NUMA was one of several co-sponsors who backed Tom
Hotzel and the North Face Research Expedition to find
British climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, lost
on Mount Everest. November, 1986.
The unknown fate of Mallory and Irvine, who vanished near
the summit of Mount Everest in 1924, has been a puzzle
for over six decades. Mallory, a famous mountain climber
of his day, was the man who coined the phrase "because
it's there" when asked why he wanted to reach the
peak of Mount Everest.
I read of Hotzel's expedition in the newspaper and
contacted him, offering to contribute to his effort.
Unfortunately, his search team was beat out by terrible
weather and they accomplished very little. We've maintained
close correspondence and Hotzel intends to try again.
His story of the expedition follows.
As of this writing (2-11-88) Mallory and Irvine remain
buried somewhere on the icy slopes of Everest.
Mallory & Irvine--The Search Continues by Tom Holzel
617 263-1122 Of forty-two Himalayan expeditions setting
out to conquer Himalayan summits this autumn, none of
them succeeded. We were no exception. Pinned down in
our tents by furious winds, the hard won tracks of the
previous days' route filled in by nightly snowfalls,
the expedition members were slowly worn down by exhaustion,
high altitude deterioration and, eventually by the sheer
cold, but we scored several small victories.
Post-monsoon (Autumn) expeditions to Mt. Everest all
follow a simple plan--a plan simple to describe, that
is. The climbers try to stock an intermediate "Advance
Base Camp" (ABC) as fully as possible. Advance
Base Camps are situated as high up the mountain as possible,
but before the climbing becomes too difficult, or "technical",
i.e., requiring ropes to climb. Then, in an anticipated
seasonal 10-day window of calm, clear weather, the climbers
attempt their rush to the summit.
We followed this plan to the letter, stocking our camp
three (C3) with 15 pitched tents, oxygen, ropes, food,
fuel and a powerful team of strong, young climbers.
While we were right on schedule, Mother Nature failed
to follow hers. The 10-day window never arrived. Even
so, the climbers repeatedly broke trail over the same
route in order to stock C-4 and C-5 at 23,000 and 25,
300ft, but it was not to be.
Once stocked, climbers never again were able to reach
C-5. It was during an effort to regain our high point
that 4 Sherpas became stranded at C-4 for two nights
of harrowing storms. At the first sign of clear weather,
they aborted their attempt and began a descent. Although
the exact cause of the avalanche is not entirely clear,
it seems likely that a Sherpa higher up on an 150-ft
long rope started an avalanche that ripped loose his
companion lower down. The sliding Sherpa fell over a
60-ft cliff. His impact created a second avalanche of
large, hard snow blocks. The pummeling of these blocks,
added to by the oxygen bottle in his pack probably broke
his neck, the likely cause of his death.
Our primary goal was to reach the 27,000-ft snow terrace
where we hoped to discover the body of an "English
dead" sighted by a Chinese climber in 1975, and
reported to a Japanese climber in 1979. The day after
the report, the Chinese discoverer died in an avalanche
on the same North Col headwall that killed our Sherpa.
Because of the description given of the body and its
location, it could only be that of Mallory or Irvine,
two British climbers who disappeared on Mt. Everest
in 1924. We hoped the cameras both climbers were known
to be carrying would answer the 62-year old mystery
of whether or not the two climbers reached the top before
they perished.
A second major goal was to search the top of the Second
Step cliff. Here we had hoped to find their empty oxygen
cylinders to confirm that the two climbers did indeed
get that high, and so probably did reach the summit
some three hours farther up, but if we failed to reach
these two major goals, was the expedition a failure?
Strangely not, for the Search for Mallory & Irvine
has taken place on many levels. It was on the literary
level that we discovered facts suggesting that Mallory
& Irvine had a much greater chance of having reached
the summit than their contemporaries were willing to
give them credit for. Here too we discovered the powerful
British prejudice against the use of oxygen breathing
equipment, and how this sentiment would doom the subsequent
pre-WW II expeditions to failure.
Our search has also taken place on the eyewitness level.
Here like so many others, we interviewed the two still-living
1924 expedition members. But their testimony equivocal
has been around for a long time. The most galvanizing
eyewitness testimony has been that of Chinese climber
Wang Hung bao. It is a report that, like nearly every
aspect of the Mallory & Irvine episode, has engendered
heated controversy. Most damaging, the Chinese Mountaineering
Association was caught completely off guard by the report,
a report made by one of its own members to the Climbing
Leader of a Japanese Everest expedition, Ryoten Hasagawa.
More incredible, still, is that Wang died in an avalanche
the day after telling his story to the Japanese climber!
Wang described in detail finding a body at 8100m (27,000
ft) dressed in old-fashioned clothing that "danced
in the wind" when touched. The corpse had a hole
in one cheek. Wang claimed to have discovered the body
during his participation in the very large, and very
successful Chinese Everest expedition of 1975.
The report was immediately attacked by older British
climbers as a delusion, confusion or a fraud, as they
have reflexively attacked every aspect of the Mallory
& Irvine episode that might put the two climbers
on top. But we were convinced by Wang's story that the
body (and camera) of either Mallory or Irvine lay on
the 8100m snow terrace and, given reasonable weather,
that we could search for it and find it.
When we questioned our Chinese Liaison Officer assigned
to the expedition, Mr. Song Zhiyi, (who was a member
of the Chinese expedition of 1975) he admitted he knew
the story well. And he denied its authenticity vigorously.
But his was a reflexive denial, too, and simply reflected
the official view of the Chinese Mountaineering Association.
After many discussions over the months at Base Camp,
Song came around to admitting the faint possibility
that Wang may have found an English body. After all,
he agreed, how could a relative simple man, as Hasagawa
and Song had both described him, dream up so complex
a plot--and be so precisely correct as to the location
the body should be found? Its location reported in 1980
was precisely where I had predicted, in 1971, the body
of Andrew Irvine should lie. Given the still insular
conditions in China in 1980, it was a prediction Wang
could not conceivably have learned about.
More important than Song's change of heart was his
subsequent agreement to introduce us to the group climbing
leader of Wang's assault team, Mr. Chen Tian Lian, now
an official of the Tibetan Mountaineering Association
in Lhasa. Mr. Chen had led the 4-man team including
Wang on an unsuccessful summit attempt. Certainly if
Wang discovered a body, it could have only been while
climbing with Chen and their two other companions. Mr.
Song agreed to introduce us to Chen upon our return
from the mountain through Lhasa.
The five-hour interview of Mr. Chen at the luxurious
Lhasa Hotel started on a depressing note. Mr. Chen began
by stating that as Wang's climbing leader, he had been
with him the entire 4 days the group was at C-5 or higher,
and that he was aware of no body discovered by Wang
during that period. But persistence pays off. It was
only in the final half-hour of our discussion that Mr.
Chen recalled receiving an emergency radio call from
Base Camp ordering him up to the next camp--a hasty
bivouac actually, at 28,000 ft., to search for a missing
Chinese climber. "Did you take Mr. Wang with you
on this climb?" I asked. "No," he replied,
I/I went with one of the Tibetan porters. Wang and his
partner Zhan Jun Yan remained in C-6 for the day."
"So it was possible that if Wang did find a body,
he could have done so on that day, May 5th, without
you knowing about it?" Mr. Chen gazed at me intently
as he though about that question. "Yes," he
answered finally, "It is possible." Our next
assignment was clear. Find Mr. Zhang, living in Peking.
Our Liaison Officer was able to arrange the Zhang meeting,
but only just. We met the evening of our departure to
the US over supper at the Bei-Wei Hotel in Peking. The
interview was unexpectedly short. Yes, Mr. Zhang, had
been left along with Wang on the day that Chen and his
Tibetan companion left on a search & rescue mission.
He, Zhang stayed in his sleeping bag that morning, but
Wang got up and wandered around the snow terrace by
himself. Then came the $64 question: "bid Wang
ever mention finding the body of an English mountaineer?"
"Yes he did," Zhang answered easily. "He
mentioned it to me and to several of our climbing companions
on the way down." So there we had it--confirmation
from an "eyewitness" that Japanese climber
Hasagawa was not deluded, and a direct refutation of
the criticism that Wang must have been lying because
he never told any Chinese about his discovery.
In the sense of this discovery, we did not fail in
our search, we were simply defeated in climbing the
mountain. We did not set foot on the 27,000 ft snow
terrace, yet we were able to scan that territory with
high-powered binoculars and so pin-point the presumed
location of the "foreign mountaineer." This
location is fortunately off any presently used route
up the mountain which means the body will only be rediscovered
by climbers also anxious to solve this great mystery,
climbers committed to continuing the Search for Mallory
& Irvine.
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