Mallory And Irvine Expedition Summary: Everest News, the group behind this year’s expedition on Everest to find the body of Sandy Irvine (George Mallory’s climbing partner on the day they died trying to summit), has posted a description of how they decided to try and locate Irvine’s body and the competition with the BBC that resulted. Here’s why they went:

“Back in 2002 and 2003 climbers kept talking to us about bodies they had seen over the years on Everest. After compiling these locations, we came down to three locations that seemed very interesting, two at which climbers have claimed to seen old dead bodies on Everest and the third location was interesting because of other clues. In the first case, it was hard not to conclude that one of our sources saw Sandy Irvine. In the other case a climber saw “something.” Therefore, in Spring of 2003, we asked some expeditions/climbers if they would be interested in having a “look” at these locations. Surprisingly, there was little real interest. We noticed that some people just did not wish to get involved in this controversial undertaking…During 2003, we finally decided that having the other expeditions do the job wasn’t going to work; we decided to do the job ourselves.”

It’s a fascinating historical project, and hopefully efforts will continue next year. This is still the greatest unresolved mountain climbing mystery…



Where’s Irvine?: Somewhere on this cold, lonely mountain…

(Photo: Everest News)