‘Because It’s There’

The post title is a quote from George Mallory, English mountaineer, who disappeared--along with his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine--on his attempt to summit Everest in June of 1924, almost three decades before the first confirmed summiting by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and local Himalayan Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, on May 29, 1953.

The debate as to whether or not Mallory and Irvine "made it to the top" before they succumbed has never been settled. The story of their own Sherpas has been told in more detail since. They were locals, not experienced climbers, and not gifted with some of the technical wherewithal of the later ascenders. (To be clear, most of their British "leaders" didn't have much of an advantage there, either.) The Sherpas were just expected, as "natives," to manage the environmental conditions and port the heavy equipment along, all the way to the top. Their British leaders were, as Brits, just expected to "overcome" regardless, or irregardless as the case may be, whatever it took to get there.

May 1, 2026, was the 27th anniversary of the discovery of George Mallory's remains, which took place in 1999, three-quarters of a century after he died:

The corpse was frozen and bleached by the sun. It lay face down in the snow, fully extended and pointing uphill. The upper body was welded to the scree with ice. The arms, still muscular, were outstretched above the head. Mountaineer George Mallory had last been sighted on 8 June 1924, when he and Andrew Irvine went missing while attempting to become the first men to reach the summit of Everest. Whether or not they achieved this goal has been the subject of intense speculation for nearly 100 years.

The remains of Andrew ("Sandy") Irvine took a little longer to locate. A National Geographic team, searching below Everest's North Face, discovered--in September 2024--a boot and sock embroidered with the words "A.C. Irvine." And so they looked a little harder. And they think they found him.

This story is one that's always fascinated me (for reasons that may become clear in a moment). From the National Geographic story linked above:

In September, several days before they came upon the [Irvine boot and sock, National Geographic photographer Jimmy] Chin says, the team was descending the Central Rongbuk Glacier when they found a different artifact that aroused their curiosity. “We discovered an oxygen bottle marked with a date on it that said 1933,” he says. Nine years after Mallory and Irvine had gone missing, the 1933 British Everest expedition was the fourth attempt to climb the mountain. It also ended in failure, but members of the 1933 expedition did find an ice ax that belonged to Sandy Irvine high on the northeast ridge, though well below where Mallory was found.

What captures my attention today is that 1933 attempt on Everest's summit, when, on May 30, Percy Wyn-Harris—a member of the British climbing team and, at that time, a Colonial Officer in Kenya—discovered an axe buried in the Everest ice. The axe was at first thought to have belonged to George Mallory, who had disappeared almost a decade earlier, but was subsequently identified as belonging to Mallory's 22-year-old climbing partner, Sandy Irvine.

Wyn-Harris’s act of recovering the ice-axe remains a signal moment in mountaineering history. And he is famous because of it.

Percy Wyn-Harris’s subsequent career in the British Colonial service culminated in his administration of the Northern Cameroons during a UN-sponsored plebiscite that was held to determine its future. His immediate subordinate in that matter was my father.

Dad didn’t have much time for Percy Wyn Harris, thinking him to be too much of a politician, and as a result, perhaps a lesser man. I was a child, though, and I remember him fondly, as something of a rather kindly and indulgent elder uncle.

I think Dad and I would have agreed that the Percy Wyn Harris who attempted an ascent of Everest in 1933, and whose altitude record—without supplemental oxygen—stood until the summitting by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler in 1978, was a mensch, in that matter, at least.

And I know that the late Mr. She would have thought the same. Because when I mentioned--almost half a century ago--that I had a personal acquaintance with Sir Percy, he, a student of mountaineering history, knew exactly of whom I spoke. He knew the story and had nothing but respect.

Full disclosure: I’ve slept in Percy Wyn-Harris’s bed. He wasn’t in it at the time, of course. But when I was a child in Nigeria, and my parents were on the important and sometimes royal political and cocktail party circuit, they’d simply lug me along to the various "dos." To start with, I’d play with the children of the Nigerian servants and have a whale of a time. And when it came bedtime, they’d put me in the host’s bed so I could sleep until the party ended, at which point, they’d pick me up and take me home in the car. It was a different world. And I still seem to be alive to tell the tale.

“Because it's there.” A very Western, and not a bad reason, to strive--when it comes to the alternative--IMHO.

Dad (middle). Percy Wyn-Harris (right). I believe the gentleman on the left is Derek Mountain.