ANDI’m so close, so close, climber Mark Synnott told himself. “I’ve come too far to turn back. I’m going to solve this bloody mystery once and for all.” Synnott was on Everest’s ‘death stretch’. There where the air is so rarefied that it does not allow long survival, and he was about to let go of the fixed rope, to abandon all security. His stunned companions watched him descend alone, through uncharted terrain made up of icy rock walls and narrow ledges.
Synnott, a climbing professional with decades of experience, had embarked on a crusade: to find the body of British mountaineer Andrew Irvine, who, with George Mallory, attempted to summit Everest in 1924. That expedition proved disastrous: Irvine disappeared while climbing precisely down the slope that Synnott was tackling. Synnott knew he was risking his life, but he trusted his technical ability. If he controlled his nerves, maybe he could solve the biggest mystery of Everest.
Two years earlier, Everest had not been among Synnott’s projects. But everything changed in 2017, when he attended a talk by his friend Thom Pollard, an Everest specialist. Pollard was a cameraman on the official 1999 expedition, which aimed to find the Kodak camera that Mallory, 37, and Irvine, 22, were carrying when they disappeared.
Ninety-eight years later it remains unknown if the British made it to the top. If they had succeeded, they would have been the first to do so, 29 years before the New Zealander sir Edmund Hillary and the Sherpas Tenzing Norgay. If the Kodak appeared and the photos could be developed, if the images showed Mallory or Irvine on the summit… then the history of the world’s tallest mountain would have to be rewritten.
The last one to see them alive, from a distance and 250 meters below the top, was his partner Noel Odell. The camera is believed to have been carried by Irvine, the better photographer of the two. Suddenly, a cloud swirled around the two climbers. When it dissipated, the two British had vanished without a trace.
The 1999 expedition that Pollard embarked on did not find the camera, but Mallory’s body, white as marble and partially clothed, was found. The body lay beneath Irvine’s ice axe, which another expedition had found in 1933. Subsequent attempts to locate Irvine’s body were in vain.
What happened that day? The family said Mallory was carrying a photo of her wife, Ruth, intending to leave her on top of Everest. However, when she recovered her body, although there were other personal belongings, that photo did not appear. Perhaps because he did manage to leave her at the top?
An image that obsesses and reaches the soul
The slides that Pollard projected during his talk piqued Synnott’s curiosity. An image fascinated him: Mallory’s body, arms outstretched, right foot still shod in a spiked-soled leather boot. “I was amazed that someone would attempt the assault on the highest mountain on the planet equipped with those boots. Of course, I knew the story of Mallory and Irvine, but suddenly it struck me. I got obsessed. I just kept thinking about it.”
For the next 18 months, Synnott – now 51 – immersed himself in studying the legendary expedition. He was willing to leave his wife and his four children – who were between 3 and 20 years old – to undertake the dangerous ascent up the terrifying north face of the peak, in the company of six other climbers and a support group of 12 sherpas and camp staff. He was “in search of a ghost.”
It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to find the body, far from it, but Synnott believed he had two advantages. Pollard had introduced him to an explorer named Tom Holzel, who in 1986 had led an expedition looking for Mallory and Irvine. This mountaineer now had a very important document: an enlarged aerial photo showing the exact point where a lone Chinese mountaineer claimed to have seen a corpse encased in a rock cavity in 1960, at an altitude of about 8,380 meters. The Chinese climber, who reached the summit by a short cut, did not reveal his discovery until 2001 and no one had tried to verify the truth of his words. The other advantage Synnott had was that he was going to use a fleet of drones to photograph Holzel’s spot. He was hoping that the body, frozen and protected in the crevasse, was nearly intact, like Mallory’s.
Synnott says that as soon as he reached Everest he was captivated by its spell. “He was hell-bent on getting to the top no matter what.” The sunrise on the day the team crowned it – May 30, 2019 – was spectacularly beautiful. “One of the most beautiful experiences I have in my memory,” she describes. Then came the tricky part: the descent and the search for Irvine’s body. Two hours later, around noon, the GPS indicated that he was 60 meters from the point indicated by Holzel. It was time to let go of the fixed ropes and take the risky detour in search of Irvine and his camera. The Sherpa who was in the lead was against deviating from the predetermined route. Too dangerous, he said. The guide and leader of the expedition did not see it clearly either. Don’t do it, Mark, he insisted. Not worth it”.
The 1999 expedition did not find the camera, but the body of George Mallory, white as marble and still partially clothed
At that moment, everyone was at the end of their strength. Synnott felt weak and nauseated. He had hardly slept a wink in the last 48 hours. He had been eating freeze-dried meat and cashews for days. However, at 8440 meters of altitude he gave the impression that the air was more compact, suddenly he felt renewed energies. You can do it, he told himself. He unhooked himself from the fixed rope, he was going to do it. Synnott acknowledges that he was breaking his promise to his family not to risk his life again. “But the mystery of Irvine’s disappearance was irresistible to me.”
He advanced along a narrow ledge covered with loose limestone plates, sticking his crampons in the direction of the cavity Holzel had pointed out. After traveling 30 meters, Synnott looked down and saw a dizzying chasm that died almost two kilometers below. “One false step and I would suffer the same fate as Irvine and Mallory,” he recalls. I put all my attention; I wanted to get out of there alive, but at the same time, the desire to reach my destination was overwhelming. I was nervous, my heart was beating like a thousand. I tried to calm down. I was consuming more oxygen than recommended.
Carefully, measuring his steps to the millimeter, he went down the ravine. When she reached the bottom, she stopped and looked around. Ten feet to her right she spotted a nook in the rock face. The GPS told him that it was the cavity visible in the photos taken by the drones. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so upset in my life.”
But that was the end of the dream: it was an optical illusion. The cavity was barely 20 centimeters wide. It was empty, of course.
The body was not. “I was stunned,” he says. But I was determined not to meet the same fate as Mallory and Irvine, so I reacted. There was nothing there, got it. I didn’t have time to think about anything other than sticking my crampons into the ice to get out of there without slipping, which would mean certain death.” The solo tour lasted less than an hour. But the longest hour of his life.
The real disappointment came when he once again felt sheltered by the security of the fixed rope and his teammates. His obsession had died in an insignificant crack. “Suddenly I felt down. What was the point of all this? Had it been worth it? All I wanted was to be home with my family.” The expedition had lasted two months. They had been through some very hard times, like a cyclonic blizzard that swept over the group at 7,000 meters, devastating the camp and nearly plunging them down the mountain. One of the expeditionaries suffered serious pulmonary embolisms that forced his evacuation by helicopter to Kathmandu.
Chinese boycott, a disturbing hypothesis
Despite all that has happened and the final disappointment, the project has been a success for Synnott. He has published a book about the expedition –The third pole-, edited a documentary –Lost on Everest– and above all, he says, he has created very close ties with Mallory and Irvine. “With each new step I took, I marveled that they could have made this journey in 1924, shod in studded boots, dressed in simple garments of wool and gabardine. What they did is amazing, you can’t even imagine it.”
The Chinese are said to have removed Irvine’s body to support the claim that they first reached the top of Everest from the north side.
So what else is known about the central mystery, the location of Irvine’s body? Synnott continues to consider it possible that she will end up showing up and so will the Kodak. There are many theories about what could have happened. Many believe that an avalanche wiped them off the map forever. But there is a more disturbing theory. Some argue that a group of Chinese climbers got ahead of Synnott and reached the point pointed out by Holzel before. Once there, Irvine’s body was removed from the mountain. The objective of this supposed operation? Buttress the official version that the 1960 Chinese team was the first to reach the top by the north slope.
Could Irvine’s body be found in Lhasa, where the Chinese mountaineering association is headquartered? Synnott toyed with the idea of traveling to China to check it out, but then the pandemic hit. Measuring his words, he notes: “It is quite possible that someone – and here I am referring to a high-level Chinese official – knows more about the case than we do.” He prefers not to say more… for the moment.
the legend of everest
Before they met, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were rivals: they were both rowers in the regatta between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. They both won it; Mallory at Cambridge, where he studied history, and Irvine at Oxford, where he became an engineer. They did not match because Mallory was 16 years older than Irvine. They met then in 1924 on the third British expedition attempting to reach the highest peak in the world.
Mallory had participated in the two previous attempts to conquer Everest, the mountain named after topographer George Everest, who determined that it was the highest mountain in the world (it is 8,848 meters high). In the first expedition, in 1921, the British opened a crucial pass for later climbs; On the next attempt, in 1922, they climbed to more than 8,000 meters, but an avalanche swept away seven Sherpas. George Mallory, who became obsessed with summiting Everest, decided to try again in 1924.
Andrew Irvine had only been on one high-mountain expedition, but he had stood out, mostly because of his skill with the oxygen apparatus. On June 7, 1924, Mallory (aged 37) and Irvine (aged 22) set out for the summit via the northwest route, known as ‘the blade’. Noel Odell watched them through a telescope from the camp, until the clouds swallowed them. Odell said it was possible for them to reach the top. But it is not known.
(Right) This is the last known image of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine. Before setting out for the top of Everest, Mallory wrote that he was “in pursuit of ultimate victory or defeat.”
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.