Authors: Conrad Anker,David Roberts
They did have hobnails on their boots. Mallory’s right boot, which Andy and Thom retrieved, had tiny V-shaped metal wedges imbedded in the sole, sticking out maybe a quarter of an inch. I’ve never worn hobnailed boots, and I’d like to try out a pair on the kind of terrain Mallory and Irvine crossed up high. My guess, though, is that hobnails could give a good purchase on the shaley rock on Everest, and that you’d get a little more traction on snow than you get in a modern pair of heavy mountain boots with rubber soles, but that on hard ice you wouldn’t get a proper bite. Mallory was extremely fast and skillful at chopping steps, but the best step-chopper in the world is going to go many times slower, and use much more energy, than a guy just stomping up the ice in modern crampons. I never took my crampons off throughout the whole summit day. They’re not as good as rubber soles on rock, but they’re so much better on ice and snow that the trade-off was well worth it.
Another very important difference between now and 1924 is fixed ropes, which offer several advantages to modern climbers. First, they indicate where the route goes. To find our way through the Yellow Band in the predawn darkness on May
17, we simply looked for the fixed ropes. Mallory and Irvine, instead, would have had to route-find on their own, both up and down.
Second, a fixed rope makes a huge difference in support. You can just wrap it around your arm, give it a tug every other step or so, or slide down it on the descent. It’s like the difference between riding a subway standing in a moving car and standing there holding the subway strap. On the steepest sections, like the three Steps on the summit ridge, we rappelled fixed lines to get down. That’s infinitely easier and safer than down-climbing those pitches.
The improvement in technical gear since 1924 has been astronomical. Mallory and Irvine were tied together with a cotton rope about three eighths of an inch in diameter or less. It’s hard to calculate, but with knots tied in the rope, and if it was wet, the breaking strength might have been as little as 500 pounds. The breaking strength of the relatively light nylon rope I led the Second Step with was over 3,500 pounds. Also, nylon stretches to absorb impact, but cotton doesn’t. In the two previous accidents in Mallory’s career that were very close calls, it was something of a miracle that the rope didn’t break. On the Nesthorn in 1909, when he fell forty feet free, Geoffrey Winthrop Young expected the rope to break. And when Mallory held his three falling comrades on the snow slope in 1922 with his extraordinary ice axe belay, as he later wrote of such predicaments, “In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred either the belay will give or the rope will break.”
On the Continent in the 1920s, climbers were using pitons to protect their leads, but not in Britain, where for decades thereafter purists sneered at what they called “ironmongery.” There is no evidence that the 1924 expedition had any metal pitons, piton hammers, or even carabiners among their gear. (Unfortunately, in
The Fight for Everest
no equipment list was published.) The book mentions “wooden pitons” being used to fix ropes below the North Col, but as there is no rock on the East Rongbuk there, my guess is that what they were using were long pickets made of wood. These would have been of no use up high.
All this means that the Second Step would have been an utterly terrifying proposition in 1924. Irvine would have had to
stand belaying at the base of the final cliff, unanchored to the mountain. Had Mallory fallen anywhere while climbing up the overhanging crack, both men would most likely have been ripped off the Step and flung headlong into a fatal fall.
We know from Mallory’s note that he forgot his compass at Camp V. That probably didn’t matter so much, unless they were caught in a whiteout, but Odell’s description of the weather on June 8 makes that sound improbable. And we know from the 1933 discovery of Mallory’s flashlight in Camp VI that he forgot that too on his summit day. Most likely he also forgot to take the magnesium flares to be used in an emergency, for Odell saw one or two of them in the tent at VI. The absence of the flashlight could have had serious consequences if the two men were descending in the dark.
In 1924, not only were the oxygen cylinders leaky, the whole apparatus flawed (to Irvine’s constant despair), but the rig was much heavier than what we carried. Our outfit weighed fourteen pounds, Mallory’s over thirty. In that last note to Odell, he comments on the burden—“it’s a bloody load for climbing.” That weight would have slowed down the fittest climber. In addition, each of our bottles gave two to three times as much oxygen as the 1924 cylinders.
Finally, in terms of clothing: Mallory had on leather single boots, two pairs of stockings Ruth had knitted for him, long underwear, knickers, and puttees—picture an Ace bandage wrapped around the ankle and calf to keep out snow. On his upper body, he had seven or eight layers of silk, cotton, and wool. On his head, what looked like a pilot’s cap with a fur lining.
In contrast, the day I went for the top I had on two layers of fleece, a synthethic wind parka, and a full down suit with a wind-resistant surface. On my head, a knit hat and the built-in down hood on my jacket. On my feet, thick nylon boots insulated with closed-cell foam, with gaiters built in to keep snow out of the ankles. The suit alone provides three to four inches of insulation, which is a lot more than all seven or eight of Mallory’s layers combined. Yet even with my snazzy state- of-the-art clothing, I’d get very cold when I had to stop and wait for any length of time.
Another important consideration is how well hydrated
Mallory and Irvine were when they set out on June 8. We know from Mallory’s note to Odell that “our Unna Cooker rolled down the slope at the last moment.” The latest that note could have been written was the afternoon of June 7, because the Sherpas carried the note down to Camp V that day. Unless Mallory and Irvine had heated snow to fill their Thermoses with water for the climb the next day even before cooking dinner, the loss of the stove would have meant they had no water and couldn’t properly hydrate. They might have tried to fill the Thermoses with snow and melt it with body heat in the night, but that’s a desperate emergency measure. On Annapurna IV I was stuck in a snow cave for five days and tried that technique with a water bottle. It was horrid: I filled the bottle with snow and kept it between my legs all evening, but managed to melt only a cupful of water. The procedure costs you more in heat loss than you gain in energy from the liquid.
So if they set out on the morning of June 8 already dehydrated, that would have taken a drastic toll. On top of this, Irvine was terribly sunburned, and sunburn dehydrates you further.
Another argument against their having made the summit has to do with rates of ascent. I’m convinced that the fact that Mallory forgot his flashlight indicates that they set out at or after sunrise. You don’t forget your flashlight if you leave while it’s still dark. So far as I can determine, nobody in either 1922 or 1924 ever got off from a high camp before 6:30 in the morning. By contrast the six of us set out at 2:30
A.M.
on May 17.
In
First on Everest: The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine
, Tom Holzel calculates a theoretical rate of ascent for the two men of 204 vertical feet per hour. This forms a crucial part of his argument that Mallory could have made the top. It took Dave and me twelve hours and twenty minutes to go from Camp VI to the summit. That’s averaging only 165 vertical feet per hour. Dave and I are relatively rapid climbers, he’d been to the top before, and we had the tremendous advantage over Mallory and Irvine of crampons and fixed ropes. I find it hard to believe they could have climbed significantly faster than we did along the northeast ridge.
All of these considerations add up to a strong case in my mind that Mallory and Irvine did not summit on June 8, 1924. But the clincher for me is the Second Step.
First of all, it’s worth pointing out that on the northeast ridge, there’s no alternative to climbing the Second Step where the Chinese tied their ladder. On the prow of the ridge, the rock is completely rotten and vertical. On the left, over the Kangshung Face, there’s just snow with the consistency of whipped cream plastered onto very steep ice. It’s probably unclimbable today, even with ice tools and crampon front-points, and there was certainly no hope of climbing it in 1924 in the traditional style of chopping steps. To the right of the ladder, the rock just gets steeper and steeper. You could traverse far beneath the ridge and get into the Great Couloir, as Norton did on June 4, and so avoid the Second Step. But once you’re above the Yellow Band, to traverse into the Great Couloir could actually be more difficult and demanding than to climb the Second Step.
Let’s imagine that Mallory and Irvine could have gotten up the bottom half of the Second Step. I’d rate the moves there as about 5.5, which Mallory could have done. But then Irvine would have had to stand at the top of the snow triangle, where Dave tied in to the ladder, and try to get some sort of stance without an anchor. He would have belayed Mallory with that flimsy cotton rope wrapped around his waist, exactly as Geoffrey Winthrop Young belayed Mallory on the Nesthorn. Mallory would have had to climb the slightly overhanging fifteen-foot crack without a single piece of protection. The cam I was able to place under the chockstone some fifteen feet up was the only possible protection, and that type of gear wasn’t invented until the late 1970s.
Even with a secure belay, a cam for protection, a good nylon rope, and a rest on the ladder rung I stepped on, I found the pitch desperately hard. By the 1920s, a few climbs as hard as 5.10 on lowland European crags like the Elbsandsteingebirge near Dresden had been done, by wizards way ahead of their time, using pitons or ring bolts or rope loops tied through holes in the rocks. But not by Britons in Wales: at the time, the hardest pitches in Great Britain were probably at the 5.7 to 5.8 level. That sort of pitch is an entirely different proposition at 28,230 feet on Everest.
Incidentally, I’m convinced—as Reinhold Messner is too—that the Chinese did not climb the Second Step in 1960. It’s unfathomable to think of taking off your boots and trying the cliff
in stocking feet there. It’s too convenient that reaching the top in the dark explains the team’s failure to bring back summit photos. And I suspect that reporting the crux of the cliff at the Second Step as only three meters high, when in truth it’s a good twenty-five feet, was a concoction to make it plausible that it could have been surmounted by a shoulder stand.
Even if Mallory and Irvine had miraculously climbed the Second Step, they would have been stranded above it. Few climbing ropes at the time were longer than 100 feet. Had they doubled the rope around the anchoring boulder at the top and rappelled the Step, the rope would never have reached. Nor would they have been able to pull the rope down from below, because the boulder sits so far back on the shelf that the friction would have been prohibitive. An alternative would have been to tie the rope to the boulder, rappel it single-strand, and leave the rope there. But no one since has ever found any trace of an anchor or a rope from 1924 above the Second Step.
Even if I had successfully free-climbed the Step, there’s no way I could have down-climbed it. Some people have wondered whether Mallory and Irvine might have fallen to their deaths trying to do just that. But if they’d come off there, they would have fallen all the way to the Rongbuk Glacier.
There’s one possible loophole in this matter. If 1924 was an unusually heavy year for snow, it’s conceivable that a snow cone could have drifted in, covering the vertical cliffs of the Second Step, in which case Mallory and Irvine could have just walked up the cone. During May that year, the expedition was hit by one storm after another. But on the north face, snow doesn’t stay long—it tends to get quickly blown off. In the few photos I’ve seen from 1924, even from far below you can see the thin black band of the upper Second Step. The only expedition in recent years to report anything like a snow cone here was that of the Catalans in 1985, but they came to Everest in the autumn season, after the monsoon. Even they had to climb the top four or five rungs of the ladder.
In my heart, I’ve always wanted to believe Mallory and Irvine could have climbed the mountain in 1924. It would have made for one of the ultimate of all mountaineering tales. It makes me sad to be on the skeptical, debunking side of the debate, but for all the reasons I’ve laid out above, I believe there is
no possible way Mallory and Irvine could have reached the summit.
W
HAT DO
I
THINK
happened, then, on June 8, 1924?
Imagine Mallory and Irvine at Camp VI that morning, looking toward the summit. For Mallory, this was the mountain of his dreams. He was the only man who’d tried Everest on three expeditions; now, after a month of defeat, he had one last chance. He had the resources and the weather to give it a good shot.
But the pair of men were tired from the tough two-day climb up from the North Col. Irvine had terrible sunburn, his lips cracked, pieces of his skin peeling off whenever his face rubbed against anything. Probably their eyes were sore, from the grit and sun—even with modern goggles, I pick up that irritation at high altitude. By evening, my eyes are red and feel very scratchy. The sun adds a significant debilitating factor to any effort at altitude, one too often underestimated.
It’s possible they used oxygen to sleep, but I’d guess they saved it for the climb. Without oxygen, it’s difficult to sleep at that altitude. You develop a cyclic breathing pattern—fast and shallow breaths alternating with no breaths at all—which wakes you up again and again. It’s an autonomic reaction of the body to lack of oxygen. So I’d guess they went to bed early, but just tossed and turned most of the night.
And maybe in the morning, Irvine made desperate last-minute repairs to the oxygen apparatus. I don’t buy Odell’s notion that he might have just been puttering, “invent[ing] some problem to be solved even if it never really had turned up.” Oxygen problems could have delayed their getting off in the morning. And again, it seems certain that it was light when they left, because Mallory forgot his flashlight.