The video explores the ongoing mystery surrounding the early expeditions of Mount Everest, focusing on the legendary figures of George Mallory and Sandy Irvin. It delves into the history of their mysterious disappearance during an attempt to reach the summit in 1924, highlighting efforts made to uncover evidence that they may have been the first to achieve this feat. The video narrative combines historical exploration with present-day expeditions to solve this long-standing mystery, revealing the deep allure and danger posed by Mount Everest.

The mystery of Mallory and Irvin captures the imagination of modern-day explorers who continue to pursue tantalizing clues in the hopes of rewriting history. Various expeditions have been launched over the years with new technologies like drones being employed to locate the elusive camera believed to hold photographic proof of their ascent. Interviews with Everest historians and footage of treacherous climbing conditions further illustrate the challenges faced by those seeking to unveil the truth.

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. summit [ˈsʌmɪt] - (noun) - The highest point or peak of a mountain. - Synonyms: (peak, pinnacle, top)

Droves of climbers waiting for their chance to summit Mount Everest with a large number of people.

2. death zone [dɛθ zoʊn] - (noun) - The altitude at which there is not enough oxygen for humans to breathe effectively. - Synonyms: (danger zone, critical area, oxygen-deficient)

The longer wait means climbers are spending more time in what's called the death zone.

3. mummified [ˈmʌmɪfaɪd] - (adjective) - Preserved by drying out and preventing decay, often used for bodies. - Synonyms: (dried, preserved, embalmed)

His body appears to be mummified.

4. vespocket camera [vɛsˈpɑːkɪt ˈkæmərə] - (noun) - A small Kodak camera that may hold historical photographic evidence of an ascent. - Synonyms: (Kodak camera, pocket camera, film camera)

Our goal was finding the Kodak VPK, or vespocket camera they're believed to have carried with them on that final day.

5. abyss [əˈbɪs] - (noun) - A deep or seemingly bottomless chasm. - Synonyms: (chasm, void, gulf)

If my crampons skated off, I would just fall into the abyss.

6. corroborated [kəˈrɒbəreɪtɪd] - (verb) - Supported or confirmed by evidence or authority. - Synonyms: (confirmed, verified, substantiated)

I think it's corroborated by Shearing Dorje in 1995.

7. detrimental [ˌdɛtrɪˈmɛntl] - (adjective) - Causing harm or damage. - Synonyms: (harmful, damaging, injurious)

And if you fall asleep one too many times, you never wake up again. It is 1030.

8. compulsion [kəmˈpʌlʃən] - (noun) - An irresistible urge to behave in a certain way. - Synonyms: (urge, impulse, drive)

Climbing an adventure and exploration for me is kind of like a compulsion.

9. grisly [ˈɡrɪzli] - (adjective) - Causing horror or disgust. - Synonyms: (horrific, ghastly, gruesome)

And as evidence of that, you see dead bodies.

10. puja [ˈpuːdʒə] - (noun) - A Hindu or Buddhist ceremony of prayer and offering. - Synonyms: (ritual, ceremony, prayer)

Today's a big day. We're doing our pujat, which is a ceremony that the Sherpas do to ask for permission and good luck to climb the mountainous.

Behind The First Summit of The World's Tallest Mountain (Full Episode) - Lost on Everest

It's the traffic jam atop the world. Droves of climbers waiting for their chance to summit Mount Everest with a large number of people. The longer wait means climbers are spending more time in what's called the death zone. The second American dying in just days, bringing the total to eleven deaths already this season.

Locals view Everest essentially as a God. And by climbing the mountain, you're stepping on the heads of their gods. I've never been an Everest person. The definition of adventure for me is an endeavor where the outcome is totally unknown. The Mallory and Irvin mystery is one of those stories like, you can't imagine, an endeavor with more unknowns than what they were facing in the 1920s. Climbing to the highest point on earth, I think in those days wasn't too much different from the idea of going to the moon.

George Mallory pioneered the first expeditions to ever. The world was shocked when he and his climbing partner, Sandy Irvin, disappeared. They were spotted just 800 vertical feet from the summit and were never seen again. The essence of the Mallory and Irvin story for me is the spirit of the climbers themselves. What was driving them? What happened to those guys? Not just solving the mystery of two guys who disappeared, it's solving the mystery to try to figure out if they might have been the first to summit the greatest mountain in the world.

Back in 1999, I had the opportunity to go look for the bodies of George Mallory and Sandy Irvin. Our goal was finding the Kodak VPK, or vespocket camera they're believed to have carried with them on that final day. The hope is that the film inside it will prove if they actually made it to the summit.

On the very first day of searching, we found a body. His body appears to be mummified. There's rope around his waist. You can see a boot. Eric, wait. This is George Mallory. Really? George Mallory. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. See that, George, now. Oh, my God. He was face down in the surface. His face was completely in. And his hands were like this around, especially around the left part of his waist. It looked like the rope really pulled tightly.

Like you could actually see the rope kind of imprinted into the side of his waist below his right knee. His leg was broken completely in half, and it was an open wound fraction. And up there, an injury like that is, there's no way you're getting out of it. And I can remember how overwhelming it was to be in the presence of this guy, this man, this icon of exploration. But we had a job to do. We wanted to try and tell his story.

So we searched the body as carefully as we could. We found some personal effects. But the most important thing that was not with Mallory was, of course, the camera burying George Mallory. We didn't find a camera. We looked fairly hard. Since then, people have speculated, and I think this is logical, that Irvin had the camera. Mallory was the leader, so it would have made sense for Irvin, you know, as his almost like assistant, to be the one taking pictures of the, you know, the boss.

Can you imagine that camera? It's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If we find that camera, let me tell you something, it's gonna just change things. It's gonna be the greatest event in the history of mountaineering. History books say the first climbers to summit Mount Everest were Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953. If Irvin took a photo on the summit in 1924, it would rewrite history. He's out there somewhere. The camera exists. It's there. It just has to be found.

We're on our way to go see Tom Holzel, who is an Everest historian. He has more knowledge about this than anyone alive. And he just contacted Tom the other day and said that he had GPS coordinates for the location of Nirvin. He did the first expedition to try to find these guys in 1986, but there was too much snow on the mountain, so they got shut down. And when they eventually found Mallory in 99, he was very close to where Hosel had thought that he would be.

It's interesting to see when you have an assembly of facts. Can you figure out what happened? Can you get to the conclusion? I think you can. That's what is so interesting about history. Mallory and Irvin went missing on June 8, 1924. In 1960, the Chinese made their first attempt from the north side and one of the climbers climbed down a more direct route and he said he saw a dead British climber.

A British. How do you know that? He was wearing braces. Braces are suspenders. All the English wore braces, so that was a fantastic clue. And then in 1995, a Sherpa named Turing Dorje also took a more direct route and also saw a body. So we have now two eyewitness accounts. That means there is a body there. So that's when I went to Brad Washburn at the Museum of Science and said, Brad, do we have any good aerial photographs?

He says, Tom, you've come to the right place. They flew over Everest in a Learjet at 40,000ft and did extensive mapping photographs and they seamed them together and I made this eight foot picture. You can see the two trails where they diverge, and there's only a very short area where the more direct, the lower route passes by these slots. So if he's in a slot, and we know he is because two people say he is, there's only one place where Irvin can be.

This is what you've come up with? Yep. Tom and I are proposing to be your boots on the ground. Yep. What are you. Given the odds that he's actually there, he can't not be there. You're saying he can't not be there? Wow. He has worked for years on identifying the exact location of that spot, and he swears if we go there, we will find Sandy. Irfan, you're no way. Oh, my God.

Climbing an adventure and exploration for me is kind of like a compulsion. I've been on a lot of expeditions in my life, and it's just something that you. That you feel where it feels right. Tom Pollard is an old friend of mine, and I said to Tom, this is a story that needs to be told. This is the trip that you and I were always meant to take together.

Ever since that day in May of 1999, this thing has just become part of the fabric of who I am. Here we are, 20 years later. I'm finally getting back to have another look around to try to wrap things up. Mark has specifically avoided Everest in his career because Everest isn't true exploration. And I think this mystery is his way of connecting with Everest. He's the chief detective. I have no idea what it will be like up there.

I've never done anything like this, but I know what it will be like for me will be similar to what it was like for them 100 years ago. We can actually see what that expedition was like for them. Back in 1924, team member John Newell brought a film camera all the way to Everest, and he captured incredible footage of the entire expedition. We're going to go just like they did, through the mountains on the south side of the Himalaya, across the border onto the north side of China, up into the Tibetan plateau.

The focus is on the urban location and finding the body, but it's the whole journey to get there and seeing the places that they were and putting myself into some of the exact positions that they were in makes this so compelling for me. I've pictured finding Sandy Irvin many, many times. His mom and dad left their back door open and unlocked for three years just in case he came home. And I feel like if I could go and find Sandy, Irvin, they could lock their door.

Let's take all the gear out of the vehicle. We can drop it in the dining tent. Jamie is the guide. He's summited Mount Everest five times. His primary job, apart from logistics and getting us from point a to point b, is to make sure that we come home from this expedition. In terms of what it's like to search high on Mount Everest for a body, I have no idea. That's one of the reasons why I'm so enthralled with this expedition, because I just have this singular focus which is Mallory and Irvin, Mount Everest and following in their footsteps and there's kind of nothing else.

Mallory and Irvin were last seen climbing a rock face just below the summit. Climbing that high has to be done in stages by hiking along a glacier from base camp to advanced base camp, then climbing to the top of a ridge called the North Col. From there, it's a final two day push up the ridge all the way to the summit. Today's a big day. We're doing our pujat, which is a ceremony that the Sherpas do to ask for permission and good luck to climb the mountainous.

We just crested 18,000ft, so we've gained about 1000ft from base camp. This is another milestone in the journey final push. Oh, wow. It's been a great day, but I think everyone's hurting a little. The last push is hard. Climbing Mount Everest has to do with cardiovascular fitness, how the physiology of your body actually handles the altitude. You can be one of the strongest climbers in the world, but your physiology just doesn't work for Mount Everest. It's a slow, cold, agonizing process.

It slams you. What I want to do right now is I want to chart out where we're going, going to go, and then the point at which we're going to fix our rope and rappel down to Hosel's spot. Okay, here's the second step. And then this is the Hosel shujing area, so we have to go to this spot. Our search zone is high on the mountain in an area known as the death zone. Our time at that altitude will be extremely limited.

The plan is to follow Mallory and Irvin's route to the summit, then traverse back across the ridge to find Tom Hozell's spot and go off rope, searching across a steep slope of loose rock with a 7000 foot drop below. The sun's just hittain. We're moving out of ABC to the north. Cold. I know I'm not dying because I desire coffee so badly. It's pretty important to note that Everest doesn't get climbed alone. We've got all of our sherpas taking all of our advanced camera loads and all of the little things we need to survive the north Col. Off we go.

Not sure how it's gonna go, but a lot of vert to climb 2000ft. We just started up the technical part to the north Col. I can't believe the Congo line. There must be 200 people up there. It's a little scary. If you look above us there's a giant serac just waiting to cut loose in the hot sun. Like textbook. You don't want to be under. Let's move.

That was burly. My lungs are not feeling great. We're all just hurting. Just trying to acclimatize. It's just a lot. It was a suffer fest. We were all suffering. And the 100 miles an hour death winds were coming. Charts of the jet stream passing right through the summit. That does not look good. Broken tent when we woke up in the morning.

Poked my head out the door of the tent, looked up at the north face which had been beautiful. That was now replaced with this nasty swirling cloud. Holy crap. They're done. You want to come in here? Is everyone okay? It threw a tent into the air and nearly killed a few people. I'm glad they were clipped into fixed lines because it threw them off the ridge and they were just hanging limp halfway down the face. Pretty windy now, but not nearly as bad.

So I'm going next door's gonna launch the drone, see what happens. We can search a thousand more just through this technological advancement of what the drones are capable of. It was kind of our vision to do all these drone flights and to photograph the terrain rather than having to put boots all over the mountain, which is incredibly dangerous. This is good. We're cranking. It's unbelievable what you're doing.

Renonite. Take a photo here. Yeah. And then should I go in a little tighter? If you can. It's gonna get right in there this time. It's gonna really push it. Oh, my God. Dude. You're fricking right there. You're so there. Yep. Get that ledge and up in here. Got my thumb workout.

Elzell would be losing his mind if he could see this right now. All right, I'm gonna come home. Bring her home. You just flew a drone to 28,300ft on Mount Everest. No one's ever done that before. You're in uncharted territory. Okay. First hand view drone. Pov yeah. This zone right in here, this is where I want to go on foot.

Okay, let's talk a little strategy quickly in terms of what we should do for the next few days with our weather forecasts. We go to ABC. It's hard work going down, but we recover so well with Everest, with Chomalongma, it's not a question of when we're ready. It's a question of when she's ready for us. Oh, wow. The conga line at the top. Holy. There's only a few days a year suitable for a summit climb.

And there was an early weather window, and there was, I don't know, something like 2300 people trying to climb Mount Everest from the north. Every single one of them went for the first weather window. Wow, that's really inspiring to see that. That's incredible. Do you wish you were there with them? Yes.

Let's be real. I do. I mean, I'm not gonna lie. It feels weird to be sitting here while all the action is going on up high. There are queues of people, lines and lines of people. Jamie said to us, you know what? This is a bad idea. I got a bad feeling about it. There's gonna be huge lines, and we're gonna get entangled up in the whole thing, and it's gonna be a mess. It's gonna be a show.

When you're sitting at home and you're looking at the photos on CNN and you just think, ah, what a bunch of selfish jerks. But when you're here, you realize that there's actually something kind of special going on here. The spirit that's driving those people is, I think, the same spirit that was driving Mallory and Irvin. We want to solve the mystery, but this mountain is pretty alluring.

We were waiting in advance base camp for the crowds to clear. And the day before we were set to leave, we went for a little hike around camp. And on the way back, Tom had some kind of bizarre neurologic episode. Tom, what's going on? Getting my blood pressure taken. I had this just before I popped into my tent. Had this really, this tingling kind of almost pleasant, believe it or not, feeling here in my cheek. And it moved kind of up into my eye area.

Throughout the expedition, I've been communicating with Doctor Peter Hackett. You know, he's a high altitude doctor, and I told him about Tom's symptoms. He said, that doesn't sound good. You know, it's possible that he had a TIA, which I think stands for trans ischemic attack. It's kind of miniature stroke. Numbness can occur from diamocs, but not trouble moving lips. So you definitely had trouble moving your lips. Yeah. He probably shouldn't go up because a chance. This is a TIA. If it was a TIA, you don't want to go up. No one would go up because.

Yeah, then you're. You could have a stroke and die. Yeah, it's dreamland, you know, to try to find Sandy Irvin and try to solve this mystery. It's over. Oh, my God. That's the hardest thing in the world, watching your blood brothers go onward. Five minutes later, we were on our way up the trail without him. This was the final push up the mountain. I think we all understood that if we made a misstep, the entire endeavor could just go off the rails.

It was grueling. It's incredibly tedious. The altitude is kicking your ass. Imagine what that must have been like in 1924, back in the day when it wasn't festooned with fixed ropes like it is now. I can't believe those guys did this. Aero modern gear to be dressed the way that they were in Tweed and Burberry and all these layers of silk and with their bomber caps and their little goggles and their leather hobnail boots and their hundred foot manila rope that was that thick.

It's mind boggling. Start moving up from camp, too, and it's windy enough that it's not comfortable. You can't just, like, hang out. You get cold, even with a down suit. Pretty scary snowstorm above 8000 meters. This is the spot where Odell had his last sighting of Mallory and Irvin. And it's kind of fitting that's a snow squall because it. It was squalling and then it lifted out and he turned the corner here and had that famous sighting. Team member Noel Odell was the last person to see Mallory and Irvin.

He describes them high on the ridge going for the summit, and then the mist came over and engulfed them, and they were never to be seen again. Everybody's been disputing since 1924 about Noel Odell's sighting of the two climbers. He saw them surmounting a rock step, and the question is whether it was the first step or the second step. The idea is that if they were that far along and that if Odell saw them surmounting the second step, that they probably could have made it to the summit, because it's the crux of the whole route.

If Odell says he saw them over the second step, I'm pretty sure nothing would stop them going to the summit. We have about 6 hours of relaxing. How do you feel about going to Ozell spot? I'm trying to recover so that I can do so. To be honest, I feel less confident than I did before. God, it's freaking hard getting up here. 8300 meters. It hurts. The death zone is correctly named. There's nothing dramatic about it. It's just the truth. You can't eat enough, you can't sleep enough, you can't drink enough.

Your body is literally wasting away up there. And if you fall asleep one too many times, you never wake up again. It is 1030. We just slept in some abandoned tents up here in the death zone. Scrounged some random food. And against all odds, we're launching to try to solve this mystery. We were working our way up to the summit and how are we gonna have the energy to do this? I mean, we'll be lucky if we even make it to the top.

We get to the first step, you know, it's pitch black. It's like a 60 foot high vertical cliff. I'm like, holy. This is the first step. What the hell is the second step like? I think we all underestimated how hard Everest in the climb was going to be. I just see Mark climbing up the ladder and I had a little panic. The regulator on the top of the oxygen bottle which feeds the oxygen down the hose crack.

And there's dead bodies on either side. One of them from a couple weeks ago. That's spooky. It's horrifying. Are we, huh? Yeah, I just lost some crash again. You did? Yeah. You run out of oxygen, you become one of the dead guys lining the side of the route. But one thing you realize quickly when you're up there is that it's kind of every man for himself. I mean, I was barely even alive myself, so I couldn't really do anything for anybody else.

The severity of the whole situation really hit home. And from that point on, I had the hardest climb of my life. Third step. How you feeling? Hammered. Couldn't have picked a better day. Incredible. There was no one on the mountain except for us. We had the entire peak to ourself and it was an absolutely perfect day. That was something really special to feel the power and the energy of the tallest place on earth. The same power that drew Mallory and Irvin.

After that last sighting by Odell, Mallory and Irvin were never seen again. Odell led a search party up to their high camp, and after two days, they marked a signal in the snow it was a black cross made out of sleeping bags. Whether they made it to the top or not, they probably died on the way back down. We went for the summit and now we're trying to make it down safely. Yet to be determined. If we go searching for Irvine.

Personally, I barely made it. And I just hope to have a safe descent at this point. Let's keep going. We're on the summit of Mount Everest. We're supposed to descend and on the way down go off the routes and go out exploring solo across the yellow band. And I thought to myself, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna find Hosel's spot. I'm gonna find Sandy Irvin. I'm gonna find the camera. I showed them where I think it is and I hope they follow that advice and find it. To me, it's been a science project.

And the nice thing about a science project is at the end you prove your theory or you disprove it. But, hey, they're the explorers, not me. We're getting closer and I'm thinking, okay, when and if I find this spot, am I really going to be able to do this? I was smoked. More tired than I'd ever been in my life. You have to be able to move under your own power. And if you can't, that's it. Then you're gonna die.

And as evidence of that, you see dead bodies. I could see Mark's brain thinking when we stopped at Mushroom rock with our backs against a frozen body. I'm looking at the GPS, and I'm trying to collate things in my mind, like, where am I? And trying to get oriented. And one of the distinguishing features, unfortunately, was a dead body of this Japanese climber that we had spotted when we were looking at the drone footage. And then I looked down, and all of a sudden I could see it. There's Hosel's spot. Yeah, I want to do it. This is the accident.

And it was the moment of truth. I was off the rope, and it was very clear that it was not something that they had wanted me to do. Just an absolute emotional rollercoaster, determination. I gotta do this. I have so much into this. And then self preservation, dude, you have four kids. Like, this is not worth it. It's not worth risking your life. Finally, I just said it. I'm going for it. He cast off into the unknown, and neither Matt Nordhead. I had the wherewithal to follow him.

I was on the edge of my seat, wondering what the answer to the mystery is going to be. As I started dropping elevation and traversing on these ledges. I realized that I was very close to where Mallory might have fallen and where Irvin might have fallen. And there were small where, if my crampons skated off, I would just fall into the abyss. As I was going, I was looking into these slots because the two eyewitness accounts said that they saw the body in a slot of rock. As I came to the various slots, I was five foot above the drop, where, if I slipped and fell, I would essentially suffer the same fate as Mallory.

I didn't see anything, and that was it. I went to Hosel's spot. There was nothing there. I went against the Sherpas, which I feel really bad about. I almost didn't go, but I spent so much time studying that spot, I just had to go there. Even after going to the summit, I seriously, this is the hardest day that I've ever had in my life. I had to get boots on the ground to either prove or disprove Ozal's theory. I think that's ultimately our. Our contribution to this mystery.

And I think that Irvin was there in 1960. I think it's corroborated by Shearing Dorje in 1995. And I think sometime between then and now, Ervin and the camera went to the bottom of the north face, and I don't think there's a chance in hell of anyone ever finding it. Cause I looked down there and I saw the size of the crevasses and just the way that the sweep of the avalanches would just flush things down into the abyss. Never gonna, never gonna find them down there.

This was the most frantic, intense, dangerous thing that I've ever done in my life. We gave it absolutely everything that we had. And the mystery remains. People who don't really know about this mountain are very quick to criticize it. What happens when people set their focus on this mountain is that the people become driven by ambition. And ambition is a really tricky thing, because sometimes it will cause us to cross over this line that can bring us to the point of no return, which is exactly what happened to George Mallory and Sandy Irvin.

We all have sort of an imaginary fence that we draw as far as how much risk we're willing to take. And I think for a father of four, I stepped over onto the wrong side of the fence on this trip. What I hope people will understand is that everybody that's here, that's trying to climb Everest, they're embodying the same spirit of Mallory and Irvin. What they did is unimaginable. The sheer grid it took to climb that high and into the unknown at that point in time. And the odds of them making it to the summit and being the first to stand on top of Troma, Longma, Everest, I don't know, man. That's the story that keeps us coming back.

Adventure, Exploration, Mount Everest, Inspiration, Science, Technology, National Geographic