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.
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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.
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.
.jpg)
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
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.
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.
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.
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