September 6, 2022 • 52 mins
George Mallory was a member of the first three European expeditions to Everest, world’s tallest mountain. He wanted to summit it so badly, he gave his life trying. Since that fateful day in 1924, climbers have wondered – was Mallory the first to summit?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and this is Stuff you should Know
lost on the Mountain Top edition, but not in Tennessee
because this has nothing to do with the Beverly Hillbillies
(00:22):
at all. Wow, that was a roundabout funny intro. I
didn't even know it was coming thirty seconds ago. Uh No,
we're not talking about Tennessee. We were talking about um
one of the heroes of of mountaineering and mountain climbing,
(00:42):
certainly Mr George Mallory, and the great mystery to me
unsettled mystery on whether or not he ever made it
to the top of Edvers. Yes, Edvers right. So boy, yeah,
this is a tough start, Chuck, because I just realized
what I referenced was the Davy Crockett theme, not Beverly Hillbilly.
(01:04):
So everybody save your emails. Okay, all you Beverly Hillbillies,
cause players save your savior emails. So, okay, we're talking
about Mount Everest. We're not talking about Davy Crockett or
the Beverly Hillbillies. We're talking about Um. George Mallory and
to a lesser extent kind of unfairly but also kind
(01:24):
of fairly his climbing companions, 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? Uh? Yeah, at least heard his name,
had a general idea about him, right, sure, named two
(01:45):
other climbers exactly, the guy from that free solo documentary
count and um, and well all the sherpa. I mean
we it makes great pains to point out the sherpa,
but uh, suffice to say, all you have to do
is go back and listen to our episode sharp a
(02:05):
Warm Friendly Living, in which we dedicate an entire episode
to the usually nameless serpa, 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 um, despite your
(02:27):
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
(02:47):
this episode that these guys that Mallory was climbing with,
we're 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. Uh, I don't know if it was
(03:07):
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 tweed
jackets and stuff. Yeah, and um, hobnail boots, so just
like some leather boots with some spikes attached to him.
(03:28):
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 kind
of a left leaning, progressive intellectual school teacher. Um, he
did rub elbows with John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf
(03:51):
from the Bloomberry group Bloomsberry. 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,
(04:13):
as Ed Keenly 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 that Lewis and Clark made. It was, uh in
eighteen fifty two when they finally finally figured out that
(04:36):
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 exactly. So there was actually a guy
named uh right On Sigtar who was an Indian surveyor
who used data that the English had um produced during
(04:59):
their occupy and of India um 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 thousand, thirty two ft. Mount Everest
was in the mid nineteenth century and still is today
(05:19):
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 it Tibetan, what's the name of that big old
mountain over there, they would tell you Chomo Lugma, which
means mother goddess of the world in Tibetan. So even
the Tibetans were like, this is clearly the world's tallest mountain. Yeah,
(05:43):
And of course they had, you know, 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, but we some some englishman. I mean Chomlongma.
That's definitely one of them. No, I know, but to
tend people what m Longa is, right, and name two
other famous climbers. Yes, but the long and short of
(06:07):
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.
(06:27):
Getting to Everest and climbing it is, uh like, ascending
the peak is one thing, but just getting to that
point is I don't know, the battle. I would say easily.
Most people think you look at the 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. Mountain mountains just don't exist on their own.
(06:50):
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, you go up like you're going
up and up and up, and you're existing at higher
(07:11):
and higher altitudes, which the English people who were um
who are doing this at first are we're not used to.
So they were doing this with basically altitude sickness and
all the stuff that comes with that. Alright, so let's
go to and the stage is sort of set to
where they feel like it might be possible to actually
(07:31):
accomplish something like this. And the Royal Geographic Society got
together with the Alpine Club UH 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
let's let's give this a go, old boy. And they
got permission from Tibet in ninety one to go on
a scouting trip. And this was a trip where they
(07:55):
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 uh 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
(08:17):
all new, uncharted territory basically for these guys. And again
it's really important to say, like we're we're going to
be telling the story from the English point of view,
and like you said, the sherpa rarely figure into that. Um,
with the big exception of Tenzing Norgay, who's who officially
was the first to summit Everest with um Edmund Hillary.
(08:37):
But um, these guys weren't doing this alone. They had,
depending on the expedition and how much money it had,
scores two hundreds of sherpas like attending them, helping them climb,
moving their stuff, um, and just basically making life much
easier on these guys. That said, I really don't want
to um undermine the amount of effort and strenuousness that
(09:03):
talent these guys. Yeah, and talent that these guys underwent
and just figuring out how to get to Everest, to
start on that first expedition. Yeah, it's really cool to
read um contemporary, yes, contemporary accounts of what modern climbers
think of Mallory and his um not not just tenaciousness,
(09:26):
but his actual talent level and his climbing style. Uh,
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
the day is amazing. But they accomplished these things based
generally on you know, they can be taught by other people,
(09:47):
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 because I'm just thinking of climbing hills, right,
and we should just go ahead and just to get
any confusion out of the way, Um Edmund Hillary Summited Everston,
I think nineteen fifty three, we're talking about the first
(10:08):
expeditions to Everest again in n 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. Alright,
So if I said Hillary, I meant Mallory. Are we
all good? I think we're good? Yeah, okay, all right.
(10:29):
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 from going on this first
(10:50):
scouting trip. No, and he was thirty three on the trip,
and he says basically, hey, um dear, I'm going to
quit my job and leave you in 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
(11:13):
carry it with me always and I will put I
will place you at the top of Everest to live
there forevermore encased in 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
submitting Everest, but from what I gather from Mallory, he
would he would have been down to give it a
(11:33):
shot that first time out. Like that's how obsessed with
Everest that that man became right and he actually was
really successful. That the expedition was this was again the
first expedition by the English to map um Everest, and
they managed to do it. They managed to find a
way onto Everest what's called the North Call, which is
(11:56):
a ridge that connects one mountain to another. And they
found that north which is the way still today. If
you're coming from the north from the Tibetan side up Everest,
do you still use that route that these guys mapped in. Yeah,
And it's it's important to point out um which side
that they would have gone up then and what side
you go up now? Because uh, there is a route
(12:19):
that China kind of secured and basically has held that
Americans can't go, and that'll that'll be a key sort
of later on in this mystery. Pould have been in that, yeah,
because China invaded Tibetan 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. Um,
(12:43):
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 you know, it's 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
(13:04):
of walking just to get from base camp to the top,
whereas the South route, which is what Westerners used today
coming from the Nepalese side, is about twelve and three
quarter miles of walking. Nothing to sneeze at still, but
it just kind of underscores the just how hard the
things that these guys were doing with zero equipment. All Right,
(13:26):
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 a eighties sitcom. No, al right, So
I'm gonna work all that out and we'll be right back.
Stuff you should know. Okay, we're back, Um, and I
(14:07):
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
smaller mountain to Everest, the taller mountain, right, But to
get there requires hiking, mountain climbing, ice climbing, rock climbing, um,
every kind of climbing you can imagine. And one of
(14:29):
the first things you have to do, no matter whether
whether you come from the North route or the South route,
is cross the 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, you're
you're there are so many different disciplines if you're going
to do something like Everest, and especially in nineteen two that, uh,
(14:54):
I just don't think we can overstate like the near
impossibility of this feat the time. Yeah, especially with the glacier.
There's crevasses. They can be really deep, um, you know,
a 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 sea corps, which are house
(15:17):
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.
(15:37):
And I remember thinking that's so we talked about sea
corps 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 Shrip episode was really good.
Ice climbing was good. I believe we did one on
dead bodies on Everest. Yeah, and the one time ago
(16:00):
we did one on altitude sickness too. Yeah, so this
all comes together. Uh. The 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 expedition. The YETI. Yeah,
that's where the YETI was introduced, or at least the
concept was introduced to Westerners, who brought it back. Um,
(16:23):
and then I believe on a later like nineteen fifty
one expedition, a guy named Eric Shipton took some photos
of what we're supposed to be YETI tracks, and that's
when like the west really went wild for the YETI.
That's right, So let's catch ourselves up. It's September one
(16:43):
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
(17:05):
attempt to ascend Everest that ended up in I don't
know what. I don't want to say failure, but I
guess it is failure if they didn't accomplish it. 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 uh of
(17:25):
course not everywhere, but you're able to establish camps along
the way, and these camps are then used later on
uh as you know, base camps like one, 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 but it's super important to
establish that for like all the hikers to come. Just
(17:47):
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,
(18:08):
because you cannot be caught overnight on Everest anywhere at
these elevations that these guys are hiking at um without
a tent and or a sleeping bag, or you're going
to die. That's all there is to it. You can,
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
(18:30):
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, uh, in order to
(18:52):
get up there and safely get back down because some people,
including Hillary, Yes, Hillary, um, and it's a thorny so object.
But some peoples, as far as the Mystery of Mallory goes,
some people don't consider it a successful assent unless you
come back down. Um. And that's kind of the thing.
And I think Hillary was one of those and his
(19:12):
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
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
saying yeah, he's yeah, He's like, well, I mean, even
(19:33):
if you've made it to the top, it doesn't count.
Like I'm I'm doing this interview right now, right, I'm
sitting here, so, um, 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 um,
(19:54):
there's a really good explanation for that. Everest 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 too, I guess,
basically conquer or pit their endurance against. And that's why
(20:17):
it was so attractive to people. Yes, and that was
a very uh 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,
why climb mountains? Because it's there? That alone makes him
(20:39):
just worth remembering. You know what a cool response, Absolutely,
are you going to eat that 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, um,
all right, so let's talk for a second about oxygen
(21:00):
and um. 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 um. You know,
the kind of oxygen they take is very easy to uh,
to take. They make it very user friendly. But back
(21:22):
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. UM.
But they knew at the time, you know, while they
learned that they would absolutely need this stuff. UM. But
Mallory was sort of, I don't I don't think indifferent.
I think he was sort of annoyed by the whole
(21:45):
thing that you actually had to take this stuff, to
the point where he didn't even use them, I believe
in the nineteen one test run, right, No, I don't believe.
So I don't think he did either in the expedition
that followed where they actually did try to make some um.
And it wasn't for years before he was like Okay,
maybe oxygen is a good idea. UM. Some of them
(22:06):
even thought it was like a hindrance in general because
it was an extra thirty pounds that you had to
carry up this mountain. And if you watch, um, 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, even yeah, they do, even they
(22:28):
seem to like have regret for being where they 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
(22:51):
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 summit Everest without oxygen,
although I think people have tried and maybe even been successful,
so I guess it would be clear. Yes, So in
twenty two, UM, I believe Mallory and a couple of
(23:14):
other climbers hit twenty six thousand, eight hundred feet, which
is remarkable, before they decided to turn back. Uh. And
again this is without using oxygen on that twenty to 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 uh,
(23:36):
seven people were killed? Yeah? So No, in twenty one
there was an avalanche that wiped out some of the
camps they had established but didn't hurt anybody. Twenty two
they weren't as lucky, and seven sherpa died in an avalanche,
and Mallory kind of considered himself at least partially responsible,
(23:56):
even though he wasn't the only person who pushed for
this last attempt for the summit, um, 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 Mallori's um, poop pooed his carelessness.
(24:20):
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?
(24:43):
Like there was. He was in charge of the camera
for the 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 classic. 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
(25:06):
I think is cameras, Like operating the 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 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 mean I kind of created
(25:27):
that narrative, 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
um quote by a doctor Tom Longstaff, who was the
doctor on the expedition in said Mallory was quite unfit
to be placed in charge of anything, including himself. So
(25:47):
I mean people definitely thought of him. I'm gonna say
flight again, and I'm not judging. I'm pretty flighting myself. Um.
You me would certainly tell you that. Um. But so
I think I recognize it when I see it. Maybe
that's what it is as you meet your doctor Longstaff. Yep,
I'm gonna start calling her that now, should be like,
what are you talking about? I looked that up to
(26:09):
remember our surnames episode. I was like, oh, is that
a dirty last name? I know. That's what it turns out.
If you were a bailiff or somebody involved in law enforcement,
you would have been carried like a long stick 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
(26:31):
and Dr long Staff definitelyast since like a born name.
Definitely all right, So now let's go to nineteen twenty four,
the the test runs had happened, the real attempts had happened,
and then finally nineteen rolls around. Uh, they didn't just
take the year off in nineteen three because they were tired.
(26:51):
They didn't get funding, like it costs a lot of
money and these people aren't like bank rolling in themselves,
so the Mount Everest Company could not raise the money
in twenty three, so he waited until nineteen four when
Mallory jumped up in class and said me, me, Me,
Me me again. Um. And almost didn't go though, because
one of his mates, George Finch, a fellow climber, was
(27:14):
I believe left off the list, and Mallory was like,
if he's not gonna 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 Hallary exactly. So um.
There was a guy who went um who was kind
of a surprise selection. His name was Andrew Sandy Irving
(27:36):
Irvine Sorry and um, 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 shlub as
far as mountaineering goes. He just was not nearly as
experienced as most of the people on that expedition. But
being an engineering student, he could fiddle and fuss with
(27:57):
the oxygen apparatus which had in cameras. Maybe yeah, probably
he knew how to put the film in the right direction.
But um that since I get the impression that since
the NTE and twenty two expeditions, it had become clear
to these these um these people on these expeditions, on
the expedition that oxygen was in fact, like really important
(28:18):
and to have somebody who could make these these um
rigs more efficient would be really, really valuable. So they
brought Sandy Irving 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 us. Another nice thing,
if you see there's a famous picture of he and
(28:41):
or him and um 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 um, he was a big, big boy. Yeah.
And Mallory was very handsome too. We should note yes,
good looking dude. He really was very pretty. I think
(29:02):
you could say pretty bad. And then one other note
about Mallory on this to start off this expedition. Again,
this is the third expedition to Everest, and he was
the only member of this entire expedition who had have
been on all three expeditions, which again really underscores Mallory
was obsessed with summiting Everest. That's right, So to June one, now,
(29:28):
I think so man, alright, Mallory and George Bruce make
this first attempt. Uh, this one didn't work out when
basically the sherpas said all right, we're not going any
further is too dangerous. Uh, and they basically dropped their
stuff and turned back. So again this um, this one
didn't work out. But one of the positives is they
(29:50):
established a camp at five thousand feet UM, which I
believe was was the tallest camp at the time or
the highest camp. Okay, yeah, so that's again that the
huge success for a summit attempt, right, even when the
following day, another couple of climbers, Edward Norton and t
Howard Summerville Um, made their own attempt on the summit.
(30:13):
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 we're twenty nine thousand feet is
(30:36):
she had a way to go, but far and away.
That was. That was the record, and it was Uh
there was a record that stood at least officially until
Hillary in Norgay Um summited Everest in so it was
a big deal. But Norton in Summerville really paid for
their attempt. Um Summerville Uh he almost suffocated from a
(30:58):
high altitude cough, and the Norton developed snowblindness because they
would wear um 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 um was
really really um abundant because of the thin air up there,
so you would get what's called snowblindness, you would get
(31:20):
carotitus on your cornias. 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 twenties five thousand feet back down, uh,
he had to be helped. Every footstep had to be
placed by sherpas uh and the doctor um on the
(31:43):
on the trip, every foot, every footstep he made all
the way back down out of the everst area. That's amazing,
it really is. Alright, So on this third attempt, Mallory
is brought Irving. I'm sorry, why do you keep saying that?
I said because you said it brought Irvine along? And Uh,
(32:03):
they were sending notes down you know, they're sending messages
back down with srpos along the way basically yeah, I
love you. Uh. They're 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. Um, we're gonna, we're gonna,
(32:26):
you know, we're gonna try and do this like tomorrow
or whatever. And so all the notes that were coming down,
we're pretty positive and um, basically everything we know about
this comes from a gentleman uh geology, a gentleman geologist
named Noel O'Dell. It was actually a pretty big hero
in this story too. Yeah, he was pretty awesome actually, um.
(32:48):
And he lived to be ripe old man. Sorry, ripe
old age. Um. He spelled really bad. Yeah. And there's
a really cool interview with him from a Nova episode.
I can't remember what's called. It's from like the eighties
and they interviewed Noel Odell about this. So he factors
in big time in a minute. But O'Dell was um.
He went up to one of the high camps. He
(33:09):
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 is 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
(33:31):
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 is probably going to be his last expedition to Everest,
and this attempt for the summit was the last attempt
(33:52):
on this expedition. Ergo, this was Mallory's last shot at
summiting Everest, and he was setting out from the high
as camp that had ever been established. Basically, I believe
it's the highest camp still today on that north route.
Al Right, it sounds like a great cliffhanger, no pun intended.
So let's take our final break here and we'll wrap
(34:14):
up the story right after this stuff you should know, alright, So, uh,
(34:42):
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. Uh.
Geologist Noel O'Dell is up there again. He is he
is doing sort of the cool, groovy Appalachian trail hang
out dude thing to people Yeah, he's doing some trail
(35:06):
magic up there. Um, 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
(35:26):
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. Uh, the entire summit Ridge
and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became
fixed on one tiny black spot beneath a rock step
(35:49):
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
rocks up 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
(36:11):
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 O'Dell would have been the
last to see them, which will become a crucial thing
later on, as we'll see. But um O'Dell uh kind
of waited for them to come back down to the camps.
Remember he was in the high camps, and he waited
(36:31):
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 O'Dell is again,
he's not down there at 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 he basically
(36:53):
from Camp six, starts hiking around trying to find these
guys and and doesn't leave. He does. He just keeps
staying and he keeps making these assents. And I believe,
like two days in a row, made an assent over
what like twenty s feet, Yeah, a couple of them,
and he go back to camp because he had to
(37:14):
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,
(37:36):
to the base camp, and there was apparently a pre
arranged signal that they had they had come up with
for this third summit attempt, and um O'Dell 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
(37:56):
them the expedition had a return signal saying like give up, hope,
come back down, And very sadly O'Dell did as 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, um, he had been up there
(38:16):
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
(38:38):
it was pretty clear those sleeping bags had to come
out at that point. Yeah, and so they said, you know, um,
they were really kind of unhappy on that done that
way back down, which again I don't think we said
that 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 have been lost on there's summit attempt. They
(39:00):
were glowam but at the same time they realized, like
you know, Mallory and Irvine had kind of embodied the
spirit of adventure and just trying and even risking your
life for you know this, this this noble attempt at
It's something no one else had ever done. So it
was kind of a bittersweet thing their loss was. It
wasn't entirely nothing but tragic. There was some silver lining
(39:22):
to it in the way that Mallory was remembered and
thought of yeah, absolutely, uh and from that moment forward,
there you know ed. Kind of makes it sound like
the consensus is 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's still debate on whether or not they
(39:44):
actually made it to the top. And there or a
bunch of cool little clues that kind of leads 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
(40:05):
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
glasses until he was in his nineties. So those two
things combined make it seem like he was probably the
best possible eye witness around. And O'Dell went to his
(40:27):
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 uh 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,
(40:49):
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
(41:10):
sort of a victim of kind of uh 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. Really okay, cool.
So here's the thing. If you were in the climbing
community and you believe that um, at the very least Mallory,
if not Mallory and Irvine made it to the top
(41:30):
of Everest on that 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.
(41:52):
Knowing that he probably would not ever make it down alive,
he still would have kept going on. So that's that's
what a lot of people think. The people who think
that he actually did make it. Uh 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,
O'Dell himself says that, you know, there would have been
(42:14):
nothing that would have stopped Mallory and Irvine. He believes
um even though dusk was approaching and they probably knew
it was a 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 summited
(42:36):
that they could get back to that highest camp in
time for surviving the night. But that would not have
stopped them because they just 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
(42:56):
have made it. If he made the second step, he
definitely summited 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 UH
found along the way. One in nineteen thirty three when
(43:18):
irvines acts as ice acts was found, and you know,
you're not gonna just leave your ice ax behind. So
basically they concluded that, um, something happened that that made
Irvine drop this ice ax, but they recovered it in
thirty three, And then in nineteen seventy five, UH there
(43:38):
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
two Americans, and so it's not like that people before
the nineteen would have been taking this route. I think
there was one American group that that snuck in and
(44:00):
did so illegally. But one of the Chinese climbers said
I found an English dead to another climber. Um. China
has always denied this and said that that's not true, uh,
and that it was a misunderstanding. And the um that climber,
actually his name was Wang Hung Bao died the next
(44:22):
day in an avalanche, so there was never like any
follow up with him. In a really interesting ironic twist,
Chuck Hung boo translate to so long staff in English.
No really, I thought i'd get a bigger laugh out
of that. We'll just get well, it was believable enough
to where I quite go so um. Yeah. So there's
all this intrigue that's kind of gathering around this, this
(44:44):
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 UM that came well, there's
expedition that found an old oxygen bottle that was almost
(45:07):
certainly Mallory or Irvines, And then all of the information
kind of came together to um support a 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 they
found Mallory. He was frozen, he was sun bleached, his
(45:32):
body was very well preserved. The items on him were
very well preserved. Uh, they found him severely injured. Well,
they found a couple of things. They found that he
had a severely broken leg and some uh some rope
trauma like ligature stuff around his waist. But what they
really found, um that was severe was the cause of death,
(45:54):
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 ax
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 it instantly. Because they
said that his his foot was almost broken off. That
(46:14):
that break was so bad, and then rope trauma to
imagine a rope yanking on you, because they found the
rope still tied around his waist um. But the head
that happened, actually, I mean, it's awful, right, It's like
falling on your tailbone at 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
(46:35):
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
(46:56):
was about. I was on a roll. It's very strange. Well,
I'm not even gonna I'm gonna tell you now what happened.
No one gets to know. That would be the great
mystery of this episode. Okay, uh 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
(47:17):
that he took with him 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 you know,
(47:40):
been destroyed by the elements over time. Uh. And you know,
I don't know how I feel about that clue. Um.
I think it's considering everything was found really uh in
good condition on him, and that that he didn't have
it is pretty interesting to think about. I'll just say
that I like that clue too. Um. There's also missing camera.
(48:02):
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,
(48:25):
because it's 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 um
(48:47):
expedition said that they found the dead English that is
nowhere near where Mallory was found. So they figured 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
(49:10):
the mountain without telling anybody. That's right, That is the rumor,
and that they got that camera and they kind of
botched uh the film trying to get it developed and
processes pictures, and that was a big embarrassment. And so
they will take that secret to their Graves. Yeah. And
another explanation is that the the nineteen sixty Chinese expedition
(49:32):
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 that um
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
(49:54):
what happened with your rope trauma. That will go to
the grave with me. 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
(50:15):
refuses to tell us about his rope trauma story, I
guess we have nothing left but listener mail. Uh. This
is uh from the Silly String up. This is myth busted. Hey, guys,
I 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 Uh. This
(50:38):
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 messages message could be disastrous, So the custom arose
of using the words stop between sentences and military telegrams
(50:59):
so that any biguous phrases could not be misinterpreted. Caught
on with the public. Even after punctuation was introduced, people
continued fashionably using stock 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, Dave. I like both stories. Okay, they're
(51:21):
both great. Yeah, everyone wins. And also I'm going to
pose it 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 and the rope and the trauma, you can send
(51:43):
us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and this is Stuff you should Know
lost on the Mountain Top edition, but not in Tennessee
because this has nothing to do with the Beverly Hillbillies
(00:22):
at all. Wow, that was a roundabout funny intro. I
didn't even know it was coming thirty seconds ago. Uh No,
we're not talking about Tennessee. We were talking about um
one of the heroes of of mountaineering and mountain climbing,
(00:42):
certainly Mr George Mallory, and the great mystery to me
unsettled mystery on whether or not he ever made it
to the top of Edvers. Yes, Edvers right. So boy, yeah,
this is a tough start, Chuck, because I just realized
what I referenced was the Davy Crockett theme, not Beverly Hillbilly.
(01:04):
So everybody save your emails. Okay, all you Beverly Hillbillies,
cause players save your savior emails. So, okay, we're talking
about Mount Everest. We're not talking about Davy Crockett or
the Beverly Hillbillies. We're talking about Um. George Mallory and
to a lesser extent kind of unfairly but also kind
(01:24):
of fairly his climbing companions, 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? Uh? Yeah, at least heard his name,
had a general idea about him, right, sure, named two
(01:45):
other climbers exactly, the guy from that free solo documentary
count and um, and well all the sherpa. I mean
we it makes great pains to point out the sherpa,
but uh, suffice to say, all you have to do
is go back and listen to our episode sharp a
(02:05):
Warm Friendly Living, in which we dedicate an entire episode
to the usually nameless serpa, 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 um, despite your
(02:27):
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
(02:47):
this episode that these guys that Mallory was climbing with,
we're 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. Uh, I don't know if it was
(03:07):
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 tweed
jackets and stuff. Yeah, and um, hobnail boots, so just
like some leather boots with some spikes attached to him.
(03:28):
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 kind
of a left leaning, progressive intellectual school teacher. Um, he
did rub elbows with John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf
(03:51):
from the Bloomberry group Bloomsberry. 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,
(04:13):
as Ed Keenly 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 that Lewis and Clark made. It was, uh in
eighteen fifty two when they finally finally figured out that
(04:36):
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 exactly. So there was actually a guy
named uh right On Sigtar who was an Indian surveyor
who used data that the English had um produced during
(04:59):
their occupy and of India um 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 thousand, thirty two ft. Mount Everest
was in the mid nineteenth century and still is today
(05:19):
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 it Tibetan, what's the name of that big old
mountain over there, they would tell you Chomo Lugma, which
means mother goddess of the world in Tibetan. So even
the Tibetans were like, this is clearly the world's tallest mountain. Yeah,
(05:43):
And of course they had, you know, 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, but we some some englishman. I mean Chomlongma.
That's definitely one of them. No, I know, but to
tend people what m Longa is, right, and name two
other famous climbers. Yes, but the long and short of
(06:07):
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.
(06:27):
Getting to Everest and climbing it is, uh like, ascending
the peak is one thing, but just getting to that
point is I don't know, the battle. I would say easily.
Most people think you look at the 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. Mountain mountains just don't exist on their own.
(06:50):
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, you go up like you're going
up and up and up, and you're existing at higher
(07:11):
and higher altitudes, which the English people who were um
who are doing this at first are we're not used to.
So they were doing this with basically altitude sickness and
all the stuff that comes with that. Alright, so let's
go to and the stage is sort of set to
where they feel like it might be possible to actually
(07:31):
accomplish something like this. And the Royal Geographic Society got
together with the Alpine Club UH 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
let's let's give this a go, old boy. And they
got permission from Tibet in ninety one to go on
a scouting trip. And this was a trip where they
(07:55):
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 uh 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
(08:17):
all new, uncharted territory basically for these guys. And again
it's really important to say, like we're we're going to
be telling the story from the English point of view,
and like you said, the sherpa rarely figure into that. Um,
with the big exception of Tenzing Norgay, who's who officially
was the first to summit Everest with um Edmund Hillary.
(08:37):
But um, these guys weren't doing this alone. They had,
depending on the expedition and how much money it had,
scores two hundreds of sherpas like attending them, helping them climb,
moving their stuff, um, and just basically making life much
easier on these guys. That said, I really don't want
to um undermine the amount of effort and strenuousness that
(09:03):
talent these guys. Yeah, and talent that these guys underwent
and just figuring out how to get to Everest, to
start on that first expedition. Yeah, it's really cool to
read um contemporary, yes, contemporary accounts of what modern climbers
think of Mallory and his um not not just tenaciousness,
(09:26):
but his actual talent level and his climbing style. Uh,
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
the day is amazing. But they accomplished these things based
generally on you know, they can be taught by other people,
(09:47):
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 because I'm just thinking of climbing hills, right,
and we should just go ahead and just to get
any confusion out of the way, Um Edmund Hillary Summited Everston,
I think nineteen fifty three, we're talking about the first
(10:08):
expeditions to Everest again in n 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. Alright,
So if I said Hillary, I meant Mallory. Are we
all good? I think we're good? Yeah, okay, all right.
(10:29):
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 from going on this first
(10:50):
scouting trip. No, and he was thirty three on the trip,
and he says basically, hey, um dear, I'm going to
quit my job and leave you in 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
(11:13):
carry it with me always and I will put I
will place you at the top of Everest to live
there forevermore encased in 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
submitting Everest, but from what I gather from Mallory, he
would he would have been down to give it a
(11:33):
shot that first time out. Like that's how obsessed with
Everest that that man became right and he actually was
really successful. That the expedition was this was again the
first expedition by the English to map um Everest, and
they managed to do it. They managed to find a
way onto Everest what's called the North Call, which is
(11:56):
a ridge that connects one mountain to another. And they
found that north which is the way still today. If
you're coming from the north from the Tibetan side up Everest,
do you still use that route that these guys mapped in. Yeah,
And it's it's important to point out um which side
that they would have gone up then and what side
you go up now? Because uh, there is a route
(12:19):
that China kind of secured and basically has held that
Americans can't go, and that'll that'll be a key sort
of later on in this mystery. Pould have been in that, yeah,
because China invaded Tibetan 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. Um,
(12:43):
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 you know, it's 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
(13:04):
of walking just to get from base camp to the top,
whereas the South route, which is what Westerners used today
coming from the Nepalese side, is about twelve and three
quarter miles of walking. Nothing to sneeze at still, but
it just kind of underscores the just how hard the
things that these guys were doing with zero equipment. All Right,
(13:26):
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 a eighties sitcom. No, al right, So
I'm gonna work all that out and we'll be right back.
Stuff you should know. Okay, we're back, Um, and I
(14:07):
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
smaller mountain to Everest, the taller mountain, right, But to
get there requires hiking, mountain climbing, ice climbing, rock climbing, um,
every kind of climbing you can imagine. And one of
(14:29):
the first things you have to do, no matter whether
whether you come from the North route or the South route,
is cross the 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, you're
you're there are so many different disciplines if you're going
to do something like Everest, and especially in nineteen two that, uh,
(14:54):
I just don't think we can overstate like the near
impossibility of this feat the time. Yeah, especially with the glacier.
There's crevasses. They can be really deep, um, you know,
a 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 sea corps, which are house
(15:17):
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.
(15:37):
And I remember thinking that's so we talked about sea
corps 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 Shrip episode was really good.
Ice climbing was good. I believe we did one on
dead bodies on Everest. Yeah, and the one time ago
(16:00):
we did one on altitude sickness too. Yeah, so this
all comes together. Uh. The 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 expedition. The YETI. Yeah,
that's where the YETI was introduced, or at least the
concept was introduced to Westerners, who brought it back. Um,
(16:23):
and then I believe on a later like nineteen fifty
one expedition, a guy named Eric Shipton took some photos
of what we're supposed to be YETI tracks, and that's
when like the west really went wild for the YETI.
That's right, So let's catch ourselves up. It's September one
(16:43):
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
(17:05):
attempt to ascend Everest that ended up in I don't
know what. I don't want to say failure, but I
guess it is failure if they didn't accomplish it. 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 uh of
(17:25):
course not everywhere, but you're able to establish camps along
the way, and these camps are then used later on
uh as you know, base camps like one, 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 but it's super important to
establish that for like all the hikers to come. Just
(17:47):
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,
(18:08):
because you cannot be caught overnight on Everest anywhere at
these elevations that these guys are hiking at um without
a tent and or a sleeping bag, or you're going
to die. That's all there is to it. You can,
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
(18:30):
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, uh, in order to
(18:52):
get up there and safely get back down because some people,
including Hillary, Yes, Hillary, um, and it's a thorny so object.
But some peoples, as far as the Mystery of Mallory goes,
some people don't consider it a successful assent unless you
come back down. Um. And that's kind of the thing.
And I think Hillary was one of those and his
(19:12):
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
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
saying yeah, he's yeah, He's like, well, I mean, even
(19:33):
if you've made it to the top, it doesn't count.
Like I'm I'm doing this interview right now, right, I'm
sitting here, so, um, 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 um,
(19:54):
there's a really good explanation for that. Everest 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 too, I guess,
basically conquer or pit their endurance against. And that's why
(20:17):
it was so attractive to people. Yes, and that was
a very uh 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,
why climb mountains? Because it's there? That alone makes him
(20:39):
just worth remembering. You know what a cool response, Absolutely,
are you going to eat that 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, um,
all right, so let's talk for a second about oxygen
(21:00):
and um. 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 um. You know,
the kind of oxygen they take is very easy to uh,
to take. They make it very user friendly. But back
(21:22):
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. UM.
But they knew at the time, you know, while they
learned that they would absolutely need this stuff. UM. But
Mallory was sort of, I don't I don't think indifferent.
I think he was sort of annoyed by the whole
(21:45):
thing that you actually had to take this stuff, to
the point where he didn't even use them, I believe
in the nineteen one test run, right, No, I don't believe.
So I don't think he did either in the expedition
that followed where they actually did try to make some um.
And it wasn't for years before he was like Okay,
maybe oxygen is a good idea. UM. Some of them
(22:06):
even thought it was like a hindrance in general because
it was an extra thirty pounds that you had to
carry up this mountain. And if you watch, um, 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, even yeah, they do, even they
(22:28):
seem to like have regret for being where they 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
(22:51):
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 summit Everest without oxygen,
although I think people have tried and maybe even been successful,
so I guess it would be clear. Yes, So in
twenty two, UM, I believe Mallory and a couple of
(23:14):
other climbers hit twenty six thousand, eight hundred feet, which
is remarkable, before they decided to turn back. Uh. And
again this is without using oxygen on that twenty to 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 uh,
(23:36):
seven people were killed? Yeah? So No, in twenty one
there was an avalanche that wiped out some of the
camps they had established but didn't hurt anybody. Twenty two
they weren't as lucky, and seven sherpa died in an avalanche,
and Mallory kind of considered himself at least partially responsible,
(23:56):
even though he wasn't the only person who pushed for
this last attempt for the summit, um, 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 Mallori's um, poop pooed his carelessness.
(24:20):
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?
(24:43):
Like there was. He was in charge of the camera
for the 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 classic. 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
(25:06):
I think is cameras, Like operating the 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 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 mean I kind of created
(25:27):
that narrative, 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
um quote by a doctor Tom Longstaff, who was the
doctor on the expedition in said Mallory was quite unfit
to be placed in charge of anything, including himself. So
(25:47):
I mean people definitely thought of him. I'm gonna say
flight again, and I'm not judging. I'm pretty flighting myself. Um.
You me would certainly tell you that. Um. But so
I think I recognize it when I see it. Maybe
that's what it is as you meet your doctor Longstaff. Yep,
I'm gonna start calling her that now, should be like,
what are you talking about? I looked that up to
(26:09):
remember our surnames episode. I was like, oh, is that
a dirty last name? I know. That's what it turns out.
If you were a bailiff or somebody involved in law enforcement,
you would have been carried like a long stick 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
(26:31):
and Dr long Staff definitelyast since like a born name.
Definitely all right, So now let's go to nineteen twenty four,
the the test runs had happened, the real attempts had happened,
and then finally nineteen rolls around. Uh, they didn't just
take the year off in nineteen three because they were tired.
(26:51):
They didn't get funding, like it costs a lot of
money and these people aren't like bank rolling in themselves,
so the Mount Everest Company could not raise the money
in twenty three, so he waited until nineteen four when
Mallory jumped up in class and said me, me, Me,
Me me again. Um. And almost didn't go though, because
one of his mates, George Finch, a fellow climber, was
(27:14):
I believe left off the list, and Mallory was like,
if he's not gonna 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 Hallary exactly. So um.
There was a guy who went um who was kind
of a surprise selection. His name was Andrew Sandy Irving
(27:36):
Irvine Sorry and um, 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 shlub as
far as mountaineering goes. He just was not nearly as
experienced as most of the people on that expedition. But
being an engineering student, he could fiddle and fuss with
(27:57):
the oxygen apparatus which had in cameras. Maybe yeah, probably
he knew how to put the film in the right direction.
But um that since I get the impression that since
the NTE and twenty two expeditions, it had become clear
to these these um these people on these expeditions, on
the expedition that oxygen was in fact, like really important
(28:18):
and to have somebody who could make these these um
rigs more efficient would be really, really valuable. So they
brought Sandy Irving 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 us. Another nice thing,
if you see there's a famous picture of he and
(28:41):
or him and um 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 um, he was a big, big boy. Yeah.
And Mallory was very handsome too. We should note yes,
good looking dude. He really was very pretty. I think
(29:02):
you could say pretty bad. And then one other note
about Mallory on this to start off this expedition. Again,
this is the third expedition to Everest, and he was
the only member of this entire expedition who had have
been on all three expeditions, which again really underscores Mallory
was obsessed with summiting Everest. That's right, So to June one, now,
(29:28):
I think so man, alright, Mallory and George Bruce make
this first attempt. Uh, this one didn't work out when
basically the sherpas said all right, we're not going any
further is too dangerous. Uh, and they basically dropped their
stuff and turned back. So again this um, this one
didn't work out. But one of the positives is they
(29:50):
established a camp at five thousand feet UM, which I
believe was was the tallest camp at the time or
the highest camp. Okay, yeah, so that's again that the
huge success for a summit attempt, right, even when the
following day, another couple of climbers, Edward Norton and t
Howard Summerville Um, made their own attempt on the summit.
(30:13):
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 we're twenty nine thousand feet is
(30:36):
she had a way to go, but far and away.
That was. That was the record, and it was Uh
there was a record that stood at least officially until
Hillary in Norgay Um summited Everest in so it was
a big deal. But Norton in Summerville really paid for
their attempt. Um Summerville Uh he almost suffocated from a
(30:58):
high altitude cough, and the Norton developed snowblindness because they
would wear um 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 um was
really really um abundant because of the thin air up there,
so you would get what's called snowblindness, you would get
(31:20):
carotitus on your cornias. 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 twenties five thousand feet back down, uh,
he had to be helped. Every footstep had to be
placed by sherpas uh and the doctor um on the
(31:43):
on the trip, every foot, every footstep he made all
the way back down out of the everst area. That's amazing,
it really is. Alright, So on this third attempt, Mallory
is brought Irving. I'm sorry, why do you keep saying that?
I said because you said it brought Irvine along? And Uh,
(32:03):
they were sending notes down you know, they're sending messages
back down with srpos along the way basically yeah, I
love you. Uh. They're 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. Um, we're gonna, we're gonna,
(32:26):
you know, we're gonna try and do this like tomorrow
or whatever. And so all the notes that were coming down,
we're pretty positive and um, basically everything we know about
this comes from a gentleman uh geology, a gentleman geologist
named Noel O'Dell. It was actually a pretty big hero
in this story too. Yeah, he was pretty awesome actually, um.
(32:48):
And he lived to be ripe old man. Sorry, ripe
old age. Um. He spelled really bad. Yeah. And there's
a really cool interview with him from a Nova episode.
I can't remember what's called. It's from like the eighties
and they interviewed Noel Odell about this. So he factors
in big time in a minute. But O'Dell was um.
He went up to one of the high camps. He
(33:09):
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 is 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
(33:31):
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 is probably going to be his last expedition to Everest,
and this attempt for the summit was the last attempt
(33:52):
on this expedition. Ergo, this was Mallory's last shot at
summiting Everest, and he was setting out from the high
as camp that had ever been established. Basically, I believe
it's the highest camp still today on that north route.
Al Right, it sounds like a great cliffhanger, no pun intended.
So let's take our final break here and we'll wrap
(34:14):
up the story right after this stuff you should know, alright, So, uh,
(34:42):
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. Uh.
Geologist Noel O'Dell is up there again. He is he
is doing sort of the cool, groovy Appalachian trail hang
out dude thing to people Yeah, he's doing some trail
(35:06):
magic up there. Um, 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
(35:26):
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. Uh, the entire summit Ridge
and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became
fixed on one tiny black spot beneath a rock step
(35:49):
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
rocks up 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
(36:11):
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 O'Dell would have been the
last to see them, which will become a crucial thing
later on, as we'll see. But um O'Dell uh kind
of waited for them to come back down to the camps.
Remember he was in the high camps, and he waited
(36:31):
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 O'Dell is again,
he's not down there at 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 he basically
(36:53):
from Camp six, starts hiking around trying to find these
guys and and doesn't leave. He does. He just keeps
staying and he keeps making these assents. And I believe,
like two days in a row, made an assent over
what like twenty s feet, Yeah, a couple of them,
and he go back to camp because he had to
(37:14):
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,
(37:36):
to the base camp, and there was apparently a pre
arranged signal that they had they had come up with
for this third summit attempt, and um O'Dell 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
(37:56):
them the expedition had a return signal saying like give up, hope,
come back down, And very sadly O'Dell did as 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, um, he had been up there
(38:16):
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
(38:38):
it was pretty clear those sleeping bags had to come
out at that point. Yeah, and so they said, you know, um,
they were really kind of unhappy on that done that
way back down, which again I don't think we said
that 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 have been lost on there's summit attempt. They
(39:00):
were glowam but at the same time they realized, like
you know, Mallory and Irvine had kind of embodied the
spirit of adventure and just trying and even risking your
life for you know this, this this noble attempt at
It's something no one else had ever done. So it
was kind of a bittersweet thing their loss was. It
wasn't entirely nothing but tragic. There was some silver lining
(39:22):
to it in the way that Mallory was remembered and
thought of yeah, absolutely, uh and from that moment forward,
there you know ed. Kind of makes it sound like
the consensus is 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's still debate on whether or not they
(39:44):
actually made it to the top. And there or a
bunch of cool little clues that kind of leads 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
(40:05):
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
glasses until he was in his nineties. So those two
things combined make it seem like he was probably the
best possible eye witness around. And O'Dell went to his
(40:27):
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 uh 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,
(40:49):
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
(41:10):
sort of a victim of kind of uh 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. Really okay, cool.
So here's the thing. If you were in the climbing
community and you believe that um, at the very least Mallory,
if not Mallory and Irvine made it to the top
(41:30):
of Everest on that 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.
(41:52):
Knowing that he probably would not ever make it down alive,
he still would have kept going on. So that's that's
what a lot of people think. The people who think
that he actually did make it. Uh 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,
O'Dell himself says that, you know, there would have been
(42:14):
nothing that would have stopped Mallory and Irvine. He believes
um even though dusk was approaching and they probably knew
it was a 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 summited
(42:36):
that they could get back to that highest camp in
time for surviving the night. But that would not have
stopped them because they just 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
(42:56):
have made it. If he made the second step, he
definitely summited 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 UH
found along the way. One in nineteen thirty three when
(43:18):
irvines acts as ice acts was found, and you know,
you're not gonna just leave your ice ax behind. So
basically they concluded that, um, something happened that that made
Irvine drop this ice ax, but they recovered it in
thirty three, And then in nineteen seventy five, UH there
(43:38):
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
two Americans, and so it's not like that people before
the nineteen would have been taking this route. I think
there was one American group that that snuck in and
(44:00):
did so illegally. But one of the Chinese climbers said
I found an English dead to another climber. Um. China
has always denied this and said that that's not true, uh,
and that it was a misunderstanding. And the um that climber,
actually his name was Wang Hung Bao died the next
(44:22):
day in an avalanche, so there was never like any
follow up with him. In a really interesting ironic twist,
Chuck Hung boo translate to so long staff in English.
No really, I thought i'd get a bigger laugh out
of that. We'll just get well, it was believable enough
to where I quite go so um. Yeah. So there's
all this intrigue that's kind of gathering around this, this
(44:44):
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 UM that came well, there's
expedition that found an old oxygen bottle that was almost
(45:07):
certainly Mallory or Irvines, And then all of the information
kind of came together to um support a 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 they
found Mallory. He was frozen, he was sun bleached, his
(45:32):
body was very well preserved. The items on him were
very well preserved. Uh, they found him severely injured. Well,
they found a couple of things. They found that he
had a severely broken leg and some uh some rope
trauma like ligature stuff around his waist. But what they
really found, um that was severe was the cause of death,
(45:54):
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 ax
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 it instantly. Because they
said that his his foot was almost broken off. That
(46:14):
that break was so bad, and then rope trauma to
imagine a rope yanking on you, because they found the
rope still tied around his waist um. But the head
that happened, actually, I mean, it's awful, right, It's like
falling on your tailbone at 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
(46:35):
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
(46:56):
was about. I was on a roll. It's very strange. Well,
I'm not even gonna I'm gonna tell you now what happened.
No one gets to know. That would be the great
mystery of this episode. Okay, uh 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
(47:17):
that he took with him 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 you know,
(47:40):
been destroyed by the elements over time. Uh. And you know,
I don't know how I feel about that clue. Um.
I think it's considering everything was found really uh in
good condition on him, and that that he didn't have
it is pretty interesting to think about. I'll just say
that I like that clue too. Um. There's also missing camera.
(48:02):
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,
(48:25):
because it's 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 um
(48:47):
expedition said that they found the dead English that is
nowhere near where Mallory was found. So they figured 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
(49:10):
the mountain without telling anybody. That's right, That is the rumor,
and that they got that camera and they kind of
botched uh the film trying to get it developed and
processes pictures, and that was a big embarrassment. And so
they will take that secret to their Graves. Yeah. And
another explanation is that the the nineteen sixty Chinese expedition
(49:32):
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 that um
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
(49:54):
what happened with your rope trauma. That will go to
the grave with me. 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
(50:15):
refuses to tell us about his rope trauma story, I
guess we have nothing left but listener mail. Uh. This
is uh from the Silly String up. This is myth busted. Hey, guys,
I 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 Uh. This
(50:38):
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 messages message could be disastrous, So the custom arose
of using the words stop between sentences and military telegrams
(50:59):
so that any biguous phrases could not be misinterpreted. Caught
on with the public. Even after punctuation was introduced, people
continued fashionably using stock 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, Dave. I like both stories. Okay, they're
(51:21):
both great. Yeah, everyone wins. And also I'm going to
pose it 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 and the rope and the trauma, you can send
(51:43):
us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
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