The 12:50 Sighting on the Northeast Ridge: George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, Mount Everest, 8 June 1924

At about 12:50 in the afternoon of 8 June 1924, the geologist Noel Odell, climbing in support at roughly 26,000 feet on the north side of Mount Everest, looked up through a sudden clearing in the cloud and saw two tiny black spots moving on the Northeast Ridge. One spot reached the foot of a rock step, climbed it, and emerged at the top. The second followed. Then the cloud closed in and the entire summit ridge was gone. Odell had just become the last person to see George Mallory and Sandy Irvine alive.

They never came back. Mallory’s wife Ruth, his three children, and the Mount Everest Committee in London learned of the disappearance by cable in late June. The case passed into the historical record as the central open question of Himalayan mountaineering, and across the rest of the twentieth century it stayed there.

On 1 May 1999, on the scree of the North Face at about 26,760 feet, the American climber Conrad Anker found Mallory’s body. It was face down, sun-bleached and preserved by the cold, with a length of cotton climbing rope around the waist and a broken left leg crossed by the right. The body carried an altimeter, snow goggles in a pocket, fragments of a watch, name labels in the clothing, and several letters from family members. It did not carry a camera. In September 2024, a National Geographic team led by Jimmy Chin photographed a worn leather boot exposed by melting ice on the Central Rongbuk Glacier, far below the North Face, with a foot inside and a sock label stitched in red reading “A.C. IRVINE.” Across a hundred years, two bodies and an ice axe have come back from the mountain. The Vest Pocket Kodak Autographic loaned to the summit party by Howard Somervell has not.

Whether Mallory and Irvine reached the top on 8 June 1924, twenty-nine years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, before they fell, is the question their case still turns on.

The 1924 expedition

The 1924 British Mount Everest Expedition was the third British attempt at the mountain, after the 1921 reconnaissance and the 1922 attempt. Brigadier-General Charles Granville Bruce was the appointed leader; he contracted malaria on the approach march and was invalided out, with command devolving to Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Felix Norton. The party included the surgeon Howard Somervell, the geologist and oxygen officer Noel Odell, the cinematographer Captain John Noel, the climbers John de Vars Hazard, Bentley Beetham, and Geoffrey Bruce, and a team of Sherpa porters who carried supplies as high as Camp VI at about 26,800 feet.

The summit push ran in three attempts. On 1 June, Mallory and Geoffrey Bruce, without oxygen, turned back at about 25,000 feet after their porters refused to continue higher. On 4 June, Norton and Somervell, also without oxygen, made a remarkable push; Somervell turned back with a near-fatal bronchial obstruction on the descent, and Norton went on alone to roughly 28,126 feet (about 8,572 metres) at the head of what is now the Norton Couloir. By the expedition report that was a height record, and in strict logic whether it stood until 1953 depends on whether Mallory and Irvine themselves exceeded it on 8 June. The third attempt was Mallory and Irvine, with oxygen.

George Herbert Leigh Mallory was 37. Educated at Winchester College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, he taught at Charterhouse School in Surrey, served as a lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery in the First World War, and had married Ruth Turner in 1914; they had three children. He was on his third Everest expedition.

Andrew Comyn Irvine, known as Sandy, was 22, an engineering undergraduate at Merton College, Oxford, and the oxygen apparatus engineer for the expedition, having redesigned the Siebe Gorman apparatus carried in 1922 to make it lighter and more usable at altitude. 1924 was his first Everest expedition.

8 June 1924

On 5 June 1924, from Camp IV on the North Col, Mallory wrote a brief note to John Noel asking the cinematographer to watch for the summit pair. The Merton College transcription preserves the wording: “We’ll probably start early to-morrow (8th) in order to have clear weather. It won’t be too early to start looking out for us either crossing the rockband under the pyramid or going up skyline at 8 p.m.” The “8 p.m.” is verbatim in the archived note and is universally read by scholars as a slip for “8 a.m.” Noel himself recorded that he understood the morning to be meant.

Mallory and Irvine spent the night of 7 to 8 June at Camp VI at about 26,800 feet and set out early in the morning of 8 June with oxygen. The next time either of them appears in the record, neither is named directly. The record is Odell’s, alone, from below.

Climbing in support at roughly 26,000 feet, Odell looked up at about 12:50 in the afternoon. His account, published in the Alpine Journal vol. 36 (1924) under the title “The Last Climb,” and in The Geographical Journal vol. 64 (1924), is the load-bearing testimony in the case. The widely reproduced passage reads: “At 12.50, just after I had emerged from a state of jubilation at finding the first definite fossils on Everest, there was a sudden clearing of the atmosphere, and the entire summit ridge and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on one tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow-crest beneath a rock-step 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 rock-step and shortly emerged at the top; the second did likewise. Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more.” Two slightly different published wordings exist across the Alpine Journal and Geographical Journal versions; the version above is the most widely reproduced.

The position of the rock step Odell saw them on matters enormously. The Northeast Ridge above 28,000 feet is broken by three rock obstacles known as the First Step (about 27,890 feet), the Second Step (about 28,230 feet, a roughly 30 metre near-vertical wall), and the Third Step (about 28,510 feet) before the final summit pyramid. Odell’s identification of which step he had seen shifted across four decades. In the expedition account of 1925 he conceded the feature may have been the First Step; later in life he returned to a Second Step reading. Modern scholarly opinion, including Holzel and Salkeld in 1986 and Anker and Roberts in 1999, has leaned First Step. The honest position is that the question is unresolved.

Mallory and Irvine never returned to Camp VI. Odell climbed back to Camp VI on 10 and 11 June 1924 looking for any sign, found none, and descended. The expedition retreated to Base Camp and cabled the news.

The 1933 ice axe

The next physical trace surfaced nine years later. On 30 May 1933, during the British expedition of that year, Percy Wyn-Harris found an ice axe lying on slabs of the Northeast Ridge. Variously cited at about 27,700 feet, and at roughly 8,450 metres (about 27,723 feet), about 18 metres below the crest of the ridge and 229 metres east of the First Step, the axe was manufactured by Willisch of Taesch.

In 1963, three linear notches cut into the wooden handle were matched to identical notches on a swagger stick that had belonged to Sandy Irvine. The axe was therefore identified as his and is now held by the Royal Geographical Society. It is undamaged. Its position on the slabs is consistent with a deposit before a fall, or with the axe having been dropped, but on its own it does not establish the manner of the accident.

The 1975 sighting and the 1999 discovery

In October 1979, on a Sino-Japanese reconnaissance, the Chinese climber Wang Hongbao told the Japanese expedition leader Ryoten Hasegawa that during the 1975 Chinese Mount Everest Expedition he had walked about twenty minutes from his Camp VI and had seen the body of an “English dead” at approximately 8,100 metres, lying on its side at the foot of a rock, in old-style clothing that disintegrated at the touch. Wang was killed in an avalanche the following day. No further details were ever obtained from him, and the precise wording of his account reaches the record through Hasegawa.

That conversation drove the search that followed. The 1999 Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition was led by Eric Simonson, with the climbers Conrad Anker, Andy Politz, Jake Norton, Tap Richards, and Dave Hahn, and with the historians Jochen Hemmleb and Larry Johnson. Hemmleb’s analysis of Wang’s report and of the position of the 1933 ice axe set the search area.

On 1 May 1999, descending below the main search line, Anker came across a body at approximately 26,760 feet (about 8,155 metres), lying face down on the scree of the North Face, well below the ridge crest. The skin was sun-bleached and the soft tissue had been preserved by the cold; the clothing carried name labels identifying the body as that of George Leigh Mallory. The expedition recovered an altimeter, snow goggles, fragments of a watch, several letters in the clothing, and a length of braided cotton climbing rope. The left leg was broken, with the right leg crossed protectively over it, and the rope around the waist showed rope-jerk injury consistent with a partner-fall.

The presence of the snow goggles in his pocket, rather than on his face, has been read as evidence that Mallory fell in low light, that is, late in the day or in cloud, which suggests a descent rather than an ascent. The letters in the clothing were correspondence from family members including his brother Trafford and his sister Mary; reports in early coverage that a letter “from Ruth” was among them are not supported by the expedition’s published artifact list. No camera was found.

The expedition photographed the body, recovered a selection of artifacts, read a brief committal from Psalm 103, and covered the body with stones in place. Subsequent searches in 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010, and 2019 found nothing that could be tied to Irvine or the camera.

The 2024 boot and foot

In September 2024 a National Geographic documentary team led by the photographer and filmmaker Jimmy Chin, with the filmmakers Erich Roepke and Mark Fisher and a Sherpa team, was working on the Central Rongbuk Glacier on a project on glacial recession. At about 17,000 feet, well below the North Face, the team spotted a worn leather boot, partially exposed by melting ice, with a foot inside. The sock in the boot carried a stitched red name label that read “A.C. IRVINE.”

The find was announced publicly on 11 October 2024. The team handed the remains to the China-Tibet Mountaineering Association after taking a DNA sample for the British Consulate. Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers provided DNA from the family for comparison. As of the October 2024 announcement, identification rested on the labelled sock and the boot, with DNA confirmation pending. The location, low on the glacier and far from the Northeast Ridge, is consistent with glacial flow carrying the body down from near the 1975 Wang Hongbao sighting.

The boot does not, on its own, answer the summit question. It says where Irvine ended up. It does not say how high he had been.

The hypotheses

Everything in this section is hypothesis. The labels below are read off the evidentiary record, not asserted as fact.

Hypothesis A: They reached the summit and fell on descent. For: the goggles in Mallory’s pocket suggest a fall in low light, consistent with a late return, and the body’s position low on the North Face is consistent with a long fall from high on the ridge. Against: the time and oxygen accounting is very tight, and the camera has not been recovered to confirm.

Hypothesis B: They turned back below the Second Step and died on descent. This is the current modern scholarly consensus, following Holzel and Salkeld and Anker’s 1999 and 2007 assessments of the Second Step. For: the body’s position is consistent with a fall from below the Yellow Band, and the 1933 ice axe, found below the First Step, is consistent with a deposit during retreat. Against: it requires reading Odell’s sighting as the First Step and discounting his later return to the Second Step reading.

Hypothesis C: They reached the Second Step, were defeated by it, and died on retreat. A middle position. For and against: the body’s position and the partner-fall injury pattern are consistent with it, but it is unverifiable without the camera.

Hypothesis D: They climbed past the Second Step, were defeated at the Third Step or above, and died on retreat. Holzel and Salkeld floated this as a possibility. For: Odell’s late-life Second Step identification and the goggles as evidence of a late return. Against: time and oxygen are very tight, and no physical evidence above the Second Step has been found.

Hypothesis E: Oxygen apparatus failure precipitated the accident. For: the 1922 Siebe Gorman apparatus had failed repeatedly at altitude, and Irvine’s 1924 modifications were partially untested. Against: no specific physical evidence of apparatus damage was recovered with Mallory, and the apparatus itself has not been found with either body.

Hypothesis F: They became separated and died separately. Against: the rope-jerk injury on Mallory’s torso and the broken length of rope tied at his waist suggest a roped fall as a partner, and this reading is poorly supported by the physical evidence.

The Second Step today

The Second Step is the crux of all six hypotheses. Conrad Anker climbed it in 1999 with the 1975 Chinese aluminium ladder in place. In 2007 he returned with Leo Houlding, removed the ladder, and made the first confirmed free ascent, which he assessed as a 5.10-grade pitch on rock. That difficulty is at or above the limit of 1924 leading standards in mountaineering boots and with the equipment of the day. Whether 1924 rock conditions and 1924 equipment could have admitted that climb, on the morning of 8 June, is unproven, and it is unlikely to be settled without the camera.

What remains unknown

Whether George Mallory and Sandy Irvine reached the summit of Mount Everest on 8 June 1924 is unresolved. The location of the Kodak Vest Pocket Autographic camera loaned to the summit party by Howard Somervell is unknown. The precise step on the Northeast Ridge that Noel Odell saw them climbing at 12:50 PM that afternoon is honestly contested. The cause of the fall, whether a slip on descent, an oxygen apparatus failure, exposure, a held-fall after one climber lost footing, or a snow-blind misstep in cloud, is not established. The full provenance of Irvine’s remains between 1924 and the 2024 recovery on the Central Rongbuk Glacier, including whether the body Wang Hongbao saw in 1975 was his and how it moved from approximately 8,100 metres down to about 17,000 feet on the glacier below, is not yet documented.