Back home in the U.S., the Everest Ski Expedition has unveiled a historic achievement that has nothing to do with their attempt to ski down the Hornbein Couloir. They found some human remains belonging to 1924 pioneer Andrew “Sandy” Irvine. Spoiler: the camera was not there.
Unlike his partner, George Mallory, whose frozen body was located in 1999 on the upper part of the mountain, Irvine’s remains — a boot with his foot inside it — were found below the North Face of Everest on the central Rongbuk Glacier.
Filmmaker and climber Jimmy Chin wrote on social media that the finding was a lucky coincidence that happened while Chin, Erich Roepke, and Mark Fisher were filming the ski expedition.
“Sometimes in life, the greatest discoveries occur when you aren’t even looking,” Chin wrote.
The leather boot with a spiked sole was clearly from the first half of the 20th century. But the final proof was inside.
“I lifted up the sock [from the foot],” Chin said in a story published by National Geographic Magazine, “and there’s a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched into it.”
“This was a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team,” Chin wrote. “We just hope this can finally bring peace of mind to his descendants and the climbing world at large.
The isolated boot and foot were unattached to anything else.
Mystery remains
Andrew “Sandy” Irvine. Photo: Wikipedia
Exciting as it is, this finding will not end the mystery surrounding the greatest question around the ill-fated climb of Mallory and Irvine: whether they reached the summit on June 8, 1924 before perishing. For years, expeditions and armchair mountaineers have hoped that the small Kodak camera that Irvine carried would turn up.
In the best possible scenario, the film inside the camera might then be developed and reveal a summit picture that would change the history of mountaineering. This would mean that two British climbers summited the highest peak on Earth 29 years before Tenzing Norgay Sherpa of Nepal and Edmund Hillary of New Zealand.
No camera or any other item was reportedly found. Yet the remains do end the rumors that Chinese climbers may have removed the body from the mountain. But even these rumors were ambiguous. Some sources suggested that the body had been moved, others that Chinese climbers simply retrieved some items from the corpse and then threw it down the mountain.
