On May 19, 1924, a tall, handsome English schoolteacher named George Mallory shouldered his pack at a high camp on the slopes of Mount Everest. He was 37 years old and on his third expedition to the world's highest mountain. With him was a young climbing partner named Andrew Sandy Irvine, just 22. They were attempting to do something no human had ever done: stand on the summit of the tallest peak on Earth, 29,032 feet above sea level.
Mallory had become famous a few years earlier when a reporter asked why he wanted to climb Everest. His answer became one of the most quoted lines in adventure history: Because it's there. The 1924 climb was brutal. The men wore wool sweaters, leather boots, and used heavy oxygen tanks that often failed. On June 8, a fellow climber named Noel Odell glimpsed Mallory and Irvine through a break in the clouds, two tiny dots moving up a steep ridge near the summit. Then the clouds closed in. They were never seen alive again.
For 75 years, climbers and historians wondered what had happened. Had they reached the top before they vanished? In 1999, an American expedition searching the slopes finally found Mallory's frozen body. His climbing rope was tied around his waist, his eyes closed, his arms reaching up the mountain. The photo of his wife he had promised to leave on the summit was missing from his pocket, which some say is a clue that he made it. Irvine has never been found. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay officially reached the summit in 1953, but the question of who got there first remains one of mountaineering's greatest mysteries.
