Twenty-two year old Andrew Comyn Irvine, part of the Oars team at Oxford University, was last seen by Noel Odell on June 8, 1924, along with his senior partner and celebrated mountaineer George Leigh Mallory, at ‘the last step but one’, going strongly for the top for the summit of Mount Everest, which, from that point, was around 240 meters high. They were never seen again.
Mallory and Irvine passed into a legend and theirs became the ultimate attempt at the ultimate mountain. Since then, Mount Everest has been climbed many times over, and yet the allure of the first possible ascent in 1924 has grown. Mallory’s remains were found by an expedition that explicitly went on the mountain to search for him in 1999 and that history now is very well known. It was Irvine who became the key to the mystery of the climb and the tragedy that followed as the location of Mallory’s remains, at around 26,700 ft off the North East ridge route, offered tantalising clues about their epic climb but no definitive answers.
In September 2024, a National Geographic Expedition team, led by mountaineer and photographer Jimmy Chin, was descending the Central Rongbuk Glacier on the North Face of the Mountain where they came across an old oxygen bottle that belonged to the 1933 British expedition to Everest. The find alerted them to the fact that there perhaps were more clues and if Irvine had indeed fallen down the north face, then he too was likely to end up in the same vicinity or “be a few hundred yards up the glacier from here toward the mountain”.
In the days that followed, the team searched the glacier and one of the team members, Erich Roepke, observed a boot which had melted out of the ice almost only a week ago according to Chin. The leather was old and worn, the sole was studded with diamond-patterned hobnails, a sure give away to the possible time of the boots, a standard wear for early British expeditions. What followed was surreal. “I lifted up the sock,” Chin says, describing the moment, “and there’s a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched into it.” The broken foot was inside the boot. After 100 years since the legendary climb by Mallory and Irvine, the mountain has relented and revealed some of Irvine’s remains to the world, far below where Mallory lies and away from his supposed sightings as reported over several years.
Also read: The Mallory and Irvine Mystery: The Radical Plan to Reach Everest’s Summit
Finally, with the mountain revealing Irvine’ partial remains, he is no longer a shadowy figure who followed Mallory to the top, but now emerges on his own in the 100th anniversary of their climb. The picture of the boot released recently is reminiscent of the image of Mallory’s boots, the stitching of A.C. Irvine on the sock in red, a mirror image of the 1999 discovery of Mallory. Now it will be the story of Andrew Irvine that will take the centre-stage and fittingly so. The discovery of Irvine’s remains has also given a poignant closure to the family, and his grandniece, Julie Summers, who wrote beautifully about her uncle in Fearless on Everest. At least now we know where the two climbers are resting on the mountain. However, what does this discovery do to the mystery of the climb and the cause of the tragedy?
The partial revelation by itself does not solve the mystery. While some possibilities have receded because of Irvine’s remains emerging, others have been added to some explanations. Perhaps Irvine’s belay failed and Mallory fell to where he fell in the Yellow Band. Irvine then, cold, without oxygen and in the dark, lay down in a cavity and gave himself up and that is where his body was perhaps sighted by mountaineer Xu Jing in 1960. If that is the case, then an avalanche may have later swept him down to the Central Rongbuk Glacier on the north face and thus the subsequent searches up on the mountain did not yield any results. Another possibility is that Irvine fell along with Mallory. Mallory could have fallen first and pulled Irvine down from his stance and both fell together, Irvine to the west of Mallory and went all the way down the north face. In either scenario, there should be more clues that the mountain certainly holds in the main Rongbuk Glacier which can tell us more. Let us hope that the Chomolungma, the Goddess Mother of the Earth, remains kind and yields more in the days to come.
Philip Summers is an Australian researcher, historian and writer with a particular interest in the early British Pre-War Everest expeditions and the Soviet/Russian Space programme to the present day.
Ajay Dandekar is a Professor in the Department of History, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR.
