Mountaineering has been waiting for exactly a century for George Mallory and Andrew Irvine to return from their attack on the virgin summit of Everest, to appear on the North Col and tell what happened to them on June 8 or 9, 1924. Let them say whether they reached or not the top. May the most exciting mystery in the history of the conquest of the peaks be finally revealed. But they will not return: Mallory’s body was found in 1999 by American mountaineer Conrad Anker, although Irvine’s remains missing. At this point all hopes of knowing the truth are centered on the illusion of a sign, a carom, an unimaginable revelation or a miracle. That is, someone finds the mummified remains of Sandy Irvine, let him search through his silk, wool, tweed and gabardine clothes and find the pocket camera, a Vest Pocket Kodak, with its film still usable and whether or not the laboratory finds the top photo, the proof that They reached the top. The most skeptical, the least dreamy, the Cartesians assure that the couple was not capable of climbing with the means and techniques of the time the second step, the definitive obstacle, a rock wall of a dozen meters but at an altitude of 8,600. Maybe they didn’t even need to climb it.
However, there are theories that fuel optimism, which see it as feasible that both climbed to the top and perished during the descent. With negativist and positivist speculations confronted, everything seems possible. Above all, it is advisable not to underestimate the capabilities of both protagonists. The unbelievers forget that Mallory was on the team that in 1920 found the logical route on the north face of the mountain, that in 1922 reached the height of 8,250 meters without using bottled oxygen and that it did so without using crampons. Over the years, there has been much speculation about the apparently poor clothing worn by the English. A 2006 study revealed that the six upper layers and four lower layers they wore would have allowed them to reach the summit although they would have compromised their survival if they had to bivouac. Today’s feather divers, on the other hand, allow you to endure a night outdoors. Many also forget that Mallory was a fantastic mountaineer, a regular at the Mont Blanc massif where he had carried out notable ascents and brave attempts. Both were seen for the last time just in the vicinity of said second step, but Noel Odell, the definitive witness of their movements, could not specify whether or not they had just overcome the challenge. Odell died at the age of 96 and no one could dissuade him from what he saw that day or from the fact that his two companions had been successful. Many think like him and consider that both climbers reached the summit, descended at night and suffered an accident after overcoming the most severe difficulties of the route. It remains to be proven. Recent studies show the possibility that Noel Odell’s perspective was not from the second step but from the third, a simple obstacle that opens the doors to the top. It is common that even books about Everest confuse the different steps that the edge observes with each other.
The second step was officially climbed for the first time in 1960: a Chinese expedition took up the cry of summit or death and achieved the first, but its protagonists were very close to the second. It was the first time that the roof of the planet had been climbed from Tibet, on the northern slope, the same one that had welcomed all the British attempts at a time when the kingdom of Nepal did not open its doors to foreigners. George Mallory was a fixture in the exploration and attacks on Everest. But he was not someone obsessive, much less a madman blinded by a certain promise of glory. He loved the mountains. He was fascinated by the highest of all, not “because he is there,” as he once said to shake off a journalist, but because he assumed the highest of aspirations. Although he was extremely absent-minded, his biographers reveal a passionate but slow-paced Mallory, without any suicidal inclination, willing to take on a terribly arduous undertaking but without getting carried away by what we know today as summit fever. In fact, in his writings he made it clear that he did not want to attack the north ridge of Everest because it seemed risky to have to climb difficult sections at such an altitude, which raises the possibility that he was looking for a sophisticated but technically simpler alternative route.
If conquering Everest in 1924 seemed like a Homeric task, climbing K 2 in 1939 sounded crazy. However, Fritz Wiessner, a small German climber, scaled the rock spur (which no one passes over today) to the left of the Bottleneck and turned around, at 8,400 meters, under a blue, windless sky. nor difficulties to the top, because the Sherpa who accompanied him asked him to do so: he feared the “demons of the night.” K 2 fell in 1954. If Wiessner did what he did, using a more complex route but less exposed to falling ice blocks, why not Mallory and Irvine? The fact that today the normal route of the north face runs along its edge does not mean that there are no alternative routes, such as flanking to the Norton corridor and ascending the snow slopes or zigzagging between the terraces of the yellow bands located under the edge. In this type of terrain, the pioneers’ spiked boots were more reliable than even crampons. With this, several analysts refute the idea that Mallory and Irvine even had to face the second step: they would have avoided it by flanking it below, on their right, and when Odell saw them through his objective (at 12:50 noon) both They were already on the third step.
Thus, more and more voices and analysts consider it possible that Mallory and Irvine reached the top. To date it seemed proven that they died as a result of a fall, since the body of the former showed, when found by the American mountaineer Conrad Anker, a 5 mm rope tied to his waist, but severed at a short distance. The discovery of Mallory’s body with a broken leg raised expectations, but nothing was found among his belongings that could determine whether or not they reached the summit. Among the remains of his clothes were a box of matches, three letters, a handkerchief, a knife, a broken altimeter, a sewing case… and a watch, but not the photo of his wife Ruth, nor the letter to she, who had promised to abandon at the top. Also a small indication is the fact that his sunglasses were kept in a pocket, which could indicate that the accident occurred at night, when they were descending from the summit. Or maybe he took them off because, as Odell said, the cloudiness was notable.
It is also known that both of them dispensed with their artificial oxygen equipment, since they were found years later abandoned on a ledge: they weighed too much to climb with agility (about 13 kg, by 3 kg in 2024) and worked with difficulty. But no one knows if they were abandoned during the ascent or upon their return from the summit. However, they used them to sleep and carried them for several hours on summit day. Mallory, they claim, chose young Irvine as his teammate because of his skill in lightening and repairing oxygen equipment. It’s a key issue: if Irvine was able to ensure his run to the top, it’s not unreasonable that they would be successful. But Mallory always considered it a “damn heresy” to use them and if he chose Irvine, over other more experienced companions, it was because he knew how to read that the young rower would not leave him stranded, that he could count on him until the end. He especially valued the solidity of a team. On the other hand, scholars of the 1924 expedition remember that almost 100% of deaths on Everest occurred after reaching the summit. Those who give up first and turn around survive. George Mallory was a Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery Regiment and participated in the Battle of the Somme which ended in 1916 after five months and a million deaths. “I have no problems with corpses, as long as they are recent,” he wrote to his wife. History would also have no problem finding Irvine’s mummified body and solving the riddle. Meanwhile, the top of Mallory and Irvine clings to a question of faith.
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