I’ve read the book before, but tonight I’ve spent some time thumbing through “Ghosts of Everest,” which chronicles the 1999 Everest expedition that discovered the final resting place of George Mallory.
There are some 207 climbers who have lost their lives pursuing Everest’s 29,029-foot peak, and most of the bodies have been left where they fell because rescuing anyone on Everest is an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous endeavor. George Mallory isn’t just another of the 200+ lost climbers. Mallory’s is one of the oldest bodies encased in the ice and frigid stone on the tallest mountain in the world. George Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, vanished during a summit bid in 1924.
The perennial question remains: did Mallory and Irvine get to the summit before they disappeared? Mallory and Irvine had a camera with them, and Kodak officials have informed that the film could be successfully developed if the camera were found. The 1999 expedition and a subsequent expedition in 2001 have attempted to answer that question, but have come up with tantalizing tidbits and artifacts instead of a concrete conclusion. The mountain may never give up its secret; we’ll just have to see what unfolds.
Mallory’s body was discovered by Conrad Anker, a climber in the 1999 Mallory and Irvine research expedition. Mallory lay face-down in a boulder field. He’d taken a nasty fall and had broken his right leg and sustained a devastating head injury. The cold, dry air on Everest preserved his remains such that he looked like a marble statue, and it was physically obvious that George Mallory was a powerful climber. Many artifacts were found on George Mallory, but two key items were missing: the sought-after camera and a photo of George’s wife, Ruth. Mallory carried the photo of his wife and planned to leave it on the summit. The absence of the photo hints that they may have reached the summit, but without the camera there is no proof.
1924 was before the invention of Gore-Tex, GPS technology, or digital cameras, yet humans still attempted to conquer Everest with what’s considered primitive equipment today. Modern climbers use down suits and multiple layers of fleece. George Mallory was dressed in layers of silk and wool, topped off by a canvas outer shell. Even with this primitive gear, Mallory and Irvine were able to climb further and higher than many who came after with high-tech climbing gear. It seems that the human spirit and their levels of athletic fitness took them up to the heights. No one was around to tell them their gear was primitive. It was 1924 and they used the best stuff available at the time.
This got me thinking: were there others before us in the off-road world that casually conquered trails and difficult dirt routes with primitive suspensions and drive trains? To some extent, the answer is ‘yes.’ When the Jeep was introduced during World War II, it was placed in combat situations such as landing on the beach at Normandy that would leave many modern rigs stuck and water-logged. On the other hand, the earliest Jeeps had dinky tires, suspension that didn’t flex far, and temperamental carburetors. Add in an excruciatingly short wheelbase and a limited selection of transmission ratios, and you’ve got something that’s downright scary at highway speeds. With our modern fuel-injected engines, flexy suspensions, and overdrive transmissions, we can walk up trails that would spit out a vintage Willys MB and we can take the highway there and back driving 70-plus MPH.
Since our activity is technology-based instead of athletic, there’s no question we can do things now that were once considered impossible. Still, the same thing that drove Mallory and Irvine toward the summit of Everest in 1924 drives the inventions and innovations in the off-road industry: the human spirit.