When Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top of Everest on 29 May 1953, they became the first people confirmed to have stood there. That word — confirmed — hides one of mountaineering’s great unsolved riddles.
Twenty-nine years earlier, in June 1924, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine were last seen pushing for the summit before clouds swallowed them. Whether they reached the top before they died has haunted climbers ever since. The clue everyone wants is a small Vest Pocket Kodak camera Mallory was thought to be carrying; develop its film, and history might be rewritten.
In 1999 — seventy-five years later — an expedition finally found Mallory’s remarkably preserved body high on the North Face. He had fallen, but the camera was not with him. Irvine’s fate stayed hidden even longer; in 2024, a boot with his name stitched into the sock surfaced from a melting glacier. The camera, and the answer it might hold, is still up there somewhere in the ice.
