The Lost Explorer

by Anker, Conrad

  The improvement in technical gear since 1924 has been astronomical. Mallory and Irvine were tied together with a cotton rope about three eighths of an inch in diameter or less. It’s hard to calculate, but with knots tied in the rope, and if it was wet, the breaking strength might have been as little as 500 pounds. The breaking strength of the relatively light nylon rope I led the Second Step with was over 3,500 pounds. Also, nylon stretches to absorb impact, but cotton doesn’t. In the two previous accidents in Mallory’s career that were very close calls, it was something of a miracle that the rope didn’t break. On the Nesthorn in 1909, when he fell forty feet free, Geoffrey Winthrop Young expected the rope to break. And when Mallory held his three falling comrades on the snow slope in 1922 with his extraordinary ice axe belay, as he later wrote of such predicaments, “In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred either the belay will give or the rope will break.”

  On the Continent in the 1920s, climbers were using pitons to protect their leads, but not in Britain, where for decades thereafter purists sneered at what they called “ironmongery.” There is no evidence that the 1924 expedition had any metal pitons, piton hammers, or even carabiners among their gear. (Unfortunately, in The Fight for Everest no equipment list was published.) The book mentions “wooden pitons” being used to fix ropes below the North Col, but as there is no rock on the East Rongbuk there, my guess is that what they were using were long pickets made of wood. These would have been of no use up high.

  All this means that the Second Step would have been an utterly terrifying proposition in 1924. Irvine would have had to stand belaying at the base of the final cliff, unanchored to the mountain. Had Mallory fallen anywhere while climbing up the overhanging crack, both men would most likely have been ripped off the Step and flung headlong into a fatal fall.

  We know from Mallory’s note that he forgot his compass at Camp V. That probably didn’t matter so much, unless they were caught in a whiteout, but Odell’s description of the weather on June 8 makes that sound improbable. And we know from the 1933 discovery of Mallory’s flashlight in Camp VI that he forgot that too on his summit day. Most likely he also forgot to take the magnesium flares to be used in an emergency, for Odell saw one or two of them in the tent at VI. The absence of the flashlight could have had serious consequences if the two men were descending in the dark.

  In 1924, not only were the oxygen cylinders leaky, the whole apparatus flawed (to Irvine’s constant despair), but the rig was much heavier than what we carried. Our outfit weighed fourteen pounds, Mallory’s over thirty. In that last note to Odell, he comments on the burden—“it’s a bloody load for climbing.” That weight would have slowed down the fittest climber. In addition, each of our bottles gave two to three times as much oxygen as the 1924 cylinders.

  Finally, in terms of clothing: Mallory had on leather single boots, two pairs of stockings Ruth had knitted for him, long underwear, knickers, and puttees—picture an Ace bandage wrapped around the ankle and calf to keep out snow. On his upper body, he had seven or eight layers of silk, cotton, and wool. On his head, what looked like a pilot’s cap with a fur lining.

  In contrast, the day I went for the top I had on two layers of fleece, a synthethic wind parka, and a full down suit with a wind-resistant surface. On my head, a knit hat and the built-in down hood on my jacket. On my feet, thick nylon boots insulated with closed-cell foam, with gaiters built in to keep snow out of the ankles. The suit alone provides three to four inches of insulation, which is a lot more than all seven or eight of Mallory’s layers combined. Yet even with my snazzy state- of-the-art clothing, I’d get very cold when I had to stop and wait for any length of time.

  Another important consideration is how well hydrated Mallory and Irvine were when they set out on June 8. We know from Mallory’s note to Odell that “our Unna Cooker rolled down the slope at the last moment.” The latest that note could have been written was the afternoon of June 7, because the Sherpas carried the note down to Camp V that day. Unless Mallory and Irvine had heated snow to fill their Thermoses with water for the climb the next day even before cooking dinner, the loss of the stove would have meant they had no water and couldn’t properly hydrate. They might have tried to fill the Thermoses with snow and melt it with body heat in the night, but that’s a desperate emergency measure. On Annapurna IV I was stuck in a snow cave for five days and tried that technique with a water bottle. It was horrid: I filled the bottle with snow and kept it between my legs all evening, but managed to melt only a cupful of water. The procedure costs you more in heat loss than you gain in energy from the liquid.

  So if they set out on the morning of June 8 already dehydrated, that would have taken a drastic toll. On top of this, Irvine was terribly sunburned, and sunburn dehydrates you further.

  Another argument against their having made the summit has to do with rates of ascent. I’m convinced that the fact that Mallory forgot his flashlight indicates that they set out at or after sunrise. You don’t forget your flashlight if you leave while it’s still dark. So far as I can determine, nobody in either 1922 or 1924 ever got off from a high camp before 6:30 in the morning. By contrast the six of us set out at 2:30 A.M. on May 17.

  In First on Everest: The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine, Tom Holzel calculates a theoretical rate of ascent for the two men of 204 vertical feet per hour. This forms a crucial part of his argument that Mallory could have made the top. It took Dave and me twelve hours and twenty minutes to go from Camp VI to the summit. That’s averaging only 165 vertical feet per hour. Dave and I are relatively rapid climbers, he’d been to the top before, and we had the tremendous advantage over Mallory and Irvine of crampons and fixed ropes. I find it hard to believe they could have climbed significantly faster than we did along the northeast ridge.

  All of these considerations add up to a strong case in my mind that Mallory and Irvine did not summit on June 8, 1924. But the clincher for me is the Second Step.

  First of all, it’s worth pointing out that on the northeast ridge, there’s no alternative to climbing the Second Step where the Chinese tied their ladder. On the prow of the ridge, the rock is completely rotten and vertical. On the left, over the Kangshung Face, there’s just snow with the consistency of whipped cream plastered onto very steep ice. It’s probably unclimbable today, even with ice tools and crampon front-points, and there was certainly no hope of climbing it in 1924 in the traditional style of chopping steps. To the right of the ladder, the rock just gets steeper and steeper. You could traverse far beneath the ridge and get into the Great Couloir, as Norton did on June 4, and so avoid the Second Step. But once you’re above the Yellow Band, to traverse into the Great Couloir could actually be more difficult and demanding than to climb the Second Step.

  Let’s imagine that Mallory and Irvine could have gotten up the bottom half of the Second Step. I’d rate the moves there as about 5.5, which Mallory could have done. But then Irvine would have had to stand at the top of the snow triangle, where Dave tied in to the ladder, and try to get some sort of stance without an anchor. He would have belayed Mallory with that flimsy cotton rope wrapped around his waist, exactly as Geoffrey Winthrop Young belayed Mallory on the Nesthorn. Mallory would have had to climb the slightly overhanging fifteen-foot crack without a single piece of protection. The cam I was able to place under the chockstone some fifteen feet up was the only possible protection, and that type of gear wasn’t invented until the late 1970s.

  Even with a secure belay, a cam for protection, a good nylon rope, and a rest on the ladder rung I stepped on, I found the pitch desperately hard. By the 1920s, a few climbs as hard as 5.10 on lowland European crags like the Elbsandsteingebirge near Dresden had been done, by wizards way ahead of their time, using pitons or ring bolts or rope loops tied through holes in the rocks. But not by Britons in Wales: at the time, the hardest pitches in Great Britain were probably at the 5.7 to 5.8 level. That sort of pitch is an entirely different proposition at 28,230 feet on Everest.

  Incidentall
y, I’m convinced—as Reinhold Messner is too—that the Chinese did not climb the Second Step in 1960. It’s unfathomable to think of taking off your boots and trying the cliff in stocking feet there. It’s too convenient that reaching the top in the dark explains the team’s failure to bring back summit photos. And I suspect that reporting the crux of the cliff at the Second Step as only three meters high, when in truth it’s a good twenty-five feet, was a concoction to make it plausible that it could have been surmounted by a shoulder stand.

  Even if Mallory and Irvine had miraculously climbed the Second Step, they would have been stranded above it. Few climbing ropes at the time were longer than 100 feet. Had they doubled the rope around the anchoring boulder at the top and rappelled the Step, the rope would never have reached. Nor would they have been able to pull the rope down from below, because the boulder sits so far back on the shelf that the friction would have been prohibitive. An alternative would have been to tie the rope to the boulder, rappel it single-strand, and leave the rope there. But no one since has ever found any trace of an anchor or a rope from 1924 above the Second Step.

  Even if I had successfully free-climbed the Step, there’s no way I could have down-climbed it. Some people have wondered whether Mallory and Irvine might have fallen to their deaths trying to do just that. But if they’d come off there, they would have fallen all the way to the Rongbuk Glacier.

  There’s one possible loophole in this matter. If 1924 was an unusually heavy year for snow, it’s conceivable that a snow cone could have drifted in, covering the vertical cliffs of the Second Step, in which case Mallory and Irvine could have just walked up the cone. During May that year, the expedition was hit by one storm after another. But on the north face, snow doesn’t stay long—it tends to get quickly blown off. In the few photos I’ve seen from 1924, even from far below you can see the thin black band of the upper Second Step. The only expedition in recent years to report anything like a snow cone here was that of the Catalans in 1985, but they came to Everest in the autumn season, after the monsoon. Even they had to climb the top four or five rungs of the ladder.

  In my heart, I’ve always wanted to believe Mallory and Irvine could have climbed the mountain in 1924. It would have made for one of the ultimate of all mountaineering tales. It makes me sad to be on the skeptical, debunking side of the debate, but for all the reasons I’ve laid out above, I believe there is no possible way Mallory and Irvine could have reached the summit.

  WHAT DO I THINK happened, then, on June 8, 1924?

  Imagine Mallory and Irvine at Camp VI that morning, looking toward the summit. For Mallory, this was the mountain of his dreams. He was the only man who’d tried Everest on three expeditions; now, after a month of defeat, he had one last chance. He had the resources and the weather to give it a good shot.

  But the pair of men were tired from the tough two-day climb up from the North Col. Irvine had terrible sunburn, his lips cracked, pieces of his skin peeling off whenever his face rubbed against anything. Probably their eyes were sore, from the grit and sun—even with modern goggles, I pick up that irritation at high altitude. By evening, my eyes are red and feel very scratchy. The sun adds a significant debilitating factor to any effort at altitude, one too often underestimated.

  It’s possible they used oxygen to sleep, but I’d guess they saved it for the climb. Without oxygen, it’s difficult to sleep at that altitude. You develop a cyclic breathing pattern—fast and shallow breaths alternating with no breaths at all—which wakes you up again and again. It’s an autonomic reaction of the body to lack of oxygen. So I’d guess they went to bed early, but just tossed and turned most of the night.

  And maybe in the morning, Irvine made desperate last-minute repairs to the oxygen apparatus. I don’t buy Odell’s notion that he might have just been puttering, “invent[ing] some problem to be solved even if it never really had turned up.” Oxygen problems could have delayed their getting off in the morning. And again, it seems certain that it was light when they left, because Mallory forgot his flashlight.

  They headed up using oxygen, probably two bottles per man, maybe at a flow of about two liters per minute. They climbed through the Yellow Band, which in itself is trying, difficult terrain. Tom Holzel argues that a bottle would have lasted them a little more than four hours, but I don’t think you can be that precise, so many things can go wrong at altitude. In any event, they discarded a bottle between the top of the Yellow Band and the First Step, where Tap and Jake found it this year.

  Even with oxygen, altitude confuses your sense of time.You think you’ve been doing something for fifteen minutes, but you’ve been doing it for an hour. A metaphor occurred to me after my experience this year on Everest. At altitude, it’s as if there’s a house burning, and the house that’s burning is you, but everything’s happening at such a dragged-out pace you can’t do anything about it. You just watch the house burn down.

  Mallory and Irvine may have been taking four or five breaths for each step. Or they may have taken as many as fourteen or fifteen—that’s not uncommon among modern climbers, even with oxygen. No matter what, I’m sure their pace was slower than Mallory had hoped. They made the long diagonal traverse from the top of the Yellow Band to the First Step. I’m convinced they climbed the First Step, and that somewhere near there is where Odell saw them at 12:50. But then they faced the tricky traverse from the First Step to the Second. It would have been amazing to have climbed this in 1924, and it would mean that they’d gotten about a hundred feet higher than Norton had four days before. That in turn means that nobody got higher on the surface of the earth for the next twenty-eight years.

  But somewhere on that traverse, they recognized that it wasn’t in the cards, that they weren’t going to make it to the top. If they’d had an exceptional climbing day, and everything had gone right, they might have reached the foot of the Second Step. But they turned back. Now the snow squall that Odell reported blew in. The new snow would have filled their tracks, meaning that they had to try to find the route all over again on the way down. The tricky part even today is finding the exit cracks at the top of the Yellow Band.

  My guess is that Mallory was going first: he wouldn’t have left the route-finding up to Irvine. And just as I started to do with Dave, he started down the Yellow Band too early, too far west. At some point in the afternoon, the weather cleared up again, and Odell looked for his friends, but if they were in the rocks of the Yellow Band as opposed to outlined against the sky, there was little chance he could spot them.

  We know that Mallory and Irvine were roped together. At the time, a common practice on moderate mixed ground was to travel roped together, with the second man carrying coils. It turns out to be an incredibly dangerous practice—the very chore of managing the rope and maintaining a steady distance between climbers can cause accidents, and the chance of one man’s belaying and stopping the other’s fall is slim at best. Yet as late as the 1960s, mountaineers were still teaching this technique.

  There are many places where you can climb through the Yellow Band. Much of it lies at that tricky angle where you’re torn between down-climbing and rappelling. The rocks are all downsloping and loose. Mallory would have been intensely focused here. And I’d guess that either it was approaching dusk or the men were descending in the squall, so he took off his goggles to see the rock better. They would have been moving together on the easier parts, maybe stopping to give a little belay on the harder stretches—the rope hooked over a prong or corner, like the “nick” Geoffrey Winthrop Young used to belay Mallory on the Nesthorn.

  Since May 1, I’ve thought a lot about Mallory’s hands. Why wasn’t he wearing gloves? He had the spare pair of fingerless knit gloves in his pocket, but they looked as though they’d never been used. The other thing that struck me at once is that the hands showed no signs of frostbite.

  A number of people, especially those who would like to believe Mallory and Irvine made the summit, have hypothesized that they spent the night of
June 8 in an open bivouac, then fell descending on the ninth. But with their clothing, there would have been no way to spend a night out above 27,000 feet and not suffer serious frostbite. When your fingers freeze, they develop “blebs,” puffy blisters, although it takes them from twenty-four to forty-eight hours to swell up. Mallory’s fingers showed no sign of blebs. On May 16 this year, during the second search, Thom Pollard had dug up Mallory’s face. I asked him if there was any sign of frostbite; he said no. Unlike the fingers, the nose and cheeks react right away to frostbite, turning first white and gray, then black.

  The absence of frostbite on Mallory’s mummified body proves to me that he died on June 8, not the next day. As the blood ceases to flow upon death, a deceased person doesn’t develop frostbite.

  My hunch is that when he fell, Mallory had taken off his gloves so that he could face inward and grasp the rocks better. Maybe it was dark by then, and down-climbing in the dark, with no flashlight, would have been all but impossible.

  Everyone has wondered whether one man fell and pulled the other off, or if Irvine belayed Mallory’s fall and the rope broke over an edge. In the latter case, Irvine would have been left to try to descend alone in the dark. This scenario might fit well with Wang Hongbao’s “old English dead”—maybe the Chinese climber in 1975 found Irvine where he had tried to wait out the night and had frozen to death. But I doubt it, for one good reason. If Irvine had belayed Mallory and the rope had broken when Mallory’s weight came on it, the rope would have parted near Irvine’s end. Instead, we found it broken only some ten feet away from Mallory’s waist.

  I think, then, that one man pulled the other off (it could have been Irvine, coming second, who fell), that both men plunged down the mountain together, and that the rope sawed over a rock edge. That’s happened often over the years, even with good nylon ropes. And if I’m right, the place to look for Irvine is not in Hemmleb’s search zone, which is up and left, or east, of where I found Mallory, but rather to the right or west of Mallory, because when the accident happened they would have been diagonaling down and eastward with Mallory in the lead.