Lost
on Everest:
The Enduring Mystery of
Mallory & Irvine
Sometime during the Spring of 1924, British climber George Leigh Mallory
wrote a letter to his friend Geoffrey Keynes saying: “This is going to be more
like war than mountaineering. I don’t expect to come back.” He was speaking of
his upcoming assault on Mount Everest, and was very accurate in his surmising.
Late in the day on June 8, 1924, Mallory and his climbing companion, 22 year old
Andrew Comyn Irvine, were last seen high on Everest’s Northeast Ridge by
teammate Noel Odell. They soon disappeared into the clouds of a pre-monsoon
squall, never to be seen again.
Questions inevitably arose: Did they summit? Did they climb the formidable
Northeast Ridge some 29 years before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzin Norgay Sherpa
climbed the Southeast Ridge in 1953? What happened to them in their final days
and hours? These and other questions lingered
unanswered for 75 years.
In 1999, a team of American climbers and one
German historian embarked on an expedition to solve the mystery. On May 1, 1999,
the team discovered George Mallory’s remains at 27,000 feet on Everest’s North
Face. But the mystery remained unsolved. The team returned again in 2001,
unearthing many more clues about Mallory & Irvine and all the pioneering
attempts to climb Mount Everest's Northeast Ridge, from 1921 to 1975.
Join Jake Norton, a photographer and climbing team member of both the 1999 and
2001 expeditions, as he recounts the findings of the expeditions and shares the
conclusions his team has drawn from the highest archaeology ever conducted.
Contact Jake today for more
information, or use the form below.
