The Lost Explorer Read online

  During the last few years, a young German graduate student in geology has taken up the quest where Tom Holzel left off. Jochen Hemmleb, twenty-seven, is a climber of modest abilities, but a researcher whose obsession with detail puts even Holzel’s in the shade. A self-professed disciple of the English writer Audrey Salkeld (who is the world’s leading authority on Mallory), Hemmleb became fascinated with the 1924 saga. From a single, mediocre photo published in a quirky book celebrating the 1975 Chinese expedition, Hemmleb figured out that that year’s Camp VI had been pitched in an entirely different place from nearly all other expeditions’ Camp VI. Studying background details, Hemmleb thought he could extrapolate the likely location of the fugitive camp. A search, then, for the body Wang Hongbao had found ought to focus on all terrain within a plausible twenty-minute stroll of that camp.

  In 1998, Hemmleb got in touch with Mount Rainier guide Eric Simonson, who had climbed Everest from the north in 1991. Soon infected with the German’s enthusiasm, Simonson put together a climbing team and a network of sponsors. Most of his teammates were fellow Rainier guides, but at the last moment, he snagged a genuine star in Conrad Anker, whose record of cutting-edge first ascents on remote mountains ranging from Patagonia to the Karakoram can be matched by only two or three other Americans. The BBC and NOVA agreed to co-produce a film about the expedition, and a Seattle-based Web site, MountainZone, signed on to cover the team via daily Internet dispatches from Base Camp.

  Most observers, however, viewed the expedition as something of a boondoggle—one more stratagem, like campaigns to raise money for medical research or to clean up other expeditions’ trash, to finance an expensive outing on the world’s highest mountain. Even if Simonson and Hemmleb’s motives were sincere, after all the expeditions that had crisscrossed the northern slopes of Everest over the years, the chances of finding something new from the 1924 expedition seemed infinitesimal.

  Anker himself, in the middle of a month-long jaunt among unclimbed towers in Antarctica in 1997, had vocally derided the Everest circuses of recent years. In March 1999, on the eve of his departure for Nepal, one of Anker’s friends invited him to dinner.

  “What are you up to, Conrad?” the friend asked over coffee.

  “I’m off for Tibet. A little high-altitude trekking.”

  “Kailas?” The friend named the famous holy mountain, object of Buddhist and Hindu pilgrimages.

  “No, a little higher,” said Anker sheepishly. “I’m going to Everest.”

  CA

  OUR FIRST PRIORITY was to look for traces of Mallory and Irvine. Most of the guys wanted to go to the summit, but Eric Simonson—“Simo,” as we call him—emphasized that the search was the primary reason we had come to Everest.

  It wasn’t until April 30 that we had camps in place and ropes fixed and were ready to conduct the search. Fixing ropes entails securing small-diameter cords most of the way up the route; these ropes, left in place throughout the expedition, serve as safety lines and make both ascent and descent quicker and easier.

  One thing that gave us a lot of hope was that the snowfall the previous winter had been extraordinarily light. Even peering out the windows of our jet as we flew into Kathmandu, we could see that the mountain was as bare as it ever gets. When we reached Base Camp, Simo, who’d been on six previous Everest expeditions, couldn’t believe the conditions—the mountain was the driest it had been in living memory. And all through April, we got really good weather. If ever a season was ideal for a search, it was in the spring of 1999.

  At 5:15 on the morning of May 1, just as it was getting light, the five of us—Andy Politz, Tap Richards, Jake Norton, Dave Hahn, and I—headed out from Camp V, at 25,600 feet. There was a pretty stiff wind, and most of the going in the early hours was in the shade, so it was quite cold. We followed the regular route up to Camp VI, at 27,000 feet, getting there about 10:30.

  I’d decided not to use oxygen. I wanted to know how my body would perform at that altitude. Dave, whom I’d climbed with in Antarctica, was a little upset with me. He thought I’d be more efficient if I was sucking gas. But as it was, I got to Camp VI before he did. So he said, “Well, I guess you don’t need that stuff.”

  Dave and Andy had both climbed Everest before from the north. Andy had been on the mountain four previous times. But I’d never been this high before. The highest I’d ever been was 24,000 feet, on an unsuccessful expedition to Annapurna IV. The highest summit I’d reached was Latok II, in the Karakoram, about 23,300 feet.

  From Camp VI, we started traversing to the right, or west, toward the search zone that Jochen Hemmleb had identified. He had made a circle on the map that covered all the ground he thought was within a likely twenty-minute walk of where he thought the Chinese Camp VI had been in 1975. Simo estimated the size of that area as equal to twelve football fields. There was no way the five of us could completely cover that ground in one day. I actually thought of what we were undertaking as a kind of reconnaissance. As we headed out there, I thought, It’s just good that we’re here to look. No one has ever searched this high before.

  Jochen had given us what he called the “research manual”—it was an eight-page, spiral-bound, laminated notebook telling us how, why, and where to search. Initially we had all these grand ideas about how we’d cover the ground. We’d hike to a high point, spread twenty yards apart, and head downhill. But when you get to 27,000 feet, you’re in a different world. Your mind needs oxygen to work, and there isn’t much oxygen up there.

  Pretty early Jake found an oxygen bottle with blue paint on one end. He got on the radio to Jochen at Base Camp and described the cylinder, and Jochen was able to verify that it was a Chinese ’75 bottle. So we knew we were in the right vicinity.

  Meanwhile I’d started to drift out of earshot of the others, lower and farther right. Jochen had located the Chinese Camp VI higher than I thought it was likely to have been. I was using my mountaineer’s intuition, not the research manual. I thought, Now where would I pitch a camp on this part of the mountain? I was coming at it fresh—I hadn’t overanalyzed, projecting preconceived “facts” onto reality.

  Also, I was skeptical about the “twenty-minute stroll.” Your sense of time at altitude goes haywire. You can say, “Okay, I’ll see you in forty-five minutes,” but up there you don’t even realize how time slips away. And there was another question—just how strong was Wang Hongbao? Some of his Tibetan teammates could really cruise at 27,000 feet. Who knows how far Wang might have gone in twenty minutes?

  I walked down and right, over a little crest of an ill-defined rib. Then, about 11:00 A.M., looking down, I saw the first body. He had on a purple suit. I walked up closer to check him out. He was lying head downhill, almost hidden on the downhill side of a rock. His legs were obviously broken or dislocated. He was pretty beat up—he’d taken a long fall. His right arm was stuck straight out, as though he were waving. We would later nickname him “the Greeter.” With his plastic boots and metal ascender, he was obviously modern.

  The goraks had eaten away his face. There was just the skull. It was very macabre.

  I realized right away that the Greeter wasn’t who we were looking for; but all the same, there was a lot of information there. One of his boots was off. I think that’s common—when people really accelerate in a fall, the boots can get whipped off, because you don’t lace them too tight at altitude, for fear of cutting off circulation. And it was significant that his head was downhill. I’d had several informal chats with other mountaineers, asking them what the dead bodies they had found on mountains all over the world looked like. Almost invariably, the head was downhill. Why that might be, I’m not sure. Perhaps the upper torso and head are denser than the rest of the body, and if you carry a pack, that makes you even more top-heavy.

  As I looked at the Greeter, I realized I was in a natural catchment basin. I asked myself, Why did he stop right here, on the downhill side of this rock? The ridge I was on had a lot of rock snags and outcroppings, places wh
ere a body would naturally come to rest. It’s like a river, with eddies downstream from boulders. Or avalanches in winter, which I’ve been studying as long as I’ve been climbing—how they take out certain trees and don’t take out certain other ones, according to their run-out tracks and deposition zones. There’s no way to analyze all the forces on a mountain rationally; it has to be intuitive. The more experience you have, the more you absorb on a subconscious level.

  So I kept traversing right, exploring this catchment basin. In the back of my mind, I wanted to look into the Great Couloir, which is way beyond Jochen’s search zone. I wanted to see the route by which Reinhold Messner had made his astounding solo, oxygenless ascent of Everest in 1980. On this standard-setting climb, Messner had to scale, 250 yards farther west, the same cliff bands that form the Second Step. How had he unlocked the north face? My curiosity drew me westward.

  By now my partners were still in sight, but they were tiny—they were at least 500 yards away. About 11:30, Andy came on the radio. He said, “Conrad, what are you doing way out there? We need to be more systematic.”

  I answered, “I’m just looking around. I want to see what this is all about.” Even as Andy was talking to me, I’d spotted another body, a fair distance away, a hundred feet below. This guy had on a blue suit so faded it looked gray. Almost all the color had gone out of the fabric, so I was thinking, He could be really old. He could be it.

  So I down-climbed to the body. He’d come to rest on the last terrace before a big cliff band. As I got close, I saw that he had on orange overboots with clip-on crampons, so I knew he was modern too. Again, he was lying head downhill, folded in half, his arms and legs at unnatural angles, as if he’d cartwheeled a long, violent way, like a rag doll. I couldn’t see his face.

  The second body made it all the more obvious that I was in a catchment basin. Looking up the slope, I could see how the natural forces of the mountain had moved the bodies. Now I started traversing back east toward the other guys, along the top of this cliff band. It was steep enough so that if I fell, I wouldn’t be able to self-arrest, but it was terrain I felt at home on. Sort of four-wheel-drive scrambling.

  Then I sat down to take off my crampons, hydrate, and suck a cough drop. As I started off again, within a couple of paces I caught sight of the shreds of blue and yellow fabric. And then, scanning right, that patch of alabaster. The body that wasn’t modern.

  WE DIDN’T HAVE all that much time to work. We’d agreed on a tentative turnaround hour of 2:00 P.M., to get back to Camp V while it was still daylight, and by the time we started excavating, it was past noon. There were clouds below us, but only a slight wind. As one can imagine, this was hard work at 26,700 feet (the altitude of the body, as I later calculated it). We had taken off our oxygen gear, because it was just too cumbersome to dig with it on.

  Because the body was frozen into the scree, we had to chip away at the surrounding ice and rock with our ice axes. It took some vigorous swings even to dislodge little chunks, the ice was so dense. We were all experienced climbers, we were used to swinging tools, so we did the chipping pretty efficiently; only once did a pick glance off a rock and impale the man’s arm. As we got closer to the body, we put down our axes and started chipping with our pocketknives.

  We were so sure this was Sandy Irvine that Jake actually sat down, took a smooth piece of shale in his lap, and started to scratch out a tombstone with Irvine’s name and dates, 1902-1924. But then we found the “G. Mallory” tag on the collar, and shortly after, Tap found another one on a seam under the arm. It read, “G. Leigh Mallory.” We just stared at each other, stunned, as we realized this wasn’t Irvine. We had found George Mallory.

  As we excavated, Tap chipped away on his left side, Jake on his right. I did mostly lifting and prying. Dave and Andy took pictures and shot video.

  It was good fortune that George was lying on his stomach, because most of the stuff you carry when you climb is in the front pockets, so it had been protected by his body for seventy-five years. It may seem funny, or even pretentious, but we referred to him as “George,” not as “Mallory.” All through the weeks before, we’d talked about Mallory and Irvine so much that it was as if we knew them, like old friends; they had become George and Sandy.

  We left George’s face where it was, frozen into the scree, but once I could lift the lower part of his body, Tap and Jake could reach underneath him and go through the pockets. The body was like a frozen log. When I lifted it, it made that same creaky noise as when you pull up a log that’s been on the ground for years.

  It was disconcerting to look into the hole in the right buttock that the goraks had chewed. His body had been hollowed out, almost like a pumpkin. You could see the remains of seeds and some other food—very possibly Mallory’s last meal.

  We didn’t go near George’s head. We moved the loose rock away from it, but we didn’t try to dig it out. I think that was a sort of unspoken agreement, and at the time, none of us wanted to look at his face.

  Of course we were most excited about the possibility of finding the camera. Jake even thought for a minute he’d found it. George had a small bag that was lodged under his right biceps. Jake reached in there, squeezed the bag, and felt a small, square object, just about the right size. We finally had to cut the bag to get the object out, and when we did, we found it wasn’t the camera after all, it was a tin of beef lozenges!

  The clincher that it was Mallory came when Jake pulled out a neatly folded, new-looking silk handkerchief in which several letters had been carefully wrapped. They were addressed to Mallory. On the envelope of one of them, for instance, we read, “George Leigh Mallory Esq., c/o British Trade Agent, Yalung Tibet.”

  Besides the letters, we found a few penciled notes in other pockets. As we found out later, they were all about logistics, about bringing so many loads to Camp VI, and so on. We read them carefully, hoping Mallory might have jotted down a note about reaching the summit or turning back, but there was nothing of the sort.

  One by one, Jake and Tap produced what we started calling “the artifacts.” It seemed an odd collection of items to carry to the summit of Everest. There was a small penknife; a tiny pencil, about two and a half inches long, onto which some kind of mint cake had congealed (we could still smell the mint); a needle and thread; a small pair of scissors with a file built into one blade; a second handkerchief, well used (the one he blew his nose on), woven in a red and yellow floral pattern on a blue background, with the monogram G.L.M. in yellow; a box of special matches, Swan Vestas, with extra phosphorus on the tips; a little piece of leather with a hose clamp on it that might have been a mouthpiece for the oxygen apparatus; a tube of zinc oxide, rolled partway up; a spare pair of fingerless mittens that looked like they hadn’t been used.

  Two other artifacts seemed particularly intriguing. Jake found a smashed altimeter in one pocket. The hand was missing from the dial, but you could see that the instrument had been specially calibrated for Everest, with a range from 20,000 feet to 30,000 feet. Inscribed on the back, in fine script, was “M.E.E. II”—for Mount Everest Expedition II. And in the vest pocket, we found a pair of goggles. The frames were bent, but the green glass was unbroken. It was Andy who came up with the possible significance of the goggles being in the pocket. To him, it argued that George had fallen after dusk. If it had been in the daytime, he would have been wearing the goggles, even on rock. He’d just had a vivid lesson in the consequences of taking them off during the day, when Teddy Norton got a terrible attack of snow blindness the night after his summit push on June 4.

  As we removed each artifact, we put it carefully in a Ziploc bag. Andy volunteered to carry the objects down to Camp V. To some people, it may seem that taking George’s belongings with us was a violation. We even had a certain sense that we were disturbing the dead—I think that’s why we had hesitated to begin the excavation. But this was the explicit purpose of the expedition: to find Mallory and Irvine and to retrieve the artifacts and try to sol
ve the mystery of what had happened on June 8, 1924. I think we did the right thing.

  As interesting as what we found was what we didn’t find. George had no backpack on, nor any trace of the frame that held the twin oxygen bottles. His only carrying sack was the little bag we found under his right biceps. He didn’t have any water bottle, or Thermos flask, which was what they used in ’24. He didn’t have a flashlight, because he’d forgotten to take it with him. We know this not from Odell, but from the 1933 party, who found the flashlight in the tent at the 1924 Camp VI.

  And we didn’t find the camera. That was the great disappointment.

  It was getting late—we’d already well overstayed our 2:00 P.M. turnaround. The last thing we gathered was a DNA sample, to analyze for absolute proof of the identity of the man we’d found. Simonson had received approval for this procedure beforehand from John Mallory, George’s only son, who’s seventy-nine and living in South Africa. I had agreed to do this job.

  I cut an inch-and-a-half-square patch of skin off the right forearm. It wasn’t easy. I had to use the serrated blade on Dave’s utility knife. Cutting George’s skin was like cutting saddle leather, cured and hard.

  Since the expedition, I’ve often wondered whether taking the tissue was a sacrilegious act. In Base Camp, I had volunteered for the task. On the mountain, I had no time to reflect whether or not this was the right thing to do.

  We wanted to bury George, or at least to cover him up. There were rocks lying around, but not a lot that weren’t frozen in place. We formed a kind of bucket brigade, passing rocks down to the site.

  Then Andy read, as a prayer of committal, Psalm 103: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth./For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone …”

  We finally left at 4:00 P.M. I lingered a bit after the other four. The last thing I did was to leave a small Butterfinger candy bar in the rocks nearby, like a Buddhist offering. I said a sort of prayer for him, several times over.