The Mystery

The sudden disappearance of the two English mountaineers George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Comyn Irvine ranks among the greatest enigmas in the history of exploring. On June 8,1924, the men were well on their way to an unprecedented conquest of Mt. Everest—29 years before Edmund Hillary reached the peak.

Mallory arid Irvine were last seen alive at 12:50 p.m., when a vale of clouds on the mountain parted briefly. Two thousand feet below, fellow climber Noel Odell spotted the men on the so-called "Second Step," the last major obstacle before the peak. Odell said they were "going strong for the top." Then the clouds closed around them.

No one knows what happened next. Businessman-inventor Tom Holzel '63 suggests that Mallory headed alone for the summit when the two men ran short of oxygen. On the way down to their camp, Irvine slipped and fell to his death onto a snow terrace. Mallory, Holzel surmises, reached the top but couldn't descend before nightfall and died on the mountain.

An ice ax on the route, discovered in 1933, marked the point of a fall- Irvine's,according to Holzel. His surmise seemed to be substantiated in 1980 when Japanese climbers heard a Chinese climber report his discovery on the terrace of an "English dead." This report galvanized Holzel into a quest to find the camera that the two explorers left on the frozen mountainside.