gagarin into space is for the Russians or Neil Armstrong on the Moon is for the Americans. After their ‘century of shame’ when Europeans all but colonised the country, after the devastation of the Second World War and the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, they do not really want to promote the idea that a pair of British amateurs might have got there first.