Old Carthusian Daniel Light (S94) uncovers the true story of the thrill-seekers, map-makers, soldiers, occultists, artists and porters who paved the way for modern mountaineering.
In September 2024, a National Geographic team discovered a boot on Mount Everest, belonging to Andrew Irvine, who vanished in 1924 while attempting to summit with George Mallory. The find, along with a sock labeled "A.C. Irvine," could solve the mystery of whether they reached the summit first.
It is not the boot itself that makes the image unsettling. It is not the name tag, reading ‘A.C.Irvine’, stitched into the sock. It is the knowledge that they contain what remains of a human foot, belonging to one of two men lost on Mount Everest wearing hobnail boots.
These are the ‘partial remains’ of Andrew ‘Sandy’ Comyn Irvine, photographed where they were found at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier in September of last year.
A century has passed since Irvine was lost trying for the summit of the world’s highest mountain. He and his climbing partner, George Mallory (BH1910-1921), were last seen leaving their highest camp and disappearing into light cloud on a still June day. Mallory taught history at Charterhouse in the years before the two wrote their name into mountaineering legend. Today, he and Irvine are central to the Western mythology of Everest, a mountain Mallory hoped to climb, in his immortal words, because it is there.
In recent years our obsession with Everest has tilted into madness. Queues at the summit are now an annual occurrence, as wealthy thrill-seekers outsource risk to their Sherpa porters and guides, those whose livelihoods too often come at the expense of their lives. Every year the body count grows. Over 340 people have died trying to reach Everest’s summit, with approximately 200 bodies still on the mountain. One, an Indian climber nicknamed ‘Green Boots’, has become a ghoulish milestone on the northeast ridge. Another, in clothes of a different era, is Mallory himself. Discovered twenty-five years ago by members of the 1999 Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition, he was found face down below the mountain’s north ridge, his body tangled in rope, his leg broken.
Now, facing the possibility that more of Sandy Irvine’s remains will be found at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier, we should address the most urgent question such discoveries raise. Not of how he and George Mallory perished, but of how they live on. The two deserve better than to be synonymous with one over-commercialised mountain. Athletes and aesthetes, they strove for the extremity of human experience. We should celebrate them for what they stood for, not for where they fell.
Meanwhile, where Everest is concerned, might it be time to think a little bigger? In Daniel Light’s (S94) latest book, The White Ladder, he documents a century of Himalayan mountaineering before the British first set foot on Everest. For all that time, Europeans were going to new heights on record-breaking peaks. In a range of so many extraordinary mountains, perhaps the time has come to stop fixating on the summit of one.
