Lost on Everest: The Search for Mallory & Irvine by P. L. Firstbrook
Despite being a climber, I’m by no means an Everest junkie. I’m not a mountaineer (I climb rocks, not snow, as I try to explain to non-climbers) and I’m most certainly not a high altitude mountaineer. But rock climbing doesn’t seem to have a literature base and Lost on Everest came my way free of charge, so I read it.
It starts with a Mallory overview – his life and times up to and during his three Everest attempts – along with some basic Everest history. So if you know your Everest, the first three quarters of the book will be redundant. Eventually the author gets to the expedition that discovered Mallory’s body but there’s not much to tell. Lastly, he analyzes what was discovered and tries to answer the age old question: did Mallory get to the top.
I’m not sure why this is even a question because climbers are pretty agreed that it doesn’t count as an ascent unless you make it back down alive. So that even if we had irrefutable proof that Mallory was the first to the top of Everest, it wouldn’t change the first ascent listing in the history books. It would be a footnote.
Putting that aside, it seems like the question has been answered. It’s highly unlikely that he made it. Highly, highly, highly unlikely. So unlikely that only people who believe in God and Santa Claus could think so. Which is the real answer. Those who want to believe he made it, because it’s more romantic that way, are always going to believe it and the rest of us don’t care because, even if he did, it wouldn’t change anything. So books like this are published for wanna-believers, not truth-seekers. The author does his best to give them hope.