On June 8, 1924, an expedition teammate spotted British alpinists George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine climbing the northeast ridge of Mount Everest, together at the base of a large rock step. “Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more,” and the climbers were never seen again. They did not return to camp, and the 1924 British Mount Everest Expedition ended with this tragedy.
Whether the two made it to the summit of Everest is perhaps the greatest mystery in climbing, and what happened to them on the mountain is perhaps the second. In 1933, Irvine’s ice axe was found on the north face at 27,760 feet. In 1975, a Chinese climber named Wang Hongbao went for a walk near his Camp VI at 26,570 feet and saw “an English dead” lying face-up, but Wang died in an avalanche in 1979 and any additional information was lost with him.
Seventy-five years after Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance, in May 1999, a team of mostly American climbers led by Eric Simonson
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