When I was in high school, I went with a group of friends to Central Texas to camp at a place called Enchanted Rock. It’s a local landmark about 1,800 feet above sea level. I don’t remember whose idea it was to climb it, but I gave it a try and got about halfway up without any hiking boots, rope or carabiners. I thought to myself, If I climb any farther up this thing, I am going to hurt myself very badly. And that was the end of my career as a mountaineer, which I have never regretted.

According to Wikipedia, there are approximately 200 dead people lying on the ground of Mount Everest, mummified by the cold, dry air. One of them --- which doesn’t come up in this book --- has been there since 1996. He was identified just this year as Dorje Morup, an Indo-Tibetan border policeman. “The body became known as Green Boots,” the Wikipedia editors tell us, “because of the distinctive green mountaineering boots associated with it. For many years, it was regarded as a landmark on the northeastern approach to the summit.” (This anecdote has done nothing at all to convince me that mountaineering is a fun thing to do.)

"The ambition of THE EVEREST MYSTERY is to present all of the relevant facts that can be known, which it achieves splendidly and with a fair degree of clarity."

THE EVEREST MYSTERY is about two other lives lost on Everest from a doomed expedition a little over 100 years ago: George Mallory, who famously said that he wanted to climb Everest because it was there, and Sandy Irvine, the youngest member of his team. They perished trying to become the first to scale the summit of the Himalayan mountain. They weren’t the first victims of Everest --- seven porters were killed in a 1922 avalanche --- but they are undoubtedly the most famous. 

Mallory’s body was found in 1999 as part of an Anglo-American expedition with the twin goals of creating a film documentary and finding a Kodak camera that the men carried with them, which might be proof of whether or not they reached the summit first. A more recent 2024 expedition --- which is the initial incident in the book --- found one of Irvine’s boots, with his foot still inside it, on an expansive glacier.

The prospective reader might ask, “Well, what’s so mysterious about this?” Mallory and Irvine died within the high reaches of Everest known as “the death zone,” and it isn’t called that for nothing. Mallory’s body was badly injured, the probable result of a fall. Case closed. But what is open for discussion is if either of them summited the mountain before they died. This turns out to be a very technical question with a lot of moving parts. The authors of THE EVEREST MYSTERY are Julie Summers, a great-niece of Irvine, and Jochen Hemmleb, a self-confessed Everest obsessive. 

There is a lot to recommend here. The book is full of British pluck and understatement, as well as eccentric, driven characters. It's about adventure on the world’s highest peak, and the central question of whether or not it was sporting to use oxygen on the climb. (It turns out to be 10 times more dangerous not to use oxygen.) Climbing Everest in that era was a romantic enterprise; today it’s a commercial experience.

There is a lot of data for the casual reader to sift through. Details of later Chinese expeditions where climbers may or may not have seen dead bodies. Complex descriptions of climbing obstacles. Peculiarities of the local landscape. The ambition of THE EVEREST MYSTERY is to present all of the relevant facts that can be known, which it achieves splendidly and with a fair degree of clarity. It’s a technical masterpiece that, like Everest itself, is going to appeal more to those already knowledgeable about the intricacies of climbing than to those who are more sea-level types.