ONE HUNDRED years ago, on June 8th or 9th, two men disappeared into the clouds above the north (Tibetan) face of Mount Everest, “going strong for the top,” and only a few hundred feet from the summit, according to Noel Odell -who was fated to be the last person on earth to see George Mallory and Sandy Irvine alive.
The men were part of the third Royal Geographical Society-funded expedition to Everest; two previous expeditions had taken place in 1921 and 1922, and George Leigh Mallory was the only member of the 1924 team to be on his third trip to Everest. Handsome, absent-minded, charismatic, and a freethinker, the mountaineer George Mallory was aged 37 at the time of his disappearance.
Seventy-five years on from the 1924 Expedition, in 1999, a team of American climbers, with BBC and PBS film-makers alongside, set out to search for Mallory and Irvine, as part of the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition.
Climber Conrad Anker did a supremely Mallory-like act and struck off alone way below the designated search zone. In the subsequent BBC film, The Wildest Dream, Anker recalled: “… I stopped, turned around and there was a patch of white. It wasn’t snow, it was matte -a light absorbing colour, like marble. As I got closer, I realised this was the body of one of the pioneering English climbers, frozen on the mountainside…”
The climber was
