“I lifted up the sock and there’s a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched into it. We were all literally running in circles dropping F-bombs.” This is how the US climber and filmmaker Jimmy Chin described to the magazine “National Geographic” the moment when he and his team discovered remains of Andrew Irvine on the Central Rongbuk Glacier at the foot of the North face of Mount Everest .
They found an old boot with a foot in it and the sock in question, which bore witness to who had once worn it. At the beginning of June 1924, the British mountaineers George Herbert Leigh Mallory, then 37 years old, and Andrew Comyn Irvine, 22 years old, had set off on a summit attempt on the then unclimbed Mount Everest. According to their expedition colleague Noell Odell, they were last seen on 8 June on the Northeast Ridge, after which their trail was lost. To this day, the mystery of how close they came to the highest point on earth at 8,849 meters is unsolved.
Mallory’s body was discovered 25 years ago
In 1933, climbers of a British Everest expedition found Irvine’s ice axe on the Tibetan north side of the mountain at an altitude of almost 8,500 meters. In 1991, an oxygen cylinder attributed to the 1924 expedition turned up at around the same altitude. On 1 May 1999, the US mountaineer Conrad Anker, a member of an international search expedition, found Mallory’s body frozen in the rubble at 8,159 meters.
George’s name was written on a label on the collar of his jacket and there were letters addressed to him in his pocket. Mallory’s leg was broken, severe head injuries were visible – obviously the result of a fall. Irvine remained missing. A small Kodak camera with which the two climbers wanted to document their ascent was also not found at the time.
Boot stuck in the ice
Oscar winner Jimmy Chin and his team were on the Tibetan north side of Everest this fall to film a planned ski descent by Jim Morrison through the Hornbein Couloir on the north face. The difficult conditions on the mountain put a stop to the project.
Chin and Co. first discovered an old oxygen bottle labeled 1933 on the glacier near the wall and speculated that it might have fallen and rolled further than a falling person. They therefore began to systematically search the area – and eventually found Irvine’s boot sticking out of the ice. “I think it literally melted out a week before we found it,” says Chin.
Hemmleb: “No solution to the mystery yet”
The German alpine historian and mountaineer Jochen Hemmleb was on site at Everest in 1999 and his years of research were instrumental in the discovery of Mallory’s body. The 53-year-old describes the fact that Irvine’s shoe has now turned up as a “seminal find”, but warns against jumping to conclusions. “I don’t see a solution to the mystery so far.”
According to Jochen, it is still unclear whether a Chinese expedition found the missing Kodak camera – which, incidentally, was not carried by Irvine but by Mallory – already 49 years ago and concealed it: “The Chinese almost certainly found Mallory in 1975, not Irvine, and might have recovered the camera Mallory had carried (again this is debatable, but still a possibility).”
“For now the find – despite its poignancy – doesn’t shed much light at all about whether Mallory and Irvine made the summit (most consider it unlikely) or what happened to them,” says Hemmleb, adding that are several possibilities as to how Irvine’s body ended on the Central Rongbuk Glacier: “He could have fallen from somewhere on the Northeast Ridge. He could have been swept down by an avalanche from somewhere on the North Face. Or his body could have been thrown off the mountain (as uncomfortable as this thought is). More information about the exact location of the find and the flow of the Central Rongbuk might offer more clues.”
Jimmy Chin does not want to go into detail about where exactly the remains were found – in his own words, so as not to encourage trophy hunters to make their way to the foot of Everest North Face. He is confident that other artifacts and perhaps even the camera are nearby, Chin told National Geographic: “It certainly reduces the search area.”
Update 15 October: For US mountaineer Jake Norton, like Hemmleb a member of the 1999 search expedition, the most important thing is “that the Irvine family can finally, a century out, have some degree of closure on their ancestor’s fate”. Based on the location of Irvine’s shoe compared with that of Mallory’s body in 1999, Jake assumes “that the two fell, still tied together, down the North Face” until the rope broke “leaving Mallory where we found him on May 1, 1999, and sending Irvine down to the glacier below”.