Everest mystery remains
Saturday 5th June 2010, 11:16AM BST.
An Australian climber has conquered Everest for a record third time – but failed in his quest to find the body of a former Shropshire schoolboy who died in an attempt on the world’s highest peak in the 1920s.
Adventurer Duncan Chessell had hoped to find the body of Andrew “Sandy” Irvine who disappeared, along with mountaineering legend George Mallory, near the summit in 1924, provoking decades of speculation over whether they had conquered the mountain a full 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing.
Mallory’s frozen body was discovered by mountaineers in 1999. But Irvine, a former Shrewsbury School pupil, was known to have been carrying a camera which could yield proof that the pair made it to the summit.
Photographic experts say, preserved by the freezing conditions, the film could be successfully developed.
Chessell, who becomes the first Australian to conquer the peak three times, had planned to search likely areas for Irvine’s body.
However, heavy snowfall and atrocious weather conditions ensured that Everest kept her secret safe.
Chessell came across a number of other dead climbers whose bodies have been left on Everest because it is too difficult and too hazardous to recover them.
The hazards of the high altitude “death zone” on Everest were starkly underlined.
He tried to help a Japanese climber who later died, and a climber from an American team who was on the summit at the same time as Chessell died on the descent.
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