The Epic of Everest: The Future

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. 

We know so much more than we did in the 1990s, when I first became interested in the subject, via a biography of Francis Younghusband. But we still don't have the answer to what happened on 8 June 1924 on the world's highest mountain. So, what more can we hope for from future research? Is it possible we will find out the whole story?

Evidence on Everest

Firstly, what is the prospect of more evidence being collected on Everest itself? 

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. 

It was one such search party that found the body of Mallory in 1999, on the slope below the First Step, seemingly killed by a fall. Given the conditions, the examination of it was somewhat less thorough than anything Professor Alice Roberts or Time Team would have done at ground level. The body was left on the mountain, so a more forensic examination may still be possible. 

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.

Smaller objects may also remain to be found. Mallory and Irvine appear to have taken, used, and then discarded five oxygen cylinders. Only one has ever been found. Finding another would be of huge importance. Plus, Mallory wasn't wearing the rigging for the kit when he died, so that must be somewhere too. Irvine also had a rig, and if that's not on his body it too would have been discarded on the mountain. At present no physical evidence puts Mallory or Irvine beyond the First Step on the Northeast Ridge, so anything higher would be a significant new find. Objects would also give an indication of route. If something turned up in the Great Couloir it would solve a century old debate about their route and make arguments about the second step redundant. With Mallory's body was found a note on his where he had recorded the serial numbers of the oxygen cylinders he took and their pressure, so if a cylinder was found we would know if it was one of his. As well as showing how far they got and by which route, where an oxygen cylinder was discarded would give an indication of rate of progress. 

Perhaps the most sought after item though is the expedition's Kodak camera. It was not on Mallory's body when it was found and whilst there is a slim chance it was lost in the fall, more likely it was with Irvine. Kodak apparently have some confidence they could get something from hundred year old film. A photo of the summit would settle the whole argument. 

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

So, who were htose climbers who spoke of seeing 'English dead' on Everest? In 1960 Xu Jing was second in command of the Chinese expedition that was the first to climb Everest from Tibet and descend safely. He claimed he saw a body whilst up there, although it wasn’t until 2001 that he told his story to anyone in the West. In 1965 another member of the team, Wang Fu-chou, gave a talk in Leningrad in which he recounted seeing a the body of a dead ‘European’ at 8600m. This startling news was recorded in the St Petersburg Alpine Club Journal, but nowhere else, and hence was not noticed by anyone outside of the Communist block for half a century.

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.

Finally, in 1995 Sherpa Chering Dorja, descending ‘via a more direct route’ also found an old body. By this time though people were taking note, and three years later an expedition was launched to find the body. In the end they found, not Irvine, but George Mallory, but this body was also not in the spot described by Xu King, Wang Hongbao or Sherpa Dorja.

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.

In 2010 China had launched a big clean-up of Everest, removing over half a century’s worth of rubbish and dead bodies. Rumours were soon swirling round that amongst other things removed from the mountain was at least one “English dead”, although five-times Everest summiteer Jamie McGuiness was told by an official of the China Tibet Mountaineering Association that the body was removed "much earlier than that".

It's also possible Irvine’s body might not have been the only one disposed of. In 2007 Conrad Anker, who’d found Mallory’s remains in 1999, returned to the same spot but couldn’t find him. Neither could a drone flown by a 2019 expedition.

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.

So, what would it take to get the Chinese to reveal what they know? 'Money' is the usual answer, but on a sensitive subject like Everest even money might not be enough. The answer then to my original question is that we really don't know when there will be an answer to this mystery. 

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?