Climbers tackle Mt. Everest in hopes of solving a mystery in documentary

EXPLORATION

Sir Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay were the first to reach the peak of Mount Everest in 1953, or so we think.

There were close contenders decades before Hilary and Norgay. The British explorers Andrew (Sandy) Irvine and George Mallory were last seen a few hundred feet below the summit in 1924. The pair had carried a Vest Pocket Kodak camera with them.

In 1999, Mallory’s body was found without the camera. Also missing was a picture of his wife, which he had said he would leave at the top. Did they die coming up or coming down?

That’s the question in the National Geographic documentary, Lost on Everest and its side story Expedition Everest, which aired on June 30.

Led by veteran climber Mark Synnott with guide

Jamie McGuiness, a team set out to find Irvine’s body and with it perhaps rewrite history.

A Chinese expedition leader in 2001 told Synnott of a climb he undertook in 1960 during which he claims to have seen a body in a crevice at 27,200 feet.

At the time, only Irvine and Mallory were known to have died at that height. Mallory was found below that altitude, leaving the only possibility to be Irvine.

Synnott also linked up with Tom Holzel, an Everest historian, who shared with him an eight-foot wide aerial photo of Mount Everest that he used to pinpoint, with GPS co-ordinates, the exact crevice where they thought they might find Irvine’s body.

“It’s incredibly badass what (Irvine and Mallory) accomplished and that was really cool to think about when we were up there,” filmmaker Renan Ozturk told the Colorado Sun.

“They were doing incredible photography and art as well. The early fieldwork gave me a new-found respect and motivation for the whole art form of expedition storytelling and makes me realize that expeditions are not really about these personal experiences as much as it is about what you bring back to share, and what kind of empathy that creates and what new understanding it creates for the places you go.”

In the documentary’s climax, Synnott is hanging over the edge of a cliff, peeking into the crevassed glacier more than a mile below. He sees nothing.

Their conclusion is that Irvine’s body was brushed off the cliff and into an unreachable glacier even farther below. The mystery of Mount Everest’s first conquerors is unlikely to ever be solved.