THE EVEREST MYSTERY: Sandy Irvine, George Mallory, and the Truth Still Buried on Everest, by Julie Summers and Jochen Hemmleb
On June 8, 1924, the mountaineer Noel Odell stood on the highest slopes of Mount Everest and looked for two men who were attempting to go higher still. Far above, he saw two dots struggling up the mountain’s northeast ridge.
They were George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, a legendary mountaineer and a 22-year-old novice, who were making the final summit attempt of an expedition that had started poorly and was about to get worse.
Odell watched as long as he could. “Then the whole fascinating vision vanished,” he later wrote, “enveloped in cloud once more.”
Mallory and Irvine were never seen again. Over the next century, their disappearance would become one of the most alluring mysteries of mountaineering, as climbers and armchair experts wondered if before they died, the doomed pair might have become the first to reach the summit. In “The Everest Mystery,” Julie Summers and Jochen Hemmleb reconstruct the expedition with a focus on Irvine, whose contributions have often been overshadowed by his more famous partner.
Written with great affection for their subject — Summers is Irvine’s great-niece and Hemmleb has been “irrevocably hooked” on the story since childhood — it is a passionate retelling that, rather than attempting to solve the mystery, celebrates the life of the boy who died in the clouds.
Too young for the trenches, Irvine was an engineering prodigy who spent the Great War dreaming up improvements to airplane machine guns. He was also a talented athlete, rowing with distinction at university.
Irvine had minimal mountaineering experience when he was invited to join the third Everest expedition. He was chosen for his strength, his mechanical skill and his appetite for hard work.
Not even a graduate when he left for Tibet — Oxford granted him leave on condition that he resume his studies in the fall — he greeted hardship with youthful enthusiasm. In the film and photos of the expedition, he’s easy to recognize: taller and stronger than his comrades, his smile broad.
After the first two Everest expeditions had foundered partly because of altitude sickness, the organizers of this trip reluctantly admitted that reaching the summit might require supplemental oxygen.
Nominally in charge of the oxygen equipment, Odell delegated the task to Irvine, who spent the months before their departure working to improve the apparatus. When he reached India, he found that the manufacturers had ignored his suggestions, sending poorly constructed devices and leaky oxygen tanks.
Irvine spent the rest of the trip tinkering with the machines, right up to the night before his summit attempt. “Irvine’s capacity for work was immense,” wrote Geoffrey Bruce, an expedition member. “After the most grueling day on the glacier, he would settle down inside his tent, improving the oxygen apparatus or mending stoves, long after the rest of us were inside the sleeping bags.”
The expedition derailed almost at once. Most of the porters deserted as a result of poor wages, forcing the Englishmen to ask their elite, highly trained Sherpas to carry 80-pound loads across the ice, wearing them out before the real work had even begun.
During a disastrous trip up the mountain, Mallory — through either absent-mindedness or callousness — left behind the porters’ sleeping bags in favor of the oxygen equipment, forcing them to weather a hellish storm under thin blankets, shattering both health and morale.
Irvine’s spirit was undimmed. In his last letter to his mother, he wrote with characteristic cheer, “A touch of dysentery for the last 16 days has pulled me down a bit but I think I’m cured now!”
After a summit attempt without oxygen left one climber snow-blind and caused his partner to cough up the lining of his own throat, it was Irvine and Mallory’s turn. They prepared as best they could, but illness, exhaustion and poor equipment had primed them for failure.
Although Odell spent the remainder of his life insisting that when he’d last seen them they had been summit-bound, most experts — including the authors — believe it’s more likely they fell short and died during their descent. But as Summers writes, unless they were to find a note “that says ‘Bugger, we didn’t make it!’ there will always remain a flicker of hope for those who believe they did.”
Hemmleb was part of a 1999 expedition that found Mallory’s body beneath the northeast ridge, where he and Irvine had been climbing when they disappeared. No sign was found of Irvine until 2024, when a National Geographic team found a boot on the glacial slopes far below — a boot that contained a human foot and bore a neatly stitched name tag that read “A.C. Irvine.” Had Irvine fallen to his death along with Mallory? Or did he watch his more experienced comrade die, leaving him to stumble on in the gathering dark until the cold overwhelmed him?
Irvine’s father learned of his son’s death from a curt telegram: “Committee deeply regret receive bad news Everest expedition today Norton cables your Son and Mallory killed last climb.” They were honored with ceremonies across England and with testimonials that treated their deaths as a noble sacrifice.
But anyone who has seen the images of Mallory’s body — his skeletal leg snapped at a right angle, his back bleached paper white by a century in the sun — will have trouble seeing nobility there.
A more fitting tribute came in 1925, when Oxford established the A.C. Irvine Travel Fund. “Its stated aim was to apply for funds to go and have adventures in the mountains,” the authors write. One stipulation was that “the expedition should not be in any way academic, but should extend students’ skills and enjoyment in the hills.”
Sandy Irvine probably never reached Everest’s summit, but he greeted its deadly slopes with a smile.
THE EVEREST MYSTERY: Sandy Irvine, George Mallory, and the Truth Still Buried on Everest | By Julie Summers and Jochen Hemmleb | Macmillan | 368 pp. | $30
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