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"I mean, dude—there's a label on it”
A longstanding mystery is finally solved 100 years after mountaineer's disappearance.
A sock embroidered with "A.C. Irvine," along with a boot, has been found on Mount Everest. Credit: Jimmy Chin
In June 1924, a British mountaineer named George Leigh Mallory and a young engineering student named Andrew "Sandy" Irvine set off for the summit of Mount Everest and disappeared—two more casualties of a peak that has claimed over 300 lives to date. Mallory's body was found in 1999, but Irvine's was never found—until now. An expedition led by National Geographic Explorer and professional climber Jimmy Chin—who won an Oscar for the 2019 documentary Free Solo, which he co-directed—has located a boot and a sock marked with Irvine's initials at a lower altitude than where Mallory's body had been found.
The team took a DNA sample from the remains, and members of the Irvine family have volunteered to compare DNA test results to confirm the identification. “It’s an object that belonged to him and has a bit of him in it,” Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers told National Geographic. "It tells the whole story about what probably happened. I'm regarding it as something close to closure.”
As previously reported, Mallory is the man credited with uttering the famous line "because it's there" in response to a question about why he would risk his life repeatedly to summit Everest. Mallory had already been to the mountain twice before the 1924 expedition: once in 1921 as part of a reconnaissance expedition to produce the first accurate maps of the region and again in 1922. He was forced to turn back on all three attempts.
Undeterred, Mallory was back in 1924 for the fated Everest expedition that would claim his life at age 37. On June 4, he and a 22-year-old Irvine left Advanced Base Camp. They reached Camp 5 on June 6 and Camp 6 the following day before heading out for the summit on June 8. Team member Noel Odell reported seeing the two men climbing either the First or Second Step around 1 pm before they were "enveloped in a cloud once more." Nobody ever saw Mallory and Irvine again, although their spent oxygen tanks were found just below the First Step. Climbers also found Irvine's ice axe in 1933.
There were several expeditions that tried to find the climbers' remains. A climber named Frank Smythe thought he spotted a body in 1936, just below the spot where Irvine's ice axe was found, "at precisely the point where Mallory and Irvine would have fallen had they rolled on over the scree slopes," he wrote in a letter that was not discovered until 2013. A Chinese climber reported stumbling across "an English dead" at 26,570 feet (8,100 meters) in 1975, but the man was killed in an avalanche the following day before the report could be verified.
Remains of the day
Mallory's body wasn't found until 1999, when an expedition partially sponsored by Nova and the BBC found the remains on the mountain's north face, at 26,760 feet (8,157 meters)—just below where Irvine's axe had been found. The team thought it was Irvine's body and hoped to recover the camera since there was a chance any photographs could be retrieved to determine once and for all whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit—thereby changing mountaineering history. But the name tags on the clothing read "G. Leigh Mallory." Personal artifacts confirmed the identity: an altimeter, a pocket knife, snow goggles, a letter, and a bill for climbing equipment from a London supplier.
After that exciting discovery, the search was on to find Irvine's body (and the camera) based on the unverified 1975 sighting. A 2001 followup expedition did locate the men's last camp. Noted Everest historian Tom Holzel—whose latest research features prominently in Lost on Everest—relied on a 2001 Chinese climber's sighting of a body lying on its back in a narrow crevasse, as well as aerial photography, to pinpoint the most likely spot to search: in the region known as the Yellow Band at an altitude of 27,641 feet (8,425 meters).
In 2019, a NatGeo expedition attempted to locate Irvine's body (lost for over 95 years) and hopefully retrieve the man's camera, based on Holzel's conclusions. They failed, although the expedition was filmed and became a gripping 2020 documentary, Lost on Everest. Chin's expedition took up the mantle for the hunt for Irvine's remains this year.
In September, Chin's team found a 1933 oxygen canister as they were descending Central Rongbuk Glacier, most likely from the 1933 expedition that found Irvine's ice axe on the northeast ridge. The canister had fallen off the mountain, and the team reasoned that it probably fell farther than a body would have, so Irvine's remains could be just a few hundred yards up the glacier. So they targeted their search to that area.
Eventually, they spotted a boot emerging from the melting ice: old cracked leather with studded soles and steel hobnails consistent with 1920s climbing gear. Inside was the sock. “It was actually [expedition member] Erich [Roepke] who spotted something and was like, ‘Hey, what's that?,’” Chin told National Geographic. “I think it literally melted out a week before we found it. I lifted up the sock and there's a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched onto it. We were all literally running around in circles dropping F-bombs.”
The partial remains are now in the custody of the China Tibet Mountaineering Association. Official confirmation that this is, indeed, Irvine must await the DNA results. “But I mean, dude—there's a label on it,” Chin said. “Any expedition to Everest follows in the shadow of Irvine and Mallory. We certainly did. And sometimes in life the greatest discoveries occur when you aren’t even looking. This was a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team on the ground, and we just hope this can finally bring peace of mind to his relatives and the climbing world at large.”
Jennifer is a senior reporter at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.
