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I’ve been watching this excellent show on Discovery chronicling the NASA space flight missions.  It sparked my interest in the Mercury 7 and subsequent Apollo missions and compelled me to do a bit of reading.  I quickly began to see parallels between the ill-fated Everest climb of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine and the fatal Apollo 1 tragedy that took the lives of astronauts Roger Chaffee, Ed White, and Gus Grissom.

I further drew more distinct parallels between Gus Grissom and George Mallory.  I’ve written about the Mallory and Irvine tragedy in detail but I’ll summarize again here.  George Mallory died in 1924, along with his young climbing partner Andrew Irvine, attempting to be the first to reach the peak of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.  There is much speculation they made it to the top but died on the descent; however, the generally acknowledged opinion is that they died on the ascent, having never reached the top.  Part of why their story is famous is because of the possibility they might have actually reached the top first (a missing camera might hold photographic proof).  The pair, particularly George Mallory …read more »

On June 8, 1924 British mountain climber George Mallory, along with his young climbing partner Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, disappeared during their attempt to be the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Twenty nine years later Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay successfully conquered the summit of Everest and are considered to be the first to have scaled the peak of the world’s tallest mountain.

There is, however, rampant speculation that George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were actually the first to reach the summit, although no conclusive evidence has been discovered to prove it. They carried with them a camera that some believe might hold the proof of their ascent to the top of the world but it has yet to be recovered. This story remains to this day one of mountaineering’s greatest mysteries, still hotly debated amongst mountaineering circles some eighty years later.

An expedition was mounted in 1999 to search for Mallory and Irvine’s remains and to hopefully recover the camera that might solve this mystery. They were unable to locate Irvine’s body but they did locate George Mallory. He was discovered face down at about 27,500 feet on the North Face of Everest. He’d fallen at some point during the descent, severely breaking his right leg in two places, injuring his shoulder, and suffering what appeared to be a fatal blow to the forehead. A broken length of rope was found tied around his torso and his ribs were fractured and his torso bruised beneath the rope. As he fell it appears the rope caught on something solid before it broke, subsequently …read more »