Why Climb Everest? A Mystery Is There

At dinner with Sir Edmund Hillary, an admirer once likened him to the greatest of sports heroes, in the class of, say, Mickey Mantle.

A hush fell over the table. Hillary narrowed his eyes.

“More like Neil Armstrong,” the old man corrected.

But what if . . .

What if Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay were not the first to step onto the top of Mt. Everest back on that amazing day of May 29, 1953? More to the point, what if you could prove they were second by 29 years?

In one of the great longshots of historical revisionism, Northwest mountaineer Eric Simonson has assembled an expedition to inquire into the question of who was first to leave footprints on the world’s highest summit.

Lost Cameras Beckon

British adventurers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine made a bid for the top in 1924. One of their team members, Noel Odell, reported seeing the two about 900 feet from the 29,028-foot top and still climbing. They vanished. The nature of their disaster, and whether it occurred on the way up or down, remains unknown.

All these years later, Mallory is remembered less for his attempt than his explanation for trying: “Because it’s there.”

No sign of Mallory and Irvine was ever reported from the top, but that tells little because nothing remains in such an exposed, wind-scarred place for long. However, in country-squire tweed coats that mountaineers of that era wore, Mallory and Irvine were thought to be carrying small Kodak cameras to record their summit achievement. Locating the cameras and finding the film in condition to process defies the odds. But Everest is always a story of extreme odds.

Simonson, a 43-year-old professional guide, will lead a team of eight high-altitude experts and eight Sherpas toward the “death zone” above 27,000 feet, to fan out to see if they can find one of the old cameras behind a rock, under a ledge or in a nook.

True, much of Everest is alive with avalanches, perpetual windstorms, moving glaciers and epic crevasses that open and close. Here and there, however, one may find protected spots where a falling body could lodge or where two desperate climbers might have sought shelter so long ago.

Clues Found and Lost

In 1933, an ice ax believed to have been Irvine’s was found high on Everest, and in 1975 a Chinese climber reported finding the body of an “English dead” on a terrace below. A 1986 effort to locate the body was turned back by weather.

Mallory and Irvine did not attempt the mountain from the familiar Nepalese side, used by Hillary and hundreds of successful climbers since. The two instead went via the north side and Tibet, a route subsequently closed by the Chinese for many years. It has since been reopened, and more than 130 climbers have used it to reach the summit without finding traces of the 1924 expedition. Maybe that’s because they did not look. They were single-mindedly bound for the summit.

Simonson and half his search team already have reached the summit on earlier expeditions. Thus, they tell themselves, they will not be tempted to divert from their mission and dash for the top.

“We’ll try to make the summit, but that won’t be our primary goal,” Simonson said while packing at his Ashford, Wash., home.

Expedition organizers have talked to experts at Kodak. There is a chance that any film Mallory and Irvine exposed on the summit would be salvageable because of frozen, low-humidity conditions. That is if the cameras did not break in whatever tragedy killed them, and if the cameras have been shielded in the 75 years since, maybe by a body or thick clothing, not directly bombarded by the intense solar rays that hit the Earth in the thin air five miles up.

Simonson’s climb will begin this month in Katmandu. The route leads across a pass into China for a base camp at 21,500 feet. The team intends to pick up Mallory and Irvine’s trail and advance higher sometime in May, depending on the seasonal post-monsoon break in Everest’s weather.

The effort has attracted support from some of the world’s top gear manufacturers, as well as PBS’ “Nova” and the BBC. As is increasingly the case in such adventure expeditions, daily reports and real-time telephone accounts will be posted on the Internet by another sponsor, MountainZone.com.

As for Hillary? Well, mountaineering is not just about getting to the summit. It’s also about getting down. Hillary’s team is secure with this first. “He’s been my hero since I was a boy,” Simonson said. “This is not about disproving what he and Tenzing Norgay did. This is more about trying to unravel one of the great mysteries of mountaineering.”