How Mount Everest killed George Mallory
George Mallory bookended the twentieth century history of Everest with his pioneering attempts in the 1920s to climb the mountain — and with the spectacular discovery, in 1999, of his body high up on the North Face, preserved by the ice for seventy-five years after he had failed to do so. His flip remark to a journalist that he was climbing Everest “because it was there” became mountaineering’s most celebrated quote, while masking other less noble reasons.
George Mallory bookended the twentieth century history of Everest with his pioneering attempts in the 1920s to climb the mountain — and with the spectacular discovery, in 1999, of his body high up on the North Face, preserved by the ice for seventy-five years after he had failed to do so. His flip remark to a journalist that he was climbing Everest “because it was there” became mountaineering’s most celebrated quote, while masking other less noble reasons.
Mick Conefrey has become one of our finest gazetteers of the Himalaya, with successive books on K2, Kangchenjunga and later exploits on Everest. Now he turns his attention to a great conundrum of mountaineering history. Did Mallory reach the summit before dying — along with the moral question it prompts: should he have even tried, with imperfect oxygen equipment, given that he was putting not only his own life at risk but that of his much younger companion, Sandy Irvine, only twenty-two and fresh out of Oxford?
