Will the discovery of Sandy Irvine lead to solving Everest's greatest mystery?
Here's why the lost explorer’s remains were hunted for so long—and what finding them now could mean.
Last week’s announcement that a boot and partial remains believed to belong to the British explorer Sandy Irvine had been found on Mount Everest by a National Geographic documentary crew supercharged interest in a mystery that has endured since he vanished with George Mallory on the mountain 100 years ago. “It’s the biggest thing that’s happened in mountaineering circles since Mallory’s body was found in 1999,” says Julie Summers, the great niece and biographer of Irvine. Summers says she was brought to tears when she was reached by phone with news of the discovery by Jimmy Chin, the National Geographic director, photographer, and climber who was leading the expedition.
Since June 1924, when the two men vanished into Everest’s swirling clouds while attempting to become the first people to summit the mountain, the tantalizing question has endured: Did they make it to the top before they perished? Now, suddenly, with the apparent emergence of Irvine’s boot historians, authors, and climbers who’ve dedicated a considerable part of their lives to unraveling the mystery are trying to understand what the discovery might actually mean.
“It certainly is a cornerstone in the whole story of Mallory and Irvine,” says Jochen Hemmleb, one of the researchers who’s been searching for Irvine for more than a quarter century and who was on the 1999 team that discovered the body of George Mallory. “One of my first reactions was this great sense of deja vu when I saw the pictures of the boot and the name tag. It was the same for me 25 years ago when the search team, Conrad [Anker] and the others, recovered the boot of Mallory.”
A century of searching
The hunt for Mallory and Irvine commenced as soon as they were recognized as lost. But expedition member Noel Odell, who conducted the initial search, soon recognized the search was futile, he later wrote. “After struggling on for nearly a couple of hours looking in vain for some indication or clue, I realised that the chances of finding the missing ones were indeed small on such a vast expanse of crags and broken slabs.”
Nine years later, in 1933, the first evidence of their presence on the mountain emerged when British climbers found an ice ax that had belonged to Irvine above 8,000 meters. In the years that followed, eyewitness accounts, mostly from Chinese climbers, began to accumulate suggesting a body or maybe two bodies were lying on the mountain, somewhere above 8,000 meters.
At least four stories that described the body of “an old English dead” were documented between 1960 and 1995. These accounts tended to make their way to English-speaking climbing circles without a lot of clarity; often they were shared non-chronologically and marred by language difficulty that made it hard to know who the witness might have glimpsed on the mountain. “Conflation, I think, is the right word there,” says author, climber, and National Geographic contributor Mark Synnott explaining the confusion that surrounds these stories.
On the basis of these circumstantial reports, two amateur researchers plotted out a target area for the 1999 expedition that ultimately located Mallory’s body. Those researchers were Hemmleb and Tom Holzel, who wrote The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine, the book that had turned Hemmleb into a Mallory and Irvine sleuth. “I closed the book and this feeling washed over me,” Hemmleb recalls. “Hell, this story is going to lead to something in my life.”
Hemmleb joined the expedition and when the search team came across a body, they thought they’d found Irvine—right up until the moment when a name tag revealed they’d found the body of George Mallory.
What might have happened to Irvine?
While Mallory was the more famous of the two climbers, searchers have always been uniquely interested in finding Irvine’s body because of what it might reveal about the lost men’s fate. It has long been thought that Irvine was carrying a Kodak Vest Pocket camera—an artifact that might contain the undeveloped photos taken at the summit.
In the wake of the Mallory discovery, experts traded theories of Irvine’s whereabouts. Maybe his body was high on Everest for a time but was scraped off the mountain by an avalanche. Maybe it was moved. A particularly provocative idea was included in a 2022 postscript to Synnott’s book The Third Pole. Synnott shared a theory relayed by an unnamed British diplomat, that the Chinese—who claimed the first ascent of Everest’s north side in 1960—had found a body in 1975 and quietly removed the prized Kodak Vest Pocket camera and then buried the remains under some stones in order to protect the primacy of their first ascent. “I wish I could say who the source was because instantly everybody would be like, Oh wow, yeah,” says Synnott.
For her part, Julie Summers, the Irvine biographer, never accepted the idea that her great uncle was found, separated from the camera, and then buried. “I felt it was a desperate attempt to explain why this body could never be found.” says Summers.
Hemmleb, who has followed these theories closely and wrote his own book, Ghosts on Everest, thinks last week’s discovery doesn’t rule out many of the prevailing hunches about what could have happened. “I personally feel that, given the nature of the discovery, all the theories pertaining to Irvine are still valid,” says Hemmlab. “Except perhaps for that statement by one Tibetan that Irvine was taken down the mountain and is now in Lhasa. We can definitely rule that one out.”
Following In Irvine’s footsteps
After Mallory was found, several additional expeditions returned to search for Irvine without success. Hemmleb took part in a 2001 trip, and Synnott led a National Geographic expedition that performed a search flying small drones in a grid pattern across a large search area. They found no sign of Irvine.
Perhaps the most creative attempt to shed light on the mystery came in 2007 when Anker and a young British climber named Leo Houlding attempted to climb the mountain using only period replica gear of the sort that would have been available in 1924.
Dressed as Mallory and Irvine in seven layers of wool and gabardine, Anker and Houlding felt reasonably comfortable at altitude. But they didn’t make it far beyond the North Col before realizing that if they really tried to climb the mountain in leather boots, they were going to lose toes.
In a film called Wildest Dream that documents their climb, both Anker and Houlding go to great lengths to leave open the possibility that Mallory and Irvine could have done in leather hobnail boots what these trained professionals struggled to do in modern gear. But today, Anker admits that the climb would have been exceptionally difficult—particularly the scramble up the notoriously steep geological feature known as the Second Step. “It’s the highest altitude free climbing on the planet,” he says.
There’s of course a chance that the conditions or snowpack were different back then and the Second Step—near where they were last spotted—wasn’t as difficult. There’s even a chance that Mallory and Irvine found an as-yet-unknown route that circumvents the Second Step. But when it comes to the fate of Irvine, Anker believes the simplest story probably explains how he ended up in the central Rongbuk Glacier down below. Back in 1924, Mallory’s body came to a stop and Irvine’s kept going: “I think that he was swept off the mountain.”
The new search for the camera
With the discovery of Irvine’s boot, a new and promising search area has now been established. Could it reveal more remains—or even artifacts like a camera? To Jimmy Chin, who was leading the expedition when the boot was recovered, finding a camera would be “the Holy Grail of discoveries,” he says. (Interestingly, Chin raced back from Everest last week in order to begin promoting his new National Geographic film Endurance, which takes up the story of another incredible discovery from the annals of adventure).
“I like to think that there's a possibility that it could be found,” Chin says of the camera, “But if you see this glacier, I mean, there are moulins and crevasses everywhere, hundreds of feet deep. You just don’t know if the camera or anything else could have melted out 10 years ago and got washed into a massive crevasse. And then it’s going to be gone for another 200 years. But I also like to think that there’s always a possibility that it could be found.”
Of course, experts, like Jamie Owen, manager of the photo collection at London’s Royal Geographical Society (RGS), are tempering expectations that a 100-year-old camera lost on Everest might still contain unexposed film. “I think it remains so incredibly unlikely that the camera would be found in a state that would actually give us any sort of relevant information,” says Owen. “I mean, if it’s constantly freezing and unfreezing or being exposed to avalanches and then glacier action, then I think it’s very unlikely that there’s anything meaningful you’re going to get from it.”
Hemmleb acknowledges the diminishingly small chance that there might be salvageable images inside any camera that turns up, but he also points to other items that could still provide meaningful insight.
“I mean, there could be notes in his pocket, an oxygen rig, some broken rope on the body,” says Hemmleb. He also raises the possibility that there may have been more than one camera.
Expedition member Howard Somervell famously loaned Mallory his Kodak Vest Pocket camera for the ill-fated summit attempt, but Irvine was also an experienced photographer and may have carried with him his own camera.
Some of Irvine’s photographs were recently published by the RGS in a collection celebrating the 100th anniversary of the expedition. “Clearly he had a camera and was very accomplished in using it,” says Owen, who curated the photography in the book.
It’s too early to know whether an additional search expedition will be organized for spring of 2025, the next window of opportunity. Chin isn’t disclosing where exactly he found the boot—but he shared that it was located far from where previous searches focused. “It was miles away from where other people were looking,” says Chin. “People were just off by a long, long way.”
Owen cautions that just because the general location of the remains is now known doesn’t mean they should be recovered.
“We are of the view that any remains should be left in peace,” says the RGS’s Owen. “We believe that they should be left in-situ, undisturbed, and the position of them not be disclosed. I think doing so risks cheapening the memory of these expeditions.”
