Mount Everest...
Twenty-nine thousand feet...
The highest point on Earth...
Captivating and deadly.
In the 1920s, to conquer this mountain
was the greatest challenge remaining in a golden age of adventure.
Everest was the edge of heaven,
where many believed no human could survive.
But not George Mallory.
"Everest is the last great conquest for man...
The Wildest Dream."
George Mallory dreamed of being the first man to climb Everest.
On June 8, 1924,
dressed in gabardine and hobnailed boots,
he and his fellow climber, Sandy Irvine,
were last seen 800 feet below the summit.
Then the clouds rolled in...
They were never seen alive again.
Many believed that almost 30 years before Everest was officially conquered,
George Mallory was the first man to set foot on the top of the world.
Seventy-five years after Mallory and Irvine vanished,
mountaineer Conrad Anker took part in an expedition
looking for their bodies high on Everest.
Conrad, come in please.
I'm down at 26,7 - over.
Anker struck off on his own.
Conrad, you're way below the search zone.
You need to be higher - over.
I was curious.
I stopped, turned around...
and there was a patch of white.
It wasn't snow; it was matte -
a light-absorbing color, like marble.
As I got closer, I realized this was the body
of one of the pioneering English climbers,
frozen onto the mountainside.
For a moment I thought...
maybe I can just keep walking and keep it to myself.
But then, that's what we were there for.
Group Meeting.
Mandatory group meeting - over.
Here, wait! This is George Mallory!
Oh, my God! Oh, my God!
You see that? George Mallory.
Oh, my God!
George Mallory and I -
our two paths have intersected 75 years apart.
My aunt called me and said in a rather small voice on the phone:
"Suzie, they've found my father's body on Mount Everest."
I was amazed,
I was absolutely shocked.
It was very powerful to know
where my grandfather was and how he died.
He had a compound fracture of his right leg, above the ankle -
fatal on Everest.
His arms were outstretched as if he had tried
to dig his fingers into the side of the mountain.
He was last seen up on the ridge,
heading west for the summit.
But I found him far to the east.
So Mallory was on his way back,
maybe returning from the summit itself.
His sun goggles, vital against the glare from the snow,
were in his pocket.
So it must have been getting dark.
He and Irvine were tied together by a thin cotton rope.
They were tired, absolutely beat, no energy left,
minds not functioning clearly.
Mallory crossed his left leg over the broken one
to ease the pain.
It was a matter of minutes,
a half hour at the very most,
before he died.
Did Mallory reach the summit
almost three decades before the first official climb?
We discovered many things on his body...
Documents and letters perfectly preserved 75 years later.
His wristwatch, rusted in at 10 after 5.
The goggles that were inside of his vest.
An altimeter - the face broken and the hands missing.
But one very significant item was missing:
The photo of his wife Ruth,
which he'd promised to leave on the summit.
Was the photo missing
because Mallory had reached the summit and placed it there -
the ultimate tribute to his love of Ruth?
He was last seen about 800 feet below the summit,
near the notoriously difficult Second Step.
If Mallory was able to make it to the summit in 1924,
he and Irvine would have had to have climbed this overhanging cliff
at about 28,000 feet.
There's never been a confirmed free climb of the Second Step.
Everyone who climbs it today
uses a metal ladder bolted to the rock
by Chinese climbers in 1975.
I want to go back to Everest
to try and climb the Second Step,
under the very same conditions Mallory faced.
It was a pure cliff when Mallory and Irvine approached it.
No one had ever been there.
It would have been an incredible feat of climbing
if they had pulled that off.
Adventure, risk...
There are some people that thrive on it,
that seek it out,
they want to push their own limits.
Mallory is one of those people.
Mallory grew up in Cheshire, Northern England.
He made his first fateful climb in Mobberley, his home village.
Mallory's father was a vicar here at this church.
And it was here that the young boy escaped
and climbed to the top of the church - age seven.
You can imagine that...
Finding climbing, it's his true passion in life.
I actually think that some people who climb
are wired a little differently from the rest of us.
My grandfather really didn't feel fear of heights
or precipices or anything like that.
He had a way of climbing that was not quite like everyone else's.
His arms and legs would just sort of eat up a mountain
and he would start flowing over it like a wave.
Aged 19, Mallory entered the University of Cambridge
at a time of great cultural upheaval.
When Mallory arrived in Cambridge in 1905
he pitched into this ferment and bubble of ideas,
excitement, intellectual, sexual, social, secret societies.
He obviously possessed some remarkable charisma,
sort of charmed presence that drew the eye,
compelled the gaze.
"My mind is in a state of constant rebellion.
I believe that will always be so."
He was a dreamer...
And he was in Cambridge at a time of great and powerful dreaming.
And eventually that dream took its form in the shape of Everest.
This was the golden age of exploration.
Mallory watched with the rest of the world
as explorers from America, Norway, and Britain
raced first to the North and then the South Pole.
In 1912, Captain Scott, the legendary British adventurer,
died in the attempt to be the first to the South Pole.
Mallory was among those inspired by the tragedy.
Britain is at the waning of the empire at this time.
It is looking for ways to reinvigorate itself.
So attention inevitably turns to Everest as the final possibility -
The Third Pole.
Surveyors had calculated that Everest was the highest mountain in the world.
But no Westerner had ever been within 40 miles.
Mallory became obsessed by a mountain he'd never even seen.
"Everest is the highest mountain in the world.
No man has reached its summit.
"Its existence is a challenge to man's desire to conquer the universe."
Mallory wasn't just enthralled with Everest...
He had also fallen in love with 21-year-old Ruth Turner.
Right from the start, they wrote each other adoring letters.
"My darling,"
I'm longing for you.
I would kiss your lips and look into your eyes
and you, you, you all near me and with me,
"strong and glorious and loving and laughing."
"I cannot find words that would be sure
to convey what I feel about you.
What I really want is to know you
and to love you more and more.
"Dearest and most beloved, your loving Ruth."
George and my grandmother Ruth fell madly in love in 1914.
They were both idealists,
really seeing kindred spirits in each other.
They were married three days before the start of World War I.
Mallory enlisted and came face to face
with death once more,
fighting in the Somme,
the bloodiest battle known to man.
"There is no reckoning with death here.
Life presents itself very much to me as a gift."
Mallory had witnessed the mass slaughter of the first World War.
His fellow soldiers, some of them six feet away,
killed by German shelling.
He knew how fragile life was.
And knowing this, he wanted to live it to the fullest.
He wanted the ultimate challenge.
And that, in the 20s, was Mount Everest.
Once the war was over,
the Royal Geographical Society in London
planned the first-ever expedition to Everest.
They needed Mallory for his supreme climbing skills;
He needed their backing to realize his obsession.
When Mallory undertook that first expedition in 1921,
he had to approach Everest through Tibet from the north.
The Nepalese refused to allow access to the easier south side
used when Everest was first officially climbed in 1953.
After an eight-week journey,
Mallory finally set eyes on the mountain
that had haunted him for so long.
"Like the wildest creation of a dream - Everest!"
A rugged giant...
A prodigious white fang...
A colossal rock plastered with snow.
From the mountaineer's point of view,
"no more appalling sight could be imagined."
When he first saw Everest,
he describes it really almost as an adversary.
It's very beautiful, but also ugly or frightful,
like an ogre.
There were no maps.
No one knew the terrain there.
And this first trip, the trip of 1921,
it was imperative that the team find the route
that would lead them to the summit.
For months, Mallory led the search,
but the route to the summit eluded him.
Finally, late in August, he found what he was looking for...
An enormous glacial valley that snaked for miles
around the other giant peaks towards the very foot of Everest.
"My dearest Ruth,
We have found our way to the great mountain."
At the end of the valley was a wall of snow and ice 1,000 feet high.
It led up to a crest that Mallory named 'The North Col. '
And then on to the top of the world.
"We have established our way to the summit
for anyone who cares to try the highest adventure."
But the heavy snow that comes with the monsoon each summer
quickly made climbing impossible.
They had to head home.
But within six months, Mallory was back again...
this time with film cameras, to show Everest to the world.
He climbed higher than anyone else before him.
But late in the season,
as Mallory led porters up the mountain, disaster struck.
A great snowfall had come.
They got to a delicate place on this massive ice slope
and triggered an avalanche.
"My dearest Ruth,"
Seven brave men killed...
and I am to blame.
It has happened forever
"and I can do nothing to make it good."
After the avalanche, when George returned to Europe,
he really had no wish to go back to Everest.
He just wanted to get away
from the deprivation and the danger,
and also the memories of that avalanche.
He had been away for a very long period
over two successive years.
He wanted to get back to his wife and his family.
They had three children.
My mother was the second daughter of George Mallory.
And at this point, I think, he was really starting
to think about wanting to be home more,
to be with Ruth more,
and to address himself to raising the kids.
But a new expedition was being planned...
And Mallory desperately wanted to be part of it -
against Ruth's wishes.
"I love you and you love me,"
and that ought to be happiness enough for a lifetime.
But I do want you.
We want to live together all the time
and share thoughts and joys and sorrows.
"And we can't apart as we can together."
"I am having a horrible time, on a tightrope."
It would be an awful tug going away
instead of settling down here with Ruth.
But it would look rather grim to see others,
"without me, conquering the summit."
Mallory clearly loved Ruth very dearly.
She was his sweet, domestic, beloved partner
who represented all that was appealing about home, family,
the flatlands of Cambridge, at sea level.
But Everest represented all that was exciting,
adventurous, visionary, mystical.
His personality was pulled between those two poles.
Early in 1923, the crisis came to a head
when Mallory sailed to America to speak about his Everest adventures.
He was the star turn at the Explorers Club in New York.
I can just imagine the audience on the edge of their seats
as Mallory told them about the biting wind,
the lack of appetite, the fierce cold.
A New York Times journalist asked the question,
"Why climb Everest?"
Mallory gave his legendary reply...
"Because it's there."
Three words that have probably become more famous than Mallory himself,
suggests a sort of fatalism bubbling away in Mallory.
The mountain remains, it's unclimbed,
and so the quest remains.
And he is the man who is locked into
this almost fairytale relationship with the mountain.
He's been twice and he must go back for the third time.
I think that the idea that someone else would build on his progress
and get to the summit on his shoulders was quite difficult for him to accept.
It was, after all, his route and his mountain.
It is actually a surprisingly selfish thing for someone like Mallory to experience.
But then mountaineers all do have this kind of element of selfishness deep down.
Aged 38,
this was Mallory's last chance to conquer the mountain.
Conrad Anker will follow Mallory's footsteps,
leading his own expedition to Everest
and the Second Step.
During his climb, Conrad plans to test clothes and boots
modeled on those he found on Mallory's body.
Using this replica clothing,
I'm going to have this chance to go back and see
what it was like for Mallory to try climbing Everest in 1924.
But like Mallory, Conrad is torn between
his passion for Everest and his love for his family.
My family's anxious about this trip.
I'm going to Everest...
It's a deadly mountain.
What's it worth?
Is it worth leaving your kids behind?
Why are you going to this mountain?
Are you going to be safe?
You know I love you.
And I can see there,
as I was trying to rationalize it to my wife and children
that it's a safe thing and it's a fine thing to go on Everest
and it's a noble thing,
that these were the same answers Mallory had for Ruth.
I know what it's like to be the wife of a climber.
And I know what it's like to be
the wife of a climber who doesn't come home.
Jennifer was previously married
to one of America's finest mountaineers, Alex Lowe,
Conrad's climbing partner and closest friend.
Just a few months after finding Mallory's body,
Conrad was climbing with Alex when the mountains claimed another life.
An avalanche struck Alex and I
as we were climbing in the Himalayas.
He died and I was three feet away from him.
You could look at him and tell that he was burdened
with this world of guilt and grief,
that somehow he could have prevented Alex's death.
In the aftermath of this tragedy,
we communicated with each other
and eventually we grew to fall in love.
It wasn't just Jennifer that my love grew for,
it was also the boys.
Jennifer must really like climbers to willingly bring me into her life
and then marry and have me adopt the boys,
because she knows it's downright dangerous work.
Boys, look what I found downstairs.
- Wow! - Good God!
Is this my Halloween costume
or is this what I'm going up Everest in?
- You guys are laughing. - You look like Inspector Gadget.
You're supposed to take me serious.
Mom can appreciate it.
It's amazing to think of those guys
going for the summit in clothing like that.
Would you climb Everest in that suit?
- No. - What would you wear?
I wouldn't climb Everest.
Before climbing Everest,
Mallory had to choose his climbing partner.
Among the candidates was a 21-year-old chemistry student,
Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine - a mountaineering novice.
My great uncle Sandy Irvine took life by the horns,
and if there was an opportunity that presented itself to him
he would take it.
He loved the theater, he loved cars,
and above all he loved women.
And he had this very indiscreet love affair
with his best friend's step-mother.
It was a terrible scandal.
But Sandy Irvine was first and foremost an oarsman.
And when he got to Oxford he was selected to take part
in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.
The annual boat race was the most prestigious sporting event of the day.
They were victorious.
And what Mallory saw in Sandy
was this extraordinary ability that great oarsmen have,
which is to row through pain,
to push himself almost beyond normal human limit.
But there was another reason for choosing Irvine.
Mallory needed someone technical
to master the oxygen equipment vital at high altitude.
And unlike Mallory, Irvine was very practical.
Sandy asked the Mount Everest committee
to send him a 1922 set, plus the drawings.
And he spent hours and hours in his rooms in Oxford
trying to make it serviceable,
trying to make it lighter, stronger and less fragile,
so that the climbers could use it with greater confidence.
And so the fact that Sandy was so practical with the apparatus,
I think, made it quite clear in Mallory's mind
that he was a useful man to have climbing with him.
Conrad Anker has also chosen
a young Englishman as his climbing partner - Leo Houlding.
Like Irvine, Leo is young, strong, a natural athlete
and has never climbed at high altitude.
The 90-feet high Second Step
will be a dangerous venture into the unknown.
I'm definitely concerned about the altitude
and the acclimatization process,
just because I've never been high enough before
to know whether, you know,
I might be one of those people that it doesn't gel with.
I don't want to let Conrad down
and I'm sure Irvine felt some of that pressure.
Leo's never been to altitude, this unknown.
And you can't walk into a hospital and take a test
that will come back and say, oh, you'll do well at altitude.
Some people do really well.
But I've seen fit people
doubled over and with splitting headaches.
Being invited to climb the highest mountain in the world with Conrad,
one of the best climbers in his generation,
is such a privilege.
For Irvine, being invited to climb with George Mallory,
the best climber of his generation, on the unclimbed Mount Everest -
I just can't imagine how he must have felt.
"I am walking on metaphorical air."
We shall go all out for the summit.
If I have to die, then there would be no finer death
"than in an attempt to conquer Everest."
On February 29, 1924, Mallory set sail from Liverpool,
after making Ruth a solemn promise.
As my grandfather was leaving England
and leaving my grandmother,
he told her that he would leave a photograph of her
at the top of Mount Everest.
And I think he was pretty confident that he would get there
and that he would leave that photograph.
With the eyes of the world upon them,
Mallory and Irvine set out on the three-week voyage for India.
Late that March, their convoy began its 350-mile trek.
Five thousand miles apart,
Mallory and Ruth wrote to each other frequently.
Couriers carried their letters across the world,
and after the months of tension they had gone through,
he and Ruth made up.
"I do miss you a lot."
I know I have rather often been cross and not nice,
and I am very sorry.
I was unhappy at getting so little of you.
Very, very much love to you, my dear one,
"Your loving Ruth."
"Dearest one,"
We went through a difficult time together in the autumn.
Your letters bring you much nearer.
"I wish I had you with me."
We can think of the relationship between Mallory, Everest and Ruth
as a kind of love triangle.
When he was at home with Ruth he was dreaming of Everest.
When he was away with Everest he was dreaming of Ruth -
until a certain point, until he got sufficiently close to the mountain
that it cast its spell over him.
The convoy of 300 pack animals and 70 porters
journeyed through Tibet.
Provisions included four cases of Montebello Champagne
and 60 tins of quail and foie gras.
On April 25th, 17,000 feet up,
they reached the last pass before Everest -
Pang La.
The Pang-La is the pass
where you get the first stunning view of Everest, right?
Yeah, and it's this vista.
You've got five of the world's highest peaks in one view.
That's Everest.
Wow.
It's so much bigger than all the other ones, isn't it?
Yeah.
It's really special that we haven't had any sign of the mountain,
and then you drive up to this high pass
and then she just reveals herself in all her glory...
you know, Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the Earth,
the mountain we call Everest.
Just... bang!
This wonderful photograph, taken on the 26th of April, 1924,
is pretty amazing.
See Everest there, there's Mallory, Irvine,
a couple of their Sherpas they had with them and their pony.
This is almost exactly the same spot, right?
Pretty close.
And they spent three weeks trekking on the plateau
to get to this point, to be able to see it.
And they were on their feet, they'd walked every day.
I mean, you think for us to get here we've been in a Jeep.
On April 29th, Mallory and Irvine
set up their center of operations - Base Camp -
12 miles from the summit.
Like Mallory, Conrad will rely heavily on Sherpa porters,
accustomed to high altitude.
But this is a still a dangerous mountain.
Over 200 people have died here - among them, many Sherpas.
Well, most important is safety.
Ten fingers, ten toes, one nose, all come back...
- Two eyes! - Yes, two eyes!
And if you see something with us, if we look sick,
then you tell us and say, "Go down!"
Before one embarks on an expedition,
it's customary to have a puja, which is a blessing ceremony.
As Chomolungma is Mother Goddess of the Earth,
the mountain is a deity for the Tibetans and the Sherpas.
Safe passage depends upon having a good puja.
Ho!
Good luck, everybody!
Lots of luck.
The Monks from the ancient monastery nearby
gave Mallory a very mixed welcome
when he approached their sacred mountain, Chomolungma.
It was 83 years ago on this day, May 15th,
that Mallory and his team came here
for a blessing from the lama.
The head lama welcomed the strange white climbers,
but it was an ominous encounter.
Along with the blessing,
the lama had a very stern warning for the expedition.
He spoke of disaster to come,
prophesying that the mountain's demons
would delight in forcing the climbers off Everest.
The monks had even created an illustration,
a very gruesome one,
of the Gods disemboweling a western man
and pitching him into hell.
It must have been a terrifying moment for Mallory.
He was not a superstitious man, but I think it would have been
hard to be in that landscape at that time on the third expedition
And not feel the atmosphere to be saturated
with signs and portent and hints and forebodings.
Despite the bad omens,
Mallory hoped that this time he'd summit the mountain.
The weather was good.
He planned to reach the top of Everest by mid-May,
to beat the snows that came with the monsoon.
On May 2, 1924, the giant convoy of climbers and porters
made its way out of Base Camp.
"My dearest Ruth,
The thought of you will be present in the most important decisions...
I am eager for the great events to begin."
Mallory realized that the way to attack Everest
was a series of camps, almost militaristic in style.
You go some way up, then come back down,
recuperate, and then move back up.
It's how you acclimatize.
He pioneered this technique,
and it's the one we still use on Everest today.
Conrad and Leo follow Mallory's route
through a forest of ice pinnacles, up to Camp 3.
You definitely can't cheat or hide from altitude and acclimatization.
It just makes everything really hard work.
- This is it, Leo. - Finally.
Camp 3 for 1924.
At Camp 3, altitude really begins to show its nasty side effects.
With each breath you're getting fewer molecules of oxygen in.
It's insidious.
You lose your appetite,
you have splitting headaches,
you have a difficult time just doing the simplest of tasks.
And yet 9,000 feet above you, the summit of Everest,
and it's calling you.
Somewhere above their Camp 2,
Mallory and Irvine experienced their first bout of bad weather.
A storm came in, the temperatures plummeted,
and Mallory realized it wasn't going to be
easy street up to the summit of Everest.
"My dearest girl,
I was acting as a lone horse and arrived first in Camp 3.
The glacier is everywhere beneath the stones...
My boots were frozen hard on my feet.
I was a good deal depressed by the situation...
I love you always, dear one."
Shall we try it on?
Yeah, I'm pretty keen to see how this stuff works.
Check this out.
Can you imagine climbing up with these things?
They're something else.
So I've got every layer on here.
Mallory and Irvine had seven layers on
when they went for the summit in '24.
But the big difference is here, in the footwear.
I tell you, the rest of this outfit seems pretty good.
But compared to the boots that we wear these days,
these things look decidedly, you know, inappropriate.
Wearing hobnailed boot and gabardine jackets,
Conrad and Leo venture onto the mountain.
We were right near the spot
where seven of Mallory's porters lost their lives in the avalanche.
But as in 1924,
we were just bound together by a thin cotton rope.
Using Mallory's technique,
Conrad cuts steps into the steep ice slope.
This is real mountain terrain.
I mean, if you lose your footing
you'll fall down 1,000 feet to the base of it.
And we need to start being careful now,
there's crevasses, there's danger of avalanche.
When you stand on the edge of a crevasse,
you just see this slot disappearing down into the glacier,
hundreds of feet deep.
But the dangerous ones are the ones that you can't see.
You can be walking across a snow bridge just a few feet thick
and fall through it to certain death.
- Yikes, she's deep, isn't she? - Yeah.
I'm right at the bridge!
Ten feet of rope!
Be careful, my friend.
It's phenomenal that they were able to get to 28,000 feet
in what I would basically call
clothing you'd walk through the forest.
Good job, Leo.
No... Good job Conrad.
Ohhh...
I'm knackered!
In 1924, Mallory's team were pinned down by weather so severe
Sandy Irvine feared for his life.
"May 10th...
Had a terrible night with wind and snow.
I don't know how the tent stood it.
Very little sleep,
and about two inches of snow over everything in the tent.
Awful headache this morning."
Irvine was suffering from altitude sickness.
His role as Mallory's climbing partner was now in doubt.
The harsh conditions forced the entire team back down to Base Camp.
When they arrived there
they found that two of the staff were dead.
Instead of preparing for a summit bid
they were burying people in Base Camp.
It must have been quite strange for Irvine to come to terms with that.
"One of our NCOs suddenly got paralysis,
probably due to a clot on the brain from frostbitten fingers.
The poor fellow died within half a mile of Base Camp."
Meanwhile, Mallory planned another dangerous summit bid.
But he allowed no sign of the team's suffering to show
in a letter to his eldest daughter, Clare.
"My darling,
There is not much wind today, so it is nice and warm.
Now tea has come and for the first time
since I don't know when, cake.
Shall we have a little tea party together one day in August,
with a flat, warm squidgy cake and nothing else?
Haven't you got a greedy Daddy!
It was already mid-May.
And soon, the snows would come.
The monsoon arrives early June every year.
It releases a tremendous amount of snow.
Climbing is impossible.
We had the same challenge as Mallory in 1924.
We were there late in the season.
If we didn't get up the mountain before the monsoon hit
we'd be in very serious trouble.
Over 22,000 feet up,
Conrad and Leo start the ascent of Everest itself.
They are on one of the most treacherous parts of the mountain -
the giant wall of ice and snow that leads up to the North Col,
the launchpad to the summit.
Despite all the modern equipment, the altitude hits Leo hard.
This is the first time I've ever been to this altitude,
and you move so desperately slowly, it's unreal, you just can't believe.
You take two steps and you're completely out of breath,
and I'm sure it's going to get worse as we get up.
With hobnailed boots and no guide-ropes,
Mallory led the assault on the North Col,
cutting steps into what he called 'its great battlements of ice. '
"The North Col was a triumph.
I enjoyed the conquest of the ice wall and making the steps.
Afterwards I was practically bust to the world."
Looking back down the valley,
he was already higher than the greatest peaks in Europe or America.
But the summit was still 6,000 feet above.
Here on the Col, Mallory set up his bridgehead to Everest -
Camp 4.
He planned higher camps further up the mountain.
These would take him within striking distance of the summit.
Mallory had a cough that wouldn't go away,
Irvine was suffering from diarrhea,
and the cold never left them.
"My dearest Ruth,
I couldn't sleep,
distressed with bursts of coughing fit to tear one's guts.
Fierce squalls visited our tents and shook them
with the disagreeable threat of tearing them away from their moorings.
There was never a more determined and bitter enemy."
Twenty-three thousand feet up,
Conrad and Leo test out Mallory's gear one last time.
Suddenly, temperatures plummet to 20 below freezing.
They're in severe danger of frostbite.
Thank you, Mingma.
No problem.
I can't imagine going to 8,500 meters in these boots.
Which is my theory,
that if those guys were moving they were okay...
but once they stopped moving the clock was ticking,
and it was a different game altogether.
My toes are freezing.
In '22, Mallory frostbit one of his fingers...
And he commented that it was bad but not that bad.
And then as a note aside he said,
"I wouldn't mind if I lost a finger for this summit."
And if I was in his shoes I probably would have thought
the same thing because it was the golden age of exploration.
Ahh, that's it.
Come on, my beauties.
Oh, God.
Bad weather blocks Conrad's path
and the monsoon snows are imminent.
He and Leo risk being trapped high on Everest, beyond rescue.
It was a stressful moment.
What are we doing?
We're climbing into the second week of June,
the monsoon's on our ass.
I get on the phone to Jennifer, and I say to her,
it's not worth what I'm putting you and the family through,
and I'm ready to come home.
The window was closing; I knew the monsoon was coming.
I was looking at the satellite imagery of the weather.
I said, Conrad, you know what?
I'm looking at the computer screen
and I'm seeing this giant wall of weather -
and it's the monsoon.
And I just said, Conrad,
you need to be confident that you can make it.
But if you have a chance to climb the Second Step,
I want you to go for it.
"My dear one,
What is happening to you?
I wonder so much.
Are you happy and are you well?
All the immortal love my soul has is with you...
Ruth."
Early in June, 1924,
two of Mallory's team, Norton and Somervell,
pushed on up the mountain, but Everest forced them back.
Snow-blind, Norton had to be carried down.
Somervell almost choked to death
before coughing up part of his frostbitten larynx.
Clearly, it was time to go home.
They were weak with exhaustion...
The monsoon was due...
But Mallory refused to give in.
"My dear girl,
This has been a bad time altogether...
Perhaps it's mere folly to go up again.
But how can I be out of the hunt?
Six days to the top from this camp.
It's 50 to 1 against, but we'll have a whack yet
and do ourselves proud.
Great love to you,
ever your loving George."
The big question is why George Mallory
thought it was worth one more shot.
I think the way to reconcile the overriding conflict in his life,
was actually to climb the mountain and be done with it
and go home to Ruth and say I've done it,
it's over, now we can get on with the rest of our lives.
He knew that this was it.
He couldn't come back again later
if he didn't get to the top.
It would be impossible to put Ruth through that again.
"I must tell you, dearest one,
I feel full of energy and strength.
My plan will be to carry as little as possible,
go fast, and rush the summit."
Mallory now needed oxygen and Irvine more than ever.
He wanted his partner,
now over the worst of his altitude sickness,
to apply his technical skills to the final assault.
"Irvine has been brilliantly skillful about the oxygen.
He has practically invented a new instrument."
"Fifth of June...
It will be a great triumph if my impromptu apparatus
gets us to the top.
It has been very trying for everyone
with terribly strong reflection off the snow.
I've prepared two oxygen apparatus
for our start tomorrow morning."
These are the last words written by Sandy Irvine.
He would have gone
wherever Mallory would have wanted him to go,
and I'm quite sure that he had every intention
of coming back from the mountain
with both feet, both legs, both arms intact.
I don't think he even entertained, truly entertained,
the idea that he would die.
I think he believed that he was indestructible.
Early on June the 6th,
support climber Noel Odell photographed Mallory and Irvine
as they set out from the North Col.
"Who could hold back when such a victory,
such a triumph of human endeavor was within their grasp."
"One must conquer, achieve, get to the top...
to know there's no dream that mustn't be dared."
There's nothing on top of Mount Everest.
There's not a pot of gold.
Well, why are we doing this?
You want the glory.
You want that feeling of standing on top of the world.
Gambling on beating the monsoon, Conrad makes his choice -
to follow Mallory up to the Second Step.
We're starting our summit bid and it's the 10th of June.
I think the 5th of June
is the latest anyone's ever climbed pre-monsoon.
The clouds in the background are an indication
of the monsoon rolling in,
so we're gonna play it by ear, one day at a time,
but this is our window.
It's just ridiculously tiring,
like it feels like someone's taking the Michael...
You take one step and your head's in your hands.
That is unreal, isn't it?
It's like an out-of-body experience.
On June the 7th, cameraman John Noel
filmed the last images of Mallory and Irvine.
They were two miles above him with their porters,
climbing into the death zone,
where the lack of oxygen
makes it impossible to function for long.
In the death zone, above 26,000 feet,
the body enters into what is known as necrosis...
One is dying.
Humans weren't meant to survive at this altitude,
and you're on borrowed time.
As they enter the death zone, Conrad and Leo use oxygen,
like Mallory and Irvine before them.
I was just thinking,
oh, the death zone - this place isn't that bad.
All of a sudden the first of the dead bodies
that we encountered appeared right by the path.
And it was a real...
Where else do you walk past a dead body?
Unless you're in a war zone
you're never going to witness anything like that.
It's such an extreme environment up there
that no one can do anything about it,
they can't bring them down.
High in the death zone, some 2,000 feet below the summit,
Mallory and Irvine pitched their last camp.
Here Mallory wrote to cameraman John Noel,
who was waiting further down to film the moment of triumph.
"Dear Noel,
We'll probably start early tomorrow to have clear weather.
Start looking out for us
either crossing the rock band under the pyramid
or going up the skyline at 8 p.m."
Clearly he meant to say 8 a.m.
He was tired.
He had been on expedition for three months
and now over three days in the death zone.
We knew the monsoon was imminent.
We only had a 12-hour window...
We had to strike while the iron was hot.
You're so nervous that I woke up
before the alarm and turned our headlamps on,
got all the layering systems set up.
When you step out of the tent it was a bit like a starting gate.
I was ready to go.
Leo was so excited,
he had that boost of summit energy.
It's probably similar to what Mallory and Irvine had
on their summit day
when they were there within striking distance
of the first ascent of Everest.
Imagine the morning of June 8, 1924...
They're cold, they've had a restless night of sleep.
Compound this with a lack of appetite,
severe dehydration.
Their bodies are wasted.
Their mental faculties are compromised.
Simple things become monumental chores.
Twenty-eight thousand feet is at the limit
of what is humanly possible.
Even with supplemental oxygen, it's very, very desperate.
And above them is a route that no one has ever been on.
And when you're the first,
overcoming this sense of the unknown
is one of the greatest challenges.
Think about it:
The anxiety, the fear, trepidation,
combined with the exhilaration.
All those things stirring around
and held fast by pain and suffering.
Mallory and Irvine climbed the North Face,
up towards the summit ridge,
where the Second Step blocked their path.
We got to the ridge just on schedule, right after dawn.
Absolutely wonderful.
At 12:50 on June 8, 1924,
support climber Noel Odell sighted Mallory and Irvine
through a gap in the clouds.
"My eyes became fixed on a tiny black dot,
a short distance from the base of the final pyramid.
Another moved up to join it.
They were moving expeditiously, as if to make up for lost time.
Then the whole fascinating vision vanished,
enveloped in a cloud."
Mallory and Irvine were missing.
"No trace can be found...
Awaiting orders."
Instead of capturing their victorious ascent,
cameraman John Noel had to film the search for them.
Days later, blankets laid out as a cross in the snow
signaled the devastating news.
Mallory and Irvine were lost, presumed dead.
Mrs Mallory, Herschel House, Cambridge...
Committee deeply regret receive bad news.
Everest expedition today...
Your husband killed...
Last climb.
Committee offer you and family heartfelt sympathy.
Ruth received the news one evening.
She decided not to tell her children that night
because they'd already gone to bed.
She actually went to bed herself
and slept with that terrible knowledge,
then in morning woke them up and took them into her bed,
and told them this terrible news.
"George's spirit was ready for another life,
and his way of going to it was very beautiful.
I know so absolutely he could not have failed
in courage or self-sacrifice.
If only it hadn't happened.
It so easily might not have."
The golden age of exploration had ended in tragedy.
The fallen hero was mourned by King and country.
It must have been an extraordinary day,
the bells ringing out around Britain in mourning...
And then a memorial service in St Paul's,
the mourners packing the pews
and speeches given in Mallory's honor.
Mallory, the man, soon became Mallory, the legend.
Many people were convinced he had reached the top of Everest.
But to summit, he would first have had to free-climb the Second Step.
On June 14th our expedition reached the Second Step -
this formidable rock face that stood between Mallory and the summit.
The Sherpas cleared the fixed-ropes and hauled the ladder away,
restoring the Second Step to what it was like in 1924.
Goal is today, pull the ladders up and climb it free -
that is without the assistance of the Chinese ladder.
This whole time on the expedition
I knew it was going to come down to this half hour,
on a cliff band at 28,300 feet.
Could I do it in the form that Mallory and Irvine
would have encountered it, free of any ladder,
free of any rope, free of any indication of man?
You have the whole North Face of Mount Everest
all the way down to the central Rongbuk glacier below you.
Seven, eight-thousand feet of exposure.
God, what am I doing?
Just like Mallory and Irvine,
Leo and I were tied together.
It's the brotherhood of the rope.
Imagine this...
June 8, 1924.
Whoa!
You okay?
Yeah...
Man!
What happened?
Bad step.
Had I not caught myself,
there's a good chance I could have fallen over the edge,
pulled Leo off of the mountain
and fallen 7,000 feet to the central Rongbuk glacier.
I think it shook him up somewhat
and he ended up spending quite a long time
figuring out what to do next, recomposing himself.
I mean, I'd say at least 20 minutes.
Want to stand on my shoulders?
I'm going to give it another go.
My job was to... climb the Second Step.
I knew that I had to try it from a different angle.
Okay...
High step...
I think I got it, Leo.
I think I got it...
Aaaahhh!
After eight years of keeping me awake at night
and being the 90 feet of climbing that I had to get done...
I got the Second Step.
I can't breathe.
I realized that my toes had gone completely numb.
My biggest fear through this whole experience
has been getting frostbite in my toes.
I was just concerned about getting to the top of the Second Step
as quickly as I possibly could.
I thought about Mallory.
Our ascent of the Second Step
opens up the possibility that they could have pulled it off.
Earlier I was under the impression that the Second Step
was an impossibility for climbers of that time.
Now I'm changed on that.
They definitely were capable of doing it.
The Second Step is not too much of an obstacle for them to overcome.
They were determined,
and if they were strong and they were moving quickly,
there's a chance they made it to the top.
"Dear one,
I will be thinking of you as you set off for the summit.
I know you can achieve your wildest dream."
"If we get within 200 yards or so
of the top of Everest,
we shall go...
And if it's a one-way ticket, so be it."
Eight years after I found the body of George Mallory,
the circle is complete.
A few hours before the monsoon closed in,
Leo and I summitted Mount Everest.
And we have shown that these could have been
Mallory and Irvine's final footsteps.
"Is this the summit crowning the day?
How cool and how quiet...
Have we vanquished an enemy?
None but ourselves?"