Hey, everybody, it's your old pal Josh and for this WEEK'SYSK Select, I've chosen our twenty twenty two episode, Did Mallory make it to the top of Everest First? It's a clunky title, but an amazing episode. It talks about George Mallory, an unsung climber who may have been the first European to ever summ at Everest, a full three decades before Sir Edmund Hillary definitely did. The reason we don't know. The reason it's still a mystery is because he was lost for years and even once he was found,
still didn't quite answer the question. This is an amazing history mystery podcast that also has a lot of human spirit in it, and I hope you enjoy it.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and this is Stuff you Should Know Lost down the Mountain op edition, but not in Tennessee because this has nothing to do with the Beverly Hillbillies at all.
Wow. I thought that was a roundabout funny intro.
I didn't even know what was coming thirty seconds ago.
No, we are not talking about Tennessee. We are talking about one of the heroes of mountaineering and mountain climbing, certainly, mister George Mallory, and the great mystery to me, unsettled mystery on whether or not he ever made it to the top of Edvers Yes, Edvere.
So boy, yeah, this is a tough start, Chuck, because I just realized what I reference was the Davy Crockett theme, not Beverly Hillbilly. So everybody save your emails. Okay, Oh that's right, all of you Beverly Hillbilly's cose players, save your save your emails. So, okay, we're talking about Mount Everest. We're not talking about Davy Crockett or the Beverly Hillbilly. We're talking about George Mallory, and to a lesser extent, kind of unfairly but also kind of fairly his climbing companion,
Sandy Irvine. And George Mallory is extraordinarily famous, not just in the climbing community. He's a legend in the climbing community, Chuck. But you and I know about him. I knew about Mallory, didn't you before all this? Yeah, at least heard his name had a general idea about him, right, sure, named two other climbers exactly.
The guy from that free solo documentary, and well all the Sherpa, I mean, we Ed makes his great pains to point out the Sherpa, But suffice to say, all you have to do is go back and listen to our episode Sherpa Warm Friendly Living, in which we dedicate an entire episode to the usually nameless Sherpa, who are usually standing just out of frame of some white dude saying, yeah, I climbed Everest again, but here, go ahead and get your picture taken.
Right, And they just kind of slowly shoved them to the side. But yeah, but despite your best efforts, you still managed to prove my point. Yeah, George Mallory is extremely famous, and up to his thirties, it did not look like it was going to go that way because he started out this very famous mountain climber and mountaineer
and early mountain climber mountaineer too. That's something that I feel as a beat will hit throughout this episode that these guys that Mallory was climbing with were using like they were making some of their own gear. They were figuring out mountaineering techniques as they went along. It was like a brand new thing that people were doing, and George Mallory was among the earliest people doing that.
Yeah, there's that one. I don't know if it was a journalist or somebody was talking about pictures of the actual attempt to climb Everest and he said, these guys look like they had gone out for a picnic and were hit by a snowstorm, right, and just in how they were dressed. You know, they were in like sweet jackets and stuff.
Yeah, and hobnail boots, so just like some leather boots with some spikes attached to him. Like just nothing you would even climb a hill in these days, let alone Mount Everest. But that's what they were wearing. So George Mallory didn't start out as showing signs he was going to be famous. He was a kind of a left leaning, progressive intellectual school teacher. He did rub elbows with John
Maynard Keynes and Virginia Wolf from the Bloomsberry group. Bloomsberry pretty cool, yeah, but that was probably the greatest brush with fame that he had up until he started hitting Mount Everest and making that basically his stated goal. In life.
Yeah, I mean he got into hiking and mountaineering when he was in his late teens and really fell in
loved with it. But you know, as Ed Keenley points out, it was, you know, it was such a new sport that people didn't even really know, Like they haven't even charted like the highest mountains in the world up into a very i mean what I consider a pretty late point when you think about like expeditions at Lewis and Clark made it was in eighteen fifty two when they finally finally figured out that Everest was the tallest peak.
Yeah, like up to eighteen fifty two, they were basically at the point of that one's tall. Oh look at that one. That's a tall one too.
Yeah. I wish we could put him next to each other.
Yeah, exactly. So there was actually a guy named Radan Siktar who was an Indian surveyor who used data that the English had produced during their occupation of India to calculate just exactly how tall Mount Everest was, because they really did settle on Everest just by sight, They're like, that might be the tallest mountain we've ever seen, And indeed it turned out at twenty nine thirty two feet. Mount Everest was in the mid nineteenth century and still
is today the tallest mountain in the entire world. And they named it Everest after the director of the survey in India. Of course they did, Sir George Everest. But if you asked a Tibetan what's the name of that big old mountain over there, they would tell you Chomo Lungma, which means mother goddess of the world in Tibetan. So even the Tibetans were like, this is clearly the world's tallest mountain.
Yeah, And of course they had their own names for it, but we generally don't know those names because they would come along later and just name it after just some dude.
Right, but we some Englishmen. I mean Chomlongma, that's definitely one of them.
No, I know, but ask ten people what Choe Malonga is.
Right, and name two other famous climbers.
Yes, but the long and short of it is, I guess the tall and short of it is. They realized that Everest was the tallest thing in eighteen fifty two, but big deal. They couldn't do anything about it. They could just kind of gaze upon it. It would be decades and decades before anyone even thought that they might
be able to climb Everest, because here's the deal. Getting to Everest and climbing it is like ascending the peak is one thing, but just getting to that point is I don't know, ninety percent of the battle.
I would say easily. Most people think you look at a mountain, you just climb up the base and go up to the side and you're done. But no, you have to basically traverse mountain ranges. Mountains just don't exist on their own. They're part of ranges and you don't really think about it, but you have to climb all these other little mini mountains to get to the big mountain in the first place. And this can be walks of you know, dozens or scores of miles and not
walk it's not a straight walk over a plane. And then you get to the edge of the mountain and you go up like you're going up and up and up, and you're existing at higher and higher altitudes, which the English people who were doing this at first were not used to, so they were doing this with basically altitude sickness and all the stuff that comes with that.
All right, so let's go to nineteen twenty and the stages sort of set to where they feel like it might be possible to actually accomplish something like this. And the Royal Geographic Society got together with the Alpine Club to form and they didn't like permanently come together, but they worked together to form the Mount Everest Committee to say, all right, let's give this a go, old boy, And they got permissioned from Tibet in nineteen twenty one to
go on a scouting trip. And this was a trip where they would just kind of figure out how to climb Everest. Like it wasn't like they just said, all right, let's give it a go and see if we can get to the top. Like they had to take several trips just to sort of map out what they thought would be a feasible way to even try to get to the top.
Right, Apparently no one from Europe had been within sixty miles of Everest itself, so this was all new, uncharted territory basically for these guys. And again it's really important to say, like we're going to be telling the story from the English point of view, and like you said, the Sherpa rarely figure into that, with the big exception of Tensing Norgay, who officially was the first to summ at Everest with Edmund Hillary. But these guys weren't doing
this alone. They had, depending on the expedition and how much money it had, scores to hundreds of sherpas like attending them, helping them climb, moving their stuff, and just basically making life much easier on these guys. That said, I really don't want to undermine the amount of effort and strenuousness that these guys, yeah, and talent that these guys underwent in just figuring out how to get to Everest to start on that first nineteen twenty one expedition.
Yeah, it's really cool to read contemporary, yes, contemporary accounts of what modern climbers think of Mallory and his not just tenaciousness, but his actual talent level and his climbing style was apparently very unique and just revered today by modern climbers. Is And you know, it's not to take anything away from what anyone does today, because what people
can accomplish day is amazing. But they accomplish these things based generally on you know, they can be taught by other people and like this is how it's done, Like Mallory and the King. We're figuring this out for the first time. And by the way, I might have said Hillary instead of Mallory. Yeah, because I'm just thinking of climbing hills.
Right, and we should just go ahead and say just to get any confusion out of the way. Edmund Hillary summitted evereston I think nineteen fifty three. We're talking about the first expeditions to ever again in nineteen twenty Mallory and Hillary, I don't believe ever met. They were of different generations of climbers, but Mallory was considered one of the pioneers, as were the other men in his expeditions that he went on.
All right, So if I said Hillary, I meant Mallory. Are we all good?
I think we're good?
Yeah, okay, all right. So they got permission again for this trip in nineteen twenty one, and Mallory was in his early thirties. He was included in this first group and I think was really chomping at the bit to do so. He has a wife and three young kids at home, but really nothing could stop him from going on this first scouting trip.
No, and he was thirty three on the nineteen twenty one trip, and he says, basically, hey, dear, I'm going to quit my job and leave you and the children for I don't know, seven months at least to go on this expedition see you. And that's where he went.
But he did say to his wife, here's what I'll do. I'll take this picture of you, babe, and I will carry it with me always, and I will place you at the top of Everest to live there forever, more in case than ice when I get up there.
Yeah, and I'm sure he probably took it with him on the first expedition, But the first expedition wasn't planning on summoning Everest. But from what I gather from Mallory, he would have been down to give it a shot that first time out. Like that's how obsessed with Everest that man became, right, and he actually was really successful. The expedition was this was again the first expedition by the English to map Everest, and they managed to do it.
They managed to find a way onto Everest what's called the North Call, which is a ridge that connects one mountain to another, and they found that North Call which is the way still today. If you're coming from the north from the Tibetan side up Everest, you still use that route that these guys mapped in nineteen twenty one.
Yeah, and it's important to point out which side that they would have gone up then and what side you go up now, because there is a route that China kind of secured and basically has held that Americans can't go, and that'll be a key sort of later on in this mystery. So put it bin in that.
Yeah, because China invaded Tibet in nineteen fifty and said this side of the mountain is closed to Westerners. But this happened. That happened to three decades after Mallory and his expeditions, so they were using that north route, and still to this day. The north route is considered technically more difficult because it requires you to spend more time at higher elevations with its attendant lower oxygen concentration, which
makes the whole thing way harder. And then secondly, the way in through the north route requires twenty two miles of walking just to get from base camp to the top, whereas the south route, which is what Westerners use today coming from the Nepalese side is about twelve and three quarter miles of walking. Nothing to sneeze that still, but yeah, it just kind of underscores the just how hard the things that these guys were doing with zero equipment.
All right, so I think it's a good time for a break. Sure, I'm gonna finally sort out the difference between Hillary and Mallory.
It sounds like an eighties sitcom.
No, all right, So I'm gonna work all that out and we'll be right back.
Stuff you should know.
Okay, we're back, and I want to go over a little more about when you how you get to a mountain. And we don't have to go in great detail, but you're basically going up one mountain to get to that ridge that connects that small mountain to Everest, the taller mountain, right, But to get there requires hiking, mountain climbing, ice climbing,
rock climbing, every kind of climbing you can imagine. And one of the first things you have to do, no matter whether you come from the north route or the south rout is cross a glacier and that is way harder than it sounds.
Yeah, I mean, this thing is you know surrounded in part by glaciers, and like you said, there are so many different disciplines if you're going to do something like Everest, and especially in nineteen twenty one twenty two, that I just don't think we can overstate like the near impossibility of this feet at the time.
Yeah, especially with the glacier. There's crevasses. They can be really deep, you know, one hundred or more feet deep, and you can fall into that and die. There can be ice slides it's also known as avalanches. They can come and bury you. There's something called I think seacres, which are how size blocks of ice that you sometimes have to climb that you could also topple and be crushed by. Like that's just the glacier. That's like the
first obstacle to get toward the mountain. And again they were doing this with zero equipment.
Yeah, I mean we did. We did a whole episode on ice climbing, right.
We totally did.
And I remember so we talked about sea coorse.
Okay, good, all right? Yeah, I thought it sounded familiar, and I also was like, yeah, ice climbing is really hard. I know that from experience and researching it.
Yeah, well I mean this one. The sharp episode was really good. Ice climbing was good. I believe we did one on dead bodies on Everest.
Yeah, and a long time ago we did one on altitude sickness too.
Yeah. So this all comes together. Point is it's really really hard and there are so many ways to die.
Yeah, what else wants to kill you up there, Chuck? That they weren't aware of until that nineteen twenty one expedition.
The yetti.
Yeah, that's where the YETI was introduced, or at least the concept was introduced to Westerners who brought it back, and then I believe on a later, like nineteen fifty one expedition, a guy named Eric Shipton took some photos of what were supposed to be Yetti tracks, and that's when like the West really went wild for the Yetti.
That's right, So let's catch ourselves up. It's September twenty fourth, nineteen twenty one, when they reach the North Coal and this is where they're like, all right, we think this is it. We think we have found a path that can actually get us. They didn't realize there would one day be an easier path, probably, but they said, we
think this is the way to go. And it should be noted that not only these expedition trips to sort of map things out, but each subsequent attempt to ascend Everest that ended up in I don't want to say failure, but I guess it is failure if they didn't accomplish
it devastating. But each one of yet, each one of those is really important too, because you know, every higher peak that you get to, you're able to sort of establish of course not everywhere, but you're able to establish camps along the way, right, and these camps are then used later on as you know, base camps like one, two, three, four, five, six, et cetera. In fact, it maybe six might have been the highest camp at the time, right.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And then so but it's super important to establish that for like all the hikers to come. Just because it was a failed attempt doesn't mean a lot of great stuff wasn't accomplished.
Yeah, because if you are hiking or you're climbing up a mountain and there's a higher camp that you're coming up to, you can make your way over the day to that camp and then just stay there for the night. If there's not a higher camp you have to turn around at some point and make your way to that next lower camp to survive. Yeah, you cannot be caught overnight on Everest anywhere at these elevations that these guys are hiking at without tent and or a sleeping bag,
or you're going to die. That's all there is to it. A human being can't survive on the you know, the higher altitudes of Everest without that kind of stuff. So, yes, establishing a camp is an enormous thing. But also they're learning stuff firsthand about how humans respond to low oxygen concentrations, what the weather conditions are, like, what time of year you can hike, Like every detail is a brand new novel detail that is really crucial in understanding how to get to the top eventually.
Yeah, like what time of day you have to start out in order to get up there and safely get back down. Because some people, including Hillary, Yes, Hillary, and it's a thorny subject, but some people, as far as the Mystery of Mallory goes, some people don't consider it a successful ascent unless you come back down. And that's
kind of the thing. And I think Hillary was one of those, and his family also said, Hey, listen, not to slag anyone, but we kind of only consider it a success if you go up and you're able to come back down and live to tell about it, essentially. Yeah, And I think that was which is an interesting point.
Yeah, but I think that point was made by Hillary himself, which is kind of saying yeah, he's yeah, He's like, well, I mean, even if you've made it to the top, it doesn't count.
Like I'm doing this interview right now.
Right I'm sitting here. So there's one thing I want to point out that I don't know has become clear yet. It's clear to me because we did this research and I found out what the deal was. But you might be asking yourself why was mountain climbing so big at this time? Why were these people doing this? And there's a really good explanation for that. Ever, itself was considered the third Pole because people had already made it to
the South Pole and the North Pole. We didn't yet have the technology to explore the deep ocean or space, and we had been almost everywhere else on Earth. So this was like the last place for humans to I guess basically conquer or pit their endurance against. And that's why it was so attractive to people.
Yes, and that was a very eloquent way to say that. I think we should mention that Mallory himself is the very person who very famously coined the term because it's there when asked why they would try to do something like this, Yeah, why climb mountains because it's there?
That alone makes him just worth remembering. You know what a cool response.
Absolutely, why are you going to eat big mac because it's there?
Everything that's ever come since then where somebody says because it's there, you're actually quoting George Mallory, that's right.
All right. So let's talk for a second about oxygen. Low oxygen is no good for the human body. And we've mentioned several times that your oxygen levels are very low when you're ascending Everest. And these days they make it really easy on you, it's all. You know, the kind of oxygen and they take is very easy to take. They make it very user friendly. But back then they had like glassed bottles of oxygen that were carried in like wooden crates, and it was a real pain to
get there. It was super super heavy. But they knew at the time, you know, well, they learned that they would absolutely need this stuff, but Mallory was sort of, I don't think indifferent. I think he was sort of annoyed by the whole thing that you actually had to take this stuff, to the point where he didn't even use them, I believe in the nineteen twenty one test run, right.
No, I don't believe.
So.
I don't think he did either in the nineteen twenty two expedition that followed where they actually did try to make summit, and it wasn't for years before he was like, Okay, maybe oxygen's a good idea. Some of them even thought it was like a hindrance in general because it was an extra thirty pounds that you had to carry, yeah,
up this mountain. And if you watch, if you watch video of people climbing Everest today, especially as they get closer and closer to the top and there's less and less oxygen, yeah, they do even they seem to like
have regret for being where they are. But even with oxygen on, if you watch them, they'll take a step so one foot and then they'll bring the other foot up and maybe they've traversed a foot of Everest right then, and then they have to wait like fifteen thirty seconds before they make the next one because they're that tired because there's that little oxygen. And that's with oxygen on. So these guys were trying these kind of a sense without oxygen, I can't imagine, like, you know, how you
would even do that. And it's actually it's not clear whether you really could some everest without oxygen, although I think people have tried to maybe even been successful, so I guess it would be clear.
Yeah, So in twenty two, I believe Mallory and a couple of other climbers hit twenty six eight hundred feet, which is remarkable, before they decided to turn back. And again this is without using oxygen on that twenty two try. And then this is the part where I was a little bit confused. Maybe you can clear it up. When did the avalanche happen? Was that in twenty one where seven people were killed? Yeah?
So no, in twenty one there was an avalanche that wiped out some of the camps they'd established, but didn't hurt anybody. Okay, twenty two they weren't as lucky, and seven Sherpa died in an avalanche, all right, And Mallory kind of considered himself that at least partially responsible. Even though he wasn't the only person who pushed for this last attempt for the summit, he was one of them.
And an avalanche was triggered by that third attempt and killed some of the people further down on the mountain when they were covered up by it.
Yeah, and there are people you know who have looked back in kind of poop pooed Mallories poo poot his carelessness. And I don't know if it was carelessness. I don't think it was carelessness just because he was a careless person. I think it was a little more his tenacious attitude sort of overrode good sense sometimes. Is the way I took it? Is that how you took it? I think that was part of it.
But I also get the impression that he was like just downright flighty, Oh was he? Yeah? Like there was a he was in charge of the camera for the nineteen twenty two expedition and apparently he put the film in backwards but was taking pictures the whole time and they didn't turn out because he didn't have the film incorrectly, Like that's a classico sure, but if you do that things like that over and over again, you start to develop a reputation as being flighty.
I guess. So the thing I think is cameras, Like operating a camera wasn't second nature at this point in history, and it's like, just give this guy a camera. I don't know. I could see him just being like I don't even know what this thing is or how to really operate it, Like, don't give it to me. They're like, well, you kind of have to take it, and he's like, all right, I'll do my best.
I can't.
I mean, I kind of created that narrative, but but it was a good one. He was good at mountain climbing. He may not have been a good photographer.
Okay, fair enough. But there's a very famous quote by a doctor, Tom Longstaff, who was the doctor on the expedition in nineteen twenty two, said Mallory was quite unfit to be placed in charge of anything, including himself. So, I mean people definitely thought of him. I'm going to say flighty, and I'm not judging. I'm pretty flighty myself. You me would certainly tell you that. But so I think I recognize it when I see it. Maybe that's what.
It is, as you me your doctor long Staff.
Yep, I'm gonna start calling her that now.
I should be like, what are you talking about?
I look that up too, Remember our surname's episode. I was like, oh, is that a dirty last name?
No, that's what I thought.
It turns out if you were a bailiff or somebody involved in law enforcement, you would have carried like a long stick, oh okay, to probably beat people with. And that's where they got that name. So his ancestor was involved in law enforcement. I looked it up. I went long Staff, surname Penis and doctor Longstaff.
Definiteast sounds like a born name.
It definitely does.
All right, So now let's go to nineteen twenty four. The test runs had happened, the real attempts had happened, and then finally nineteen twenty four rolls around. They didn't just take the year off in nineteen twenty three because they were tired. They didn't get funding, like it costs a lot of money and these people aren't like bankrolling themselves. So the Mount Everest Company could not raise the money in twenty three, so they waited until nineteen twenty four.
When Mallory jumped up in class and said me, me, me, me, me again. Yeah, and almost didn't go though, because one of his mates, George Finch, a fellow climber, was I believe left off the list, and Mallory was like, if he's not going to go, I'm not there gonna go And they said okay, and then he went, well, I still want to go.
He put on a fake mustache and put himself down as George Hallery exactly. So there was a guy who went who was kind of a surprise selection. His name was Andrew Sandy Irving Irvine. Sorry, and Sandy Irvine was a student still. He was an engineering student. That's actually one of the reasons they brought him along. He wasn't a schlub as far as mountaineering goes. He just was not nearly as experienced as most of the people on
that nineteen twenty four expedition. But being an engineering student, he could fiddle and fuss with the oxygen apparatus which.
Had in the cameras.
Maybe yeah, probably he knew how to put the film in the right direction. But since I get the impression that since the nineteen twenty one and twenty two expeditions, it had become clear to these these these people on these expeditions, on the nineteen twenty four expedition that oxygen wasn't like really important and to have somebody who could make these these rigs more efficient would be really, really valuable. So they brought Sandy Irvine along.
Yeah. I also saw that Irvine was, you know, despite his fiddler's reputation, was strong as an ox.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's another nice thing.
If you see there's a famous picture of he and him and Mallory next to each other facing the camera like posing for a picture. And he's easily a full head taller than Mallory was, and about his wide too, so he was a big, big boy.
Yeah. And Mallory was very handsome too, if we should note, yes, good looking dude.
He really was very pretty. I think you could.
Say pretty mad.
And then one other note about Mallory on this to start off this nineteen twenty four expedition. Again, this is the third expedition to Everest, and he was the only member of this entire expedition who had been on all three expeditions, which again really underscores Mallory was obsessed with summiting Everest.
That's right, So to June first, now, I think, so, man, all right, Mallory and George Bruce make this first attempt. This one didn't work out when basically the sherpass said all right, we're not going any further. It's too dangerous, and they basically dropped their stuff and turned back. So again, this one didn't work out. But one of the positives is they established a camp at twenty five thousand feet, which I believe was the tallest camp at the time or the highest camp.
Okay, yeah, so that's again that's a huge success for a summit attempt, right, even more groundwork. The following day, another couple climbers, Edward Norton and t Howard Somerville, made their own attempt on the summit. Norton kept going beyond Summerville, and he made it within a thousand feet of the summit of Everest, which, depending on your perspective, sounds really close but actually isn't or is actually super close even though it sounds far away.
I think it's pretty close.
It is. But if you look at a map and see where twenty eight thousand feet is and then where twenty nine thousand feet is she had a way to go, but far and away. That was the record, and it was a record that stood, at least officially until Hillary and Norgay summitted Everest in nineteen fifty three. So it was a big deal. But Norton in Somerville really paid for their attempt Somerville. He almost suffocated from a high
altitude cough. And then Norton developed snow blindness because they would wear goggles that were like basically sunglass goggles, and you had to wear them during the day, not just from the wind, but because the UV was really really abundant because of the thin air up there, so you would get what's called snow blindness. You would get Caro Titus on your corneas, and that's what happened to Norton. He burned his corneas from the reflected sunlight because he
didn't keep his goggles on long enough. And on the way back down from twenty five thousand feet back down, he had to be helped. Every footstep had to be placed by shurpas and the doctor on the trip. Every foot, every footstep he made all the way back down out of the Everest area.
That's amazing it really is all right. So on this third attempt, Mallory brought Irving. Sorry, why do you keep saying that? I said? Because you said it?
Sorry?
Brought Irvine along, and they were sending notes down. You know, they're sending messages back down with Shurpas along the way, basically saying yeah, I love you. They were sending notes back down to the other camps, basically giving reports on what's going on, saying things are going well, the weather looks like we should be able to do it. We're gonna, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna try and do this
like tomorrow or whatever. And so all the notes that were coming down were pretty positive, and basically everything we know about this comes from a gentleman, a gentleman geologist named Noel O'Dell. It was actually a pretty big hero in this story too.
Yeah. He was pretty awesome actually, and he lived to be a ripe old man, sorry ripe old age.
He spelled really bad.
Yeah, and there's a really cool interview with him from a Nova episode. I can't remember what it's called, but it's from like the eighties, and they interviewed Noel Odell about this. So he factors in big time in a minute. But Odell was He went up to one of the high camps. He wanted to look for fossils. Being a geologist, he also brought up supplies of food and water to those higher camps to help the climbers on their way back down. And this was the third attempt. Remember, the
first attempt didn't work, second attempt didn't work. It kind of resulted in disaster. And then this third attempt was going to be the last one. And Mallory said, hey, Irvine, why don't you come with me. We're going to try to make the summit of Everest. And there's something that you need to know about this third attempt. Mallory was I think thirty seven maybe by this time, and as far as mountaineers and climbers go, especially back then, he
was old. This was probably going to be his last expedition to Everest, and this attempt for the summit was the last attempt on this expedition ergo. This was Mallory's last shot at summiting Everest, and he was setting out from the highest camp that had ever been established. Basically, I believe it's the highest camp still today on that north route.
All right. It sounds like a great cliffhanger, no pun intended. So let's take our final break here and we'll wrap up the story right after.
This stuff you should know, all right.
So Mallory is on his last attempt as a human to do the thing that he was obsessed with since he was, you know, a young late teenager. Beautiful, beautiful. So so handsome geologist Noel Odell is up there again. He is. He is doing sort of the cool, groovy Appalachian trail hangout dude thing that is still for people. Yeah, he's doing some trail magic up there. And at twelve fifty he sees Mallory and Irvine on the northeast ridge.
But there are a few hours and this is really key, there are a few hours behind schedule from where they should be, and there's a very narrow window again for like what time of day you can pull this off and then safely get back down. So to be a few hours behind schedule is a big deal on whether or not you're gonna survive basically. So what he says, and we'll just go ahead and read the quote. What he says he saw is the following the entire Summit Ridge,
and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on one tiny black spot beneath a rock step in the ridge. The black spot moved. Another black spot became apparent and moved up the snow to join the other on the crest. The first then approached the great rock step and shortly emerged at the top. The second did likewise.
So right after that, Chuck apparently the clouds came back, and those two black spots that were he took to be Irvine and Mallory disappeared from view. And that was, if that was Irvine and Mallory, the last time anybody saw them, and Odell would have been the last to see them, which will become a crucial thing later on, as we'll see. But Odell kind of waited for them
to come back down to the camps. Remember he was in the high camps, and he waited and he waited and he waited, and then he started to get really worried. And here's where he became a hero, like you were saying earlier.
Yeah, so Odell is again he's not down there at sea level. He is hanging out up there trying to do the trail magic thing. He's all of a sudden worried, and he basically from Camp six starts hiking around trying to find these guys and doesn't leave. He just keeps staying, and he keeps making these a cents, And I believe, like two days in a row, made an assent over what like twenty six thousand feet.
Yeah, a couple of them, and he'd go back to camp because he had to again to survive, but then he would strike out like as soon as he could the next day to look for them.
I mean, that's why he's one of the heroes.
Yeah, exactly, And like again, I don't even know if he had oxygen at that point. So he spent a couple of days way up there looking for them, and finally from the high camp he signaled back down to the lower camps, the base camp, and there was apparently a pre arranged signal that they had come up with for this third summit attempt, and Odell laid it out. It was six sleeping bags laid out in a cross, which meant death, that they had died, that they hadn't
made it. And so in reply, the guy who led the expedition had a return signal saying like, give up, hope, come back down, and very sadly, Odell did as he was instructed and came back down without Irvine, without Mallory, who remained up on the mountain as far as anyone knew.
Yeah, and at this point he had been up there for and this is over twenty three thousand feet. He had been up there for eleven days. And that's I mean, surely no, uh, I don't think that had been done before.
Right, That's no picnic caught in a snowstorm. That's some serious stuff.
Yeah, And there's no way that these guys, I mean, they were up there for two nights and you're not going to survive one night. So it was pretty clear those sleeping bags had to come out at that point.
Yeah, and so they said, you know, they were really kind of unhappy on that way back down, which again I don't think we said if you're coming up a mountain, you have to acclimate over weeks, little by little, and I believe you have to do roughly the same thing
coming back down. So these guys had to basically have this party where two people had been lost on their summit attempt, and they were glowmed but at the same time, they realized, like, you know, Mallory and Irvine had kind of embodied this spirit of adventure and just trying and even risking your life for you know, this this noble attempt that at something no one else had ever done. So it was kind of a bitter sweet thing. Their
loss was. It wasn't entirely nothing but tragic. There was some silver lining to it in the way that Mallory was remembered and thought of.
Yeah, absolutely, and from that moment forward there you know ed kind of makes it sound like the consensuses that they never reached the top, And after reading all this stuff and a lot of other opinions, I don't think I don't think that's true at all. I think there is still debate on whether or not they actually made it to the top. And there are a bunch of cool little clues that kind of lead you down one way or the other along the way.
Yeah, one of them, Chuck, was Odell and what he saw. And there's a couple of things you need to know about Odell. Number one, he was a geologist, and a lot of people say he just mistook some rocks for Irvine and Mallory. The little tiny dots he thought he saw moving. He's a geologist, making him very unlikely to mistake rocks for people. And then secondly, he was well known to have really good eyesight. Apparently he didn't need
glass until he was in his nineties. So those two things combined make it seem like he was probably the best possible eyewitness around. And Odell went to his grave saying, I saw them. They were moving. It was them, But exactly where he saw them kind of came up for grabs.
Yeah, so there are these three cliffs sort of you know, if you go this route, there are three cliffs to get to the top, and they called them steps step one, step two, step three. They didn't know about these steps until they got there, obviously, because no one had done this yet. And from what he was talking about, he saw them on the second step, But there are a lot of people today that said no. I think he
probably saw them on the first step. At one point in his life he said that it was the first step, but then he went back and said no. And I don't know if he was just sort of a victim of kind of listening to what other people had to say. But apparently later in life. He went back and was adamant that it was the second step that he saw them on.
Oh really, okay, cool. So here's the thing. If you were in the climbing community and you believe that at the very least Mallory, if not Mallory and Irvine made it to the top of Everest on that nineteen twenty four expedition on that third attempt. The reason you think that is because you believe that Odell did see them climb up that second step, Because that second step was the last great obstacle to the top, and had they made it up the second step, nothing would have stopped
Mallory from continuing on to hit the summit. Knowing that he probably would not ever make it down alive, he still would have kept going on. So that's what a lot of people think, and the people who think that he actually did make it kind of point to Odell's eyewitness statements.
Yeah, and that's in that interview when he was what he was ninety seven years old, Odell himself says that you know, there would have been nothing that would have stopped Mallory and Irvine. He believes even though dusk was approaching and they probably knew it was, I guess a suicide mission at that point. His feeling was that there's no way they would have stopped too.
Yeah, because we didn't say when those clouds came around, they brought with them a blizzard too, so it was really terrible conditions. They were way late in the day. There was basically no chance if they submitted that they could get back to that highest camp in time for surviving the night. But that would not have stopped them, because they would They just would have kept going. That's just what Mallory would have done. Pretty much everybody agrees
on that. The distinction is whether he was on the first step or the second step, because if he was just on the first step, he still had that second step ahead of him, he might not have made it. If he made the second step, he definitely summitted. That seems to be what the consensus is.
All right, so you've got that. We can park that to the side. In the subsequent years, on different expeditions, there have been little bits and pieces of evidence found along the way. One in nineteen thirty three, when Irvine's acts, his ice axe was found, and you know you're not gonna just leave your ice ax behind r So basically they concluded that something happened that made Irvine drop this
ice axe, but they recovered it in thirty three. And then in nineteen seventy five there were some Chinese Chinese climbers who made a successful summit all the way to the top, and they were the only ones that could have gone this way because, like we said earlier, the Chinese route was shut down basically to Americans, and so it's not like that people before the nineteen seventy five would have been taking this route. I think there was one American group that snuck in and did so illegally.
But one of the Chinese climbers said I found an English dead to another climber. China has always denied this and said that that's not true and that it was a misunderstanding, and that climber, actually his name was Wang Hungboo died the next day in an avalanche, so there was never like any follow up with him.
In a really interesting ironic twist, Chuck hungbo translate to so long staff in English. No, really, I thought I'd get a bigger laugh out of that.
We'll just say that, well, it was believable enough to where I couldn't quite do it.
So yeah, so there's all this intrigue that's kind of gathering around this this idea that the Chinese had found at least one dead Englishman on their side of the mountain, the north side of the Tibetan side, where they shouldn't have been, which means that, yeah, it had to have
been Irvine or Mallory. So there was an expedition that came well, there's a nineteen ninety one expedition that found an old oxygen bottle that was almost certainly Mallory or Irvines, and then all of that information kind of came together to support a nineteen ninety nine GEO expedition to actually find Irvine or Mallory, and they actually did. They found one of them, and at first they thought it was Irvine.
Right, yeah, they did, But they found Mallory. He was frozen, he was sun bleached, his body was very well preserved, the items on him were very well preserved. They found him severely injured. Well, they found a couple of things. They found that he had a severely broken leg and some rope trauma like ligature stuff around his waist. But what they really found that was severe was the cause of death, which was a golf ball size hole in his forehead.
Yeah, they and it was a puncture wound. So they think it's possible as he was falling that his ice axe bounced off of a rock and into his head, which that'd be pretty merciful on the way down if you think about it, if that killed him instantly, Because they said that his foot was almost broken off. That break was so bad trauma too. Imagine a rope yanking on you, because they found the rope still tied around his waist.
But I had that happen, Actually, I can't imagine.
I mean, it's awful, right, It's like falling on your tailbone, but times a million. And the other end of the rope was snapped off, and I saw a climber say because of that snap, it must have been tied to something really immobile, like a rock, rather than Irvine. So that suggested that Mallory had sent Irvine back and tried to make the summit himself, which a lot of people kind of give to his credit that he wasn't willing to risk Irvine's life, only his own.
I found it very strange that I said that that happened to me, and you didn't even ask what that was about.
I was on a roll. It's very strange what happened.
I'm not even gonna I'm not gonna tell you now what happened. No one gets to know, all right, that would be the great mystery of this episode. Okay, So the two big clues here as to whether or not he made it are well. One big clue was he didn't have that picture of his wife on him. This is the picture that he took with them everywhere that he vowed to place at the top of the mountain,
and it wasn't on him. So a lot of people look at that and say, well, it's not on them, because he actually did, maybe by himself or maybe with Irvine, make it to the summit and place that picture there. And it's not like you would have necessarily found that picture years later. It very probably would have blown away or been destroyed by the elements over time. And you know,
I don't know how I feel about that clue. I think it's considering everything was found really in good condition on him, and that he didn't have it is pretty interesting to think about.
I'll just say that I like that clue too. There's also a missing camera. They took a camera with them for that third attempt, Kodak vest pocket camera VPK, and it's like one of those old cameras with the accordion that you pull out, but it is a really small, like pocket sized version. And had they made it to the summit, they absolutely would have taken a photograph from
the summit. And if you could just find that camera, then you could conceivably, because it had been in deep freeze conditions for all these years, it's possible using modern techniques that you could develop that film and solve this mystery once and for all. But the problem is this Chuck. The camera's missing, and so is Irvine. Because there was an expedition not too long ago, a few years back that set out to look for Irvine, this other guy.
Because where the Chinese expedition said that they found the dead English that is nowhere near where Mallory was found, so they figure that they found Irvine. But when they went when this expedition, I think a couple of years ago, went back to find Irvine, there was nothing there. His body was not exactly where it should be. Nothing there, And so this rumor has kind of come up over the years that the Chinese actually found him and brought him back down the mountain without telling anybody.
That's right, That is the rumor, and that they got that camera and they they kind of botched the film trying to get it developed and process those pictures, and that was a big embarrassment. And so they will take that secret to their graves.
Yeah. And another explanation is that the nineteen sixty Chinese expedition to the top of the North Face was the first to summit the North Face and that they were protecting national pride because they found evidence on that camera, on that film when they did develop it that Mallory had made it to the top. Who knows? The thing is, we'll never know right ever. The thing that we will know, I think eventually, though, Chuck, hopefully, is what happened with your rope trauma?
Ah, that will go to the grave with me.
Oh man, I really botched that, like the Chinese mountain climbers botched processing that film.
Okay, long staff.
Long wind, It's more like it you got anything else?
I got nothing else?
All right, everybody? Well, since Chuck refuses to tell us about his rope traumas story. I guess we have nothing left but listener mail.
This is from the Silly String up. This is myth busted. Hey, guys, just wanted to point out that Josh repeated a widely spread myth about telegrams in the Silly String episode that stop was used because punctuation cost extra. This myth has been busted. The real story is Morse code originally had
only capital letters and no punctuation. It's generally not much of a problem, but during the First World War, when the telegrams were widely used in the military, a misunderstood Messa message could be disastrous, So the custom arose of using the word stop between sentences and military telegrams so that any ambiguous phrases could not be misinterpreted called on
with the public. Even after punctuation was introduced, people continued fashionably using stop between sentences even though they didn't have to. I thought this was kind of interesting. Thanks for the great show. And that is from Dave.
It is very interesting. I like both stories.
Okay, they're both great.
Yeah, everyone wins. And also I'm going to posit that you have mentioned before that you've gone repelling as a boy scout and that it happened somewhere on Stone Mountain.
Not true. The mystery continues.
Whatever. If you want to get in touch with us like Dave did and maybe take a crack at what happened with Chuck in the Rope and the trauma, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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