“No, no, NO!” yelled Lhakpa Tenje Sherpa. “Very Dangerous. Very Dangerous!”
I stood about 20 feet below him, my crampons skittering in a pile of loose rocks at 27,700 feet, high in what they call the “Death Zone” on the North Face of Mount Everest. I had just unclipped from the fixed ropes that climbers use as their umbilical cord on the way up and down from the summit, and this, I was now being told by this veteran guide, is something that you simply don’t do.
But I was on an entirely different mission than the other climbers on the mountain that year, and I had a very good reason for leaving the security of those ropes. It was the spring of 2019, and I was leading a team sponsored by National Geographic that was trying to solve one of the great mysteries of exploration: Who really was the first to stand atop the roof of the world? Officially, the tallest mountain on Earth was first ascended by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary in May 1953. But there has always been a chance that pioneering British mountaineers, George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Comyn “Sandy” Irvine might have beaten them to the punch.
Shortly after noon on June 8, 1924, Mallory and Irvine’s teammate Noel Odell scrambled atop a small limestone crag jutting from the North Face of Mount Everest. A thick cottony veil had enveloped the upper reaches of the mountain all morning, but as Odell turned his gaze towards the summit, 3,000 feet above him, the swirling cloud cap lifted. High on the Northeast Ridge, at what he later approximated to be 28,200 feet — just 800 feet shy of the summit — Odell spotted two tiny silhouettes going strong for the summit. “My eyes became fixed on one tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow crest,” Odell would write a few days later in his diary. “The first then approached the great rock step and shortly emerged on top; the second did likewise. Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in clouds once more.”
It was the last time Odell would ever see his two friends. At that moment, two of history’s greatest explorers — men decades ahead of their time, clad in wool and gabardine, hobnailed leather boots and homemade oxygen sets — vanished into the ether.
Photography by Royal Geographical Society
In the years since, clues as to what might have happened on that fateful day have been few and far between. A subsequent British expedition in 1933 found Irvine’s ice ax laying atop a rock slab not far from where he’d last been seen. Then, in 1999, my friend Conrad Anker found Mallory’s body on a ledge at 26,700 feet. Mallory lay face down, frozen into the ground, his arms outstretched overhead, bare fingers dug into the gravel. His jacket had been shorn from his body, and his right leg was broken cleanly above the top of his boot. Rope burns on the left side of his torso suggest that he had taken a hard, swinging fall. The rope itself was tangled around his body, its severed end whipping in the wind. Anker and his companions searched Mallory’s pockets, finding a pair of green tinted goggles and a wrist watch missing its crystal that had stopped working between one and two (but was that a.m. or p.m.?).
More significant, though, was what they didn’t find, namely the photo of Mallory’s wife, Ruth, which he had said he would leave on the summit. There was also no trace of Sandy Irvine, nor of the Kodak Vest Pocket camera, known as the VPK, that he is believed to have been carrying. If that camera could be found, and the film was salvageable and held snapshots of the summit, it could rewrite the history of the world’s tallest peak. In the meantime, new research had resulted in a set of GPS coordinates that might mark the spot of Sandy’s final resting place. This is what my team had come to investigate.
As I contemplated how Lhakpa might react if I disobeyed his order to clip back in, I took a moment to assess how I felt. Since setting off from Advanced Base Camp three days earlier, I had barely slept or ate. That morning, I had forced myself to choke down a bite of Snickers — only to vomit it on the front of my down suit. Lhakpa was right, of course. One slip and I would meet the same fate as the man I was trying to find. And after leading dozens of mountaineering expeditions all over the world, I had promised my wife and four children that I would never step over to the wrong side of the fence. But this mystery and this mountain that Tibetans call Chomolungma, which means “goddess mother of the world,” had by now all but consumed me. And so, against those promises and Lhakpa’s admonitions, I turned into the slope and began downclimbing into the unknown.
Photography by Royal Geographical Society
After traversing about 200 feet, I arrived atop a small rock step about as high and steep as a playground slide. It would have been inconsequential almost anywhere else, but up here in the Death Zone, in my depleted state, alone and without a rope, it was a daunting obstacle. Looking down, I took in the dizzying void between me and the glacier, 7,000 feet below. Then I removed the steel blade of my ax from the snow and stepped gingerly down onto the rock. My crampons grated on the sloping gray limestone, but they didn’t slip, and step after timid step, I made my way down.
At the bottom of the cliff, I stomped my foot into a panel of rock-hard snow, took a few deep breaths and paused to take in my surroundings. Balancing carefully, I reached into my suit and pulled out the GPS which hung from a string around my neck. It showed that I had arrived at the waypoint. Ten feet to my right lay a small alcove with a niche in the back that looked like the kind of place where a climber in distress might try to find shelter. My eyes opened wide.
Wind whispered through the thin air, and high above I could see the summit of Chomolungma etched against a pale blue sky. Fourteen thousand feet below, the arid plain of the Tibetan Plateau shimmered like a mirage. I had risked my life to reach this forlorn place. And I now knew with awful clarity that it had been a fool’s errand. The niche was empty. Sandy Irvine wasn’t there.
Unlike Mallory and Irvine — and so many others — I was allowed safe passage back to those fixed ropes, which led me down Chomolungma and back to my family. But I had failed in my quest to find that infamous camera and the images it might hold. Then, in the fall of 2021, about six months following the publication of my book, The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession and Death on Mt. Everest, a former high ranking official in the British Embassy dropped a bombshell that he had been sitting on for almost forty years.
According to my source (who has asked to remain anonymous), he attended a meeting at the headquarters of the Chinese Mountaineering Association in Beijing back in 1984. At this meeting, a woman named Pan Duo, who made the first female ascent of the North Face of Everest in 1975, told the diplomat that on the way to the summit her team stumbled upon a body high on the mountain. And on that body, they found the Kodak VPK. They brought the camera back to China and tried to develop the film. But they either botched it or the film was ruined. No images were recovered.
I assumed this would be the end of the story, but then in October 2024 came some stunning news out of Tibet: a National Geographic team led by my old climbing partner Jimmy Chin had found Sandy’s boot, with a sock labeled A.C. [Andrew Comyn] Irvine, on the Central Rongbuk Glacier, at the base of the North Face of Everest. At one point or another, it seems that Sandy did indeed fall to the bottom of the mountain. The coincidence of this discovery happening on the 100 year anniversary of Sandy’s disappearance is almost too hard to believe, but as I have learned time and again with this story, sometimes real life is more incredible than anything we could make up.
My initial reaction when hearing this news was one of intense relief to finally know where Sandy rests in peace. But like all the other clues in this mystery, the boot offers more questions than answers, and, of course, the camera is still out there somewhere. If the story from the British diplomat is true, one possible place for the VPK to reside is the Tsering Chey Nga Snow Mountain Museum in Lhasa. And yes, I would like to visit this museum and ask its director if they have the VPK. But there’s another part of me, a stronger part, that is glad that I still don’t know what happened on that fateful day a century ago — and that the mystery of Mallory and Irvine endures.
And maybe that’s the nut of it all: In not knowing, the ending to this epic story is left to all of us. For me, this will always be a vision of those two intrepid souls, still going strong for the summit — despite the late hour of the day, and the odds stacked terribly against them.
Excerpted and adapted from The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession and Death on Mount Everest (Dutton, 2021).
