Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay are credited as the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, in 1953. But were they the first, or just the first to reach the summit and live to tell about it? There is still speculation about the doomed expedition of climbers George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine, who were last seen on the Northeast Ridge just below the summit. Then clouds descended, but the two men did not. George Mallory's body was discovered in 1999, without the camera the two had taken to record themselves at the summit.
A team from National Geographic filming a documentary last month made an important discovery. They found Sandy Irvine's left foot, unearthed by the melting Central Rongbuk Glacier. The booted foot has a sock labeled A.C. Irvine. Irvine's great-niece has provided a sample for a DNA test, but the sock label is pretty convincing. Investigators now know where to search for the rest of Irvine's body and possibly the camera. Read an account of the find at BBC. Be warned that the article has a photograph of the boot. -via Metafilter
(In the image above, Irvine is second from the left and Mallory is holding the magazine.)
Somewhere in the bowels of YouTube is a video showing an unusual route that Mallory and Irvine could have taken to avoid the otherwise-impassible 'steps' en route to the summit. Many 'experts' claim that they did not reach the summit, but my feeling is that they did but that Mallory was overcome with 'target-fascination' and injudiciously decided to go for it too late to be able to descend before nightfall. Mallory either slipped in the dark or was blown off by high winds. A Chinese expedition circa 1960 reported seeing a body, whose description matched that of Irvine, but the location has never been verified. I do hope the camera is found intact.