Did Mallory Make it to the Top of Everest First?

Introduction

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Episode Selection

1:26Hey, everybody. It's your old pal, Josh. And for this week's SYSK Select, I've chosen our 2022 episode, Did Mallory Make It to the Top of Everest First? It's a clunky title, but an amazing episode. It talks about George Mallory, an unsung climber who may have been the first European to ever summit Everest a full three decades before Sir Edmund Hillary definitely did. The reason we don't know, the reason it's still a mystery, is because he was lost for years. And even once he was found,

1:58still didn't quite answer the question. This is an amazing history mystery podcast that also has a lot of human spirit in it. And I hope you enjoy it.

George Mallory Introduction

2:10Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is Stuff You Should Know, Lost on the Mountaintop Edition. But not in Tennessee, because this has nothing to do with the Beverly Hillbillies at all.

2:34Wow. That was a roundabout funny intro. I didn't even know it was coming 30 seconds ago. No, we are not talking about Tennessee. We are talking about one of the heroes of mountaineering and mountain climbing, certainly, Mr. George Mallory. And the great mystery, to me, unsettled mystery, on whether or not he ever made it to the top of Everest. Yes. At Everest.

3:05Right. Oh, boy. Yeah, this is a tough start, Chuck, because I just realized what I referenced was the Davy Crockett theme, not Beverly Hillbillies. So, everybody, save your emails, okay? Oh, that's right. All of you Beverly Hillbillies cosplayers, save your emails. So, okay, we're talking about Mount Everest. We're not talking about Davy Crockett or the Beverly Hillbillies. We're talking about George Mallory, and to a lesser extent, kind of unfairly, but also kind of fairly, his climbing companion, Sandy Irvine.

3:36And George Mallory is extraordinarily famous, not just in the climbing community. He's a legend in the climbing community, Chuck, but you and I know about him. I knew about Mallory, didn't you, before all this? Uh, yeah. I at least heard his name had a general idea about him, right? Sure. Name two other climbers. Exactly. The guy from that free solo documentary. Does not count. And, um, and, well, all the Sherpa. I mean, we, you know, Ed makes great pains

4:08to point out the Sherpa, but, uh, suffice to say, all you have to do is go back and listen to our episode, Sherpa Warm, Friendly Living, in which we dedicate an entire episode to the usually nameless Sherpa who are usually standing just out of frame of some white dude saying, yeah, I climbed Everest again, but here, go ahead and get your picture taken. Right, and they just kind of slowly shoved them to the side. But, um, despite your best efforts, you still managed to prove my point.

4:39Yeah. George Mallory is extremely famous, and up to, uh, his 30s, it did not look like it was going to go that way because he started out this very famous mountain climber and mountaineer, and early mountain climber and mountaineer, too. That's something that I feel as a beat will hit throughout this episode, that these guys that Mallory was climbing with were using, like, they were making some of their own gear. They were figuring out mountaineering techniques as they went along. It was like a brand new thing that people were doing,

5:10and George Mallory was among the earliest people doing that. Yeah, there's that one, uh, I don't know if it was a journalist or somebody was talking about pictures of the actual attempt to climb Everest, and he said these guys look like they had gone out for a picnic and were hit by a snowstorm. Yeah, right. And just in how they were dressed, you know, they were in, like, tweed jackets and stuff. Yeah, and, um, hobnail boots, so just, like, some leather boots with some spikes attached to them. Like, just nothing you would even climb a hill in these days,

5:42let alone Mount Everest, but that's what they were wearing. So, George Mallory didn't start out as, um, showing signs he was going to be famous. He was, um, kind of a left-leaning, progressive, intellectual school teacher. Um, he did rub elbows with John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf from the Bloomsbury Group. Bloomsbury Group. Pretty cool. Yeah, but that was probably the greatest brush with fame that he had up until he started hitting Mount Everest and making that basically his stated goal in life.

6:14Yeah, I mean, he got into hiking and mountaineering when he was in his late teens and really fell in love with it, but, you know, as Ed Keenley points out, it was, you know, it was such a new sport that people didn't even really know, like, they haven't even charted, like, the highest mountains in the world up into a very, I mean, what I consider a pretty late point when you think about, like, expeditions that Lewis and Clark made. It was, uh, in 1852 when they finally, finally

6:45figured out that Everest was the tallest peak. Yeah, like, up to 1852, they were basically at the point of, that one's tall. Oh, look at that one. That's a tall one, too. Yeah, I wish we could put them next to each other. Yeah, exactly. So, there was actually a guy named, uh, Radhan Sikdar, who was an Indian surveyor, who used data that the English had, um, produced, uh, during their occupation of India, um, to calculate just exactly how tall Mount Everest was. Because they really did

7:15settle on Everest just by sight. They're like, that might be the tallest mountain we've ever seen. And indeed, it turned out at 29,032 feet, Mount Everest was in the mid-19th century and still is today the tallest mountain in the entire world. And they named it Everest after the director of the survey in India. Of course they did. Sir George Everest. But if you asked a Tibetan, what's the name of that big old mountain over there? They would tell you, uh, Chomolungma, which means

7:45Mother Goddess of the World in Tibetan. So, even the Tibetans were like, this is clearly the world's tallest mountain. Yeah. And of course they had, you know, their own names for it. Uh, but we generally don't know those names because they would come along later and just name it after just some dude. Right. But we... Some Englishman. I mean, Chomolungma, that's definitely one of them. No, I know, but ask 10 people what Chomolungma is. Right. And name two other famous climbers. Yes, but the long and short of it is,

8:17or I guess the tall and short of it is, they realized that Everest was the tallest thing in 1852, but big deal. They couldn't do anything about it. They could just kind of gaze upon it. It would be decades and decades before anyone even thought that they might be able to climb Everest because here's the deal. Getting to Everest and climbing it is, uh, like ascending the peak is one thing, but just getting to that point is, I don't know, 90% of the battle.

8:48I would say easily. Most people think you look at a mountain and you just climb up the base and go up to the side and you're done, but no, you have to basically traverse mountain ranges. Mountains just don't exist on their own. They're part of ranges and you don't really think about it, but you have to climb all these other little mini mountains to get to the big mountain in the first place. And this can be walks of, you know, dozens or scores of miles and not walk. It's not a straight walk over a plane and then you get to the edge of the mountain and you go up. Like, you're going up and up and up

9:18and you're existing at higher and higher altitudes, which the English people who were doing this at first were not used to. So they were doing this with basically altitude sickness and all the stuff that comes with that. All right.

1920 Expedition

9:33So let's go to 1920 and the stage is sort of set to where they feel like it might be possible to actually accomplish something like this. and the Royal Geographic Society got together with the Alpine Club to form and they didn't like permanently come together but they worked together to form the Mount Everest Committee to say, all right, let's give this a go, old boy. And they got permission from Tibet in 1921 to go on a scouting trip and this was a trip

10:03where they would just kind of figure out how to climb Everest. Like, it wasn't like they just said, all right, let's give it a go and see if we can get to the top. Like, they had to take several trips just to sort of map out what they thought would be a feasible way to even try to get to the top. Right. Apparently, no one from Europe had been within 60 miles of Everest itself. So this was all new uncharted territory basically for these guys. And again, it's really important to say, like, we're going to be

10:33telling the story from the English point of view and like you said, the Sherpa rarely figure into that with the big exception of Tenzing Norgay who officially was the first to summit Everest with Edmund Hillary. But these guys weren't doing this alone. They had, depending on the expedition and how much money it had, scores to hundreds of Sherpas, like, attending them, helping them climb, moving their stuff, and just basically making life much easier on these guys.

11:03That said, I really don't want to undermine the amount of effort and strenuousness that these guys, yeah, and talent that these guys underwent in just figuring out how to get to Everest to start on that first 1921 expedition. Yeah, it's really cool to read contemporary, yes, contemporary, accounts of what modern climbers think of Mallory and his,

11:34not just tenaciousness, but his actual talent level and his climbing style was apparently very unique and just revered today by modern climbers. And, you know, it's not to take anything away from what anyone does today because what people can accomplish today is amazing, but they accomplish these things based generally on, you know, they can be taught by other people and, like, this is how it's done. Like, Mallory and the gang were figuring this out for the first time. And, by the way, I might have said Hillary instead of Mallory,

12:04because I'm just thinking of climbing hills. Right. And we should just go ahead and say, just to get any confusion out of the way, Edmund Hillary summited Everest in, I think, 1953. We're talking about the first expeditions to Everest again in 1920. Mallory and Hillary I don't believe ever met. They were of different generations of climbers. But Mallory was considered one of the pioneers, as were the other men in his expeditions that he went on. All right, so if I said Hillary, I meant Mallory. Are we

12:35all good? I think we're good, yeah. Okay. All right, so they got permission again for this trip in 1921, and Mallory was in his early 30s. He was included in this first group, and I think was really chomping at the bit to do so. He has a wife and three young kids at home, but really nothing could stop him from going on this first scouting trip. No, and he was 33 on the 1921 trip, and he says basically,

13:05hey, dear, I'm going to quit my job and leave you and the children for, I don't know, seven months at least to go on this expedition. See ya. And that's where he went. But he did say to his wife, here's what I'll do. I'll take this picture of you, babe, and I will carry it with me always, and I will place you at the top of Everest to live there forever more encased in ice when I get up there. Yeah. And I'm sure he probably took it with him on the first expedition, but the first expedition

13:35wasn't planning on summiting Everest. But from what I gather from Mallory, he would have been down to give it a shot that first time out. Like, that's how obsessed with Everest that man became. Right. And he actually was really successful, the expedition was. This was, again, the first expedition by the English to map Everest, and they managed to do it. They managed to find a way onto Everest, what's called the North Call, which is a ridge that connects

14:06one mountain to another. And they found that North Call, which is the way still today, if you're coming from the north, from the Tibetan side up Everest, you still use that route that these guys mapped in 1921. Yeah, and it's important to point out which side that they would have gone up then and what side do you go up now, because there is a route that China kind of secured and basically has held that Americans can't go, and that'll be a key

14:37sort of later on in this mystery. So put it in that. Yeah, because China invaded Tibet in 1950 and said this side of the mountain is closed to Westerners. But this happened three decades after Mallory and his expeditions. So they were using that north route. And still to this day, the north route is considered technically more difficult because it requires you to spend more time at higher elevations with its attendant lower oxygen concentration, which makes

15:07the whole thing way harder. And then secondly, the way in through the north route requires 22 miles of walking just to get from base camp to the top. Whereas the south route, which is what Westerners use today coming from the Nepalese side, is about 12 and three-quarter miles of walking. Nothing to sneeze at still, but it just kind of underscores just how hard the things that these guys were doing with zero equipment. All right. So I think it's a good time for a break.

15:38Sure. I'm going to finally sort out the difference between Hillary and Mallory. It sounds like an 80s sitcom. I know. All right. So I'm going to work all that out and we'll be right back.

15:54Stuff you should know.

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Climbing Challenges

19:06Okay, we're back. And I want to go over a little more about how you get to a mountain. We don't have to go in great detail, but you're basically going up one mountain to get to that ridge that connects that smaller mountain to Everest, the taller mountain, right? But to get there requires hiking, mountain climbing, ice climbing, rock climbing, every kind of climbing you can imagine. And one of the first things you have to do, no matter whether you come from the north route or the south route, is cross

19:37a glacier. And that is way harder than it sounds. Yeah. I mean, this thing is, you know, surrounded in part by glaciers. And like you said, there are so many different disciplines if you're going to do something like Everest, and especially in 1921 and 1922, that I just don't think we can overstate like the near impossibility of this feat at the time. Yeah, especially with the glacier, there's crevasses. They can be really deep, you

20:08know, 100 or more feet deep, and you can fall into that and die. There can be ice slides, also known as avalanches. They can come and bury you. There's something called, I think, secors, which are house-sized blocks of ice that you sometimes have to climb that you could also topple and be crushed by. Like, that's just the glacier. That's like the first obstacle to get toward the mountain. And again, they were doing this with zero equipment. Yeah, I mean, we did a whole episode on ice climbing, right?

20:39We totally did. And I remember thinking... That's why we talked about sea cores. Okay, good. All right, yeah. I thought it sounded familiar. And I also was like, yeah, ice climbing's really hard. I know that from experience in researching it. Yeah. Well, I mean, this one, the Sherpa episode was really good. Ice climbing was good. I believe we did one on dead bodies on Everest. Yeah. Way long time ago. We did one on altitude sickness, too. Yeah, so this all comes together.

21:09Point is, it's really, really hard. And there are so many ways to die. Yeah, what else wants to kill you up there, Chuck, that they weren't aware of until that 1921 expedition? The Yeti? Yeah, that's where the Yeti was introduced, or at least the concept was introduced to Westerners who brought it back. And then, I believe on a later, like, 1951 expedition, a guy named Eric Shipton took some photos of what were supposed to be Yeti tracks, and that's when, like, the West really went wild for the Yeti.

21:41That's right. So, let's catch ourselves up. It's September 24th, 1921, when they reach the North Kohl. And this is where they're like, all right, we think this is it. We think we have found a path that can actually get us. They didn't realize there would one day be an easier path, probably. But they said, we think this is the way to go. And it should be noted that not only these expedition trips to sort of map things out, but each subsequent attempt to ascend Everest that ended

22:11up in, I don't want to say failure, but I guess it is failure if they didn't accomplish it. Devastation. But each one of, yeah. Each one of those is really important, too, because, you know, every higher peak that you get to, you're able to sort of establish, of course, not everywhere, but you're able to establish camps along the way. And these camps are used later on as base camps like one, two, three, four, five, six, et cetera. In fact, six might have been the highest camp at

22:42the time, right? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But it's super important to establish that for like all the hikers to come. Just because it was a failed attempt doesn't mean a lot of great stuff wasn't accomplished. Yeah, because if you are hiking or you're climbing up a mountain and there's a higher camp that you're coming up to, you can make your way over the day to that camp and then just stay there for the night. If there's not a higher camp, you have to turn around at some point and make your way to that next lower camp to survive.

23:12Yeah. Because you cannot be caught overnight on Everest anywhere at these elevations that these guys are hiking at without a tent and or a sleeping bag or you're going to die. That's all there is to it. A human being can't survive on the higher altitudes of Everest without that kind of stuff. So yes, establishing a camp is an enormous thing, but also they're learning stuff firsthand about how humans respond to low oxygen concentrations, what the weather conditions are like, what time of year you can hike.

23:43Like every detail is a brand new novel detail that is really crucial in understanding how to get to the top eventually. Yeah, like what time of day you have to start out in order to get up there and safely get back down because some people, including Hillary, yes, Hillary, and it's a thorny subject, but some people, as far as the mystery of Mallory goes, some people don't consider it a successful ascent unless you come back down. And that's kind of the thing, and I

24:13think Hillary was one of those, and his family also said, hey, listen, not to slag anyone, but we kind of only consider it a success if you go up and you're able to come back down and live to tell about it, essentially. Yeah, and I think that was which is an interesting point. Yeah, but I think that point was made by Hillary himself. Oh, no, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, he's like, well, I mean, even if you've made it to the top, it doesn't count. Like I'm doing this interview right now. Right, I'm sitting here. So, there's one thing I want to

24:44point out that I don't know has