Colorado College Bulletin

Climbing Towards History

Story by DEB ACCORD of the Colorado Springs Gazette

Jake Norton '96 stood motionless on the flank of Mount Everest's north face. At 27,000 feet, the thin, sub-zero air discourages lingering.

But Norton didn't move.

The 25-year-old Colorado Springs climber gazed, first in disbelief, then in reverence, at a body as smooth as marble and as white as the ice that cemented it to the ground.

He had passed other bodies on his climb to this point on a mountain seemingly insensitive to death. While the others yielded clues, they died in relatively recent times - twisted limbs clad in brightly colored nylon anoraks, high-tech pack frames bent on impact - this body had no death shroud of red or yellow nylon, no plastic mountaineering boots. Instead, frozen into the ground with it were tatters of rough wool tweed like that worn by mountaineers in the early part of this century. Face down, arms outstretched, the man's body lay as if he had been trying to arrest his fall. This frozen body, thought Norton and Conrad Anker, a fellow climber who had reached the body first, might well hold the answers to a mystery that has captivated the climbing world for decades: Was renowned British climber George Mallory the first man to scale the world's highest peak in 1924? Mallory and his climbing companion, Sandy Irvine, disappeared on that climb, and their bodies never were recovered.

Until now.

On May 1, nearly 75 years later, Norton and Anker thought they were looking at Irvine's body, based on years of sleuthing by many people. But they were wrong: It was Mallory's.

This spring, Norton was a member of a two-month Everest expedition unlike any other; an expedition on which, Norton said, "summiting Everest was a distant second to what we really went there to do."

While climbing the north face of Everest, the group planned to search for the bodies of Mallory and Irvine and a small camera carried by either that might have photos of them on Everest's summit. If evidence of their success existed, it would mean Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay weren't the first to stand at the top of the world in 1953.

The Mallory-Irvine Research Expedition team of seven climbers was assembled last year by Seattle-based mountaineer and highly regarded Mount Rainier guide Eric Simonson. Simonson, who had scaled Everest from the less-frequently climbed north side in 1991 and had been there many other times, was contacted by German researcher Jochen Hemmleb.

After years of research, Hemmleb believed he'd figured out where Mallory and Irvine had disappeared as they climbed that same face. Through a friend, he connected with Simonson. Hemmleb believed Simonson could find their bodies.

Simonson assembled a team - Dave Hahn, Tap Richards, Andy Politz, Anker and Norton, a fellow Rainier guide and Colorado College graduate - and sought sponsors to help pay for the trek. The group was excited, and confident about its mission.

"We knew we could do it," Norton said. "But when we were trying to get sponsors, we got laughed at. They didn't think we'd find anything." After all, no one had seen a trace of Mallory since his disappearance.

Finally, in March, after securing financial backing from the BBC, "Nova" and Mountainzone.com, a Seattle-based Web site, the group set out for Tibet.

Search area designated

By late April, they were in place to begin the search of the area Hemmleb had designated, which was the size of about 12 football fields. Their target area was based on a climber's final sighting of Mallory and Irvine hours before they disappeared on that June day in 1924.

The climbers had been searching the rock ledges and snow slabs separately when Norton got a radio message from Anker: "Last time I went bouldering in my hobnails, I fell off."

That was a code the group had agreed upon earlier, indicating Anker had found something. They didn't want to draw attention from other teams on the mountain and possibly ruin the site, Norton said.

Norton was the first to reach Anker and the body. Then the others arrived. They spent more than half an hour just taking photographs and video footage of the body. Then they just stood and looked, awestruck -- and uncertain how to search a body for clues to its identity. Finally, with archaeological precision, they began to chip the ice that held the body to the mountain and examine the bits of clothing. Norton found a nametag in the collar that read "G. Mallory."

It wasn't until then that the climbers realized who they found.

The group had been instructed by Mallory's family to bring back a DNA sample, so they gathered that along with other artifacts - an altimeter, a pair of goggles, a tube of zinc oxide -- then carefully buried the body with stones and gravel and set out for their camp down the mountain.

International interest

The story of a vanished explorer found after 75 years intrigued more than the climbing community. It intrigued people around the world.

Norton and his teammates were celebrated -- and reviled. Fellow climbers "said that we had no right to call ourselves climbers. That we were treasure hunters. That we were just trying to take something away from Hillary and Tensing," Norton said. "We had spent endless hours talking about what we should do if we found something. We were very, very careful."

When they realized whose body they'd found, "we started calling him George. We felt like we were with him the entire time, with the person, not the 75-year-old corpse that birds had picked over."

Finding and documenting the body was more about setting history straight than gaining fame or fortune, Norton said. He came away with a new respect for a climber who preceded him on Everest by 75 years.

"Seeing George Mallory changed my mind (about whether he made it to the summit). He was awe-inspiring in death. Maybe it's idealism on my part, maybe I just want to believe, but I'd say the odds are 75-25 he made the summit," Norton said in an article about the expedition in National Geographic Adventure magazine.

Together in spirit

There are many similarities between Mallory and Irvine and this modern-day group of climbers. All feel the pull of the world's tallest mountain; all are drawn by the physical and mental challenges posed by high-altitude climbs. It's an attraction Norton has felt his whole life. He was 12 when he first climbed 14,411-foot Mount Rainier in Washington. Later that same year, I was on Mont Blanc with my father, and I was hypothermic. It was so much work. I was in tears. It was an ordeal for me."

Norton eventually came to love climbing, and when he was a student at Colorado College, he "lived at Turkey Rocks (a popular climbing area near Deckers). Climbing became a total passion for me."

Tall and rangy with a youthful face that belies his experience, he spends part of each year as a climbing and mountaineering guide on Mount Rainier and near Ouray, where he specializes in ice climbing. A recent Outside magazine cover story called him "one of the country's best mountaineers."

An irresistible expedition

When the opportunity arose to be a part of the Mallory-Irvine Research Expedition, Norton felt ready. He'd climbed high before, reaching the summits of Choy Oyu, (26,906 feet) a peak in the Himalayas, and Alaska's Mount McKinley (20,320 feet).

But reaching Everest's summit wasn't to be. Bad weather kept Norton from the top; he and fellow climber Tap Richards turned around at 28,350 feet, with the distinctive pyramid of the summit in clear sight.

He plans on returning; Simonson already is organizing a return trip for 2001 to try again to find the camera and Irvine's body. It will be easier to obtain funding this time.

A book about the expedition is in the works, and Norton and others have been featured in major newspapers and magazines, and on TV around the world. The young climber also aspires to be a photographer, and has sold his Everest pictures to Vanity Fair, National Geographic Adventure and Outside magazines.

While Norton still has Everest in his sights, he isn't consumed by a desire to reach the top.

"I don't like to get fixated on summits," he said. "They're a nice place to stand, but there's more to climbing than that."

Such as setting history straight -- and making it in the process.

Copyright 1999, The Gazette, Colorado Springs. Reprinted with permission. All photographs copyright 1999 Jake Norton/Mountain World Photography.

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