MOUNTAIN OF MYSTERY
Were MALLORY AND IRVINE the first climbers to conquer Everest?
It’s one of Mount Everest’s most enduring mysteries. Did George Mallory and Sandy Irvine reach the summit in1924?
The British climbers were last seen a few hundred metres from the top in bad weather, before disappearing. Mallory’s body was discovered in1999, but not his camera, which might have answered the question once and for all.
Now, Lost on Everest follows a bid to locate the body of Irvine, and establish whether Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first men to conquer Everest in1953, or if Mallory and Irvine beat them to it by nearly 30 years. Even with the latest clothing and equipment, scaling the world’s highest peak is a dangerous and gruelling undertaking, says film-maker and expedition member Renan Ozturk.
‘I can’t believe those guys did this with no modern gear,’ he says. ‘The tents were draughty, the sleeping bags inadequate, the stoves weak, and they were dressed in tweed and hobnail boots. It’s mind-boggling.’
Experienced mountaineers, Ozturk and the team were well aware of the challenges of the climb. As well as waiting for a weather window, they had to deal with the queue of climbers preparing to go up and the dangers of ‘the death zone’.
‘It’s the zone above 8,000m where it’s a point of no return,’ explains Ozturk. ‘Even with oxygen, it’s so hard to function. You start to see dead bodies.’
The climber ran into serious trouble when the regulator on his oxygen supply started leaking.
‘It was close for me,’ he recalls. ‘I was literally crawling to the top and worried that I wasn’t going to be able to get down because
I was losing motor function.’
In the end, his team did not find Irvine, but Ozturk thinks they have closed one chapter of the story.
‘I hope our trip puts an end to people continuing to search for Irvine’s body,’ he says. ‘But I like to imagine that they did reach the summit – just because of their willpower, and the difficulties they had already overcome. I want to perpetuate that belief.’