NEPAL: About a century ago, a young British climber went missing on Mount Everest.
Last month, a team of mountaineers filming a National Geographic documentary found a boot revealed by ice melting on a glacier.
According to a BBC report, the boot was believed to be that of climber Andrew Comyn “Sandy” Irvine, who disappeared while trying to climb Mount Everest in 1924 with his partner George Mallory.
The boot with his foot inside gave his family closure while potentially making Irvine and Mallory the first to climb Mount Everest 29 years earlier before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
The other theory still plays – that the Chinese found the body and cleared it. Remains to be seen if more of the body is found or they missed this.
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Lost climber Sandy Irvine’s foot believed to have been found on Mount Everest 100 years after he vanished#everest #Irvine pic.twitter.com/Us5h75vhIg— Sidharth Shukla (@sidhshuk) October 12, 2024
People have been searching for his body for years, and Irvine, who was 22 years old at the time, is also said to have had a camera with an undeveloped film in it, which may have shown him and his partner at the summit.
History aside, his great-grandniece Julie Summers was over the moon about the find, saying it was “extraordinary.”
“I just froze… We had all given up any hope any trace of him would be found,” she said in a BBC interview.
The family gave a DNA sample to confirm the foot was indeed his, but the team of filmmakers was confident that it was him anyway. They also found a sock inside the boot with a name tag stitched into it with the words “A.C Irvine”.
The National Geographic team was led by well-known documentary maker and adventurer Jimmy Chin. Chin spoke about finding the sock to the National Geographic magazine, saying, “I mean, dude… there’s a label on it.”
The team discovered the boot as they were coming down the Central Rongbuk Glacier on the north face of Everest in September.
First, they found an oxygen bottle dated 1933, and that made them search for his body; several days later, they found the boot in the melting ice.
Summers said she had grown up listening to her grandmother talk of her younger brother, calling him “Uncle Sandy” and his adventures.
“My grandmother had a photo of him by her bed until the day she died. She said he was a better man than anyone would ever be.”
Irvine and Mallory were last seen alive on June 8, 1924.
Irvine’s family and the team who found the boot think this latest finding will make people search for the camera to find out if they did reach the summit.
It will be a moment that would rewrite history if that were the case.
“It would be nice – we would all feel very proud. But the family has always maintained the mystery, and the story of how far they got and how brave they were was really what it was about.
The only way we will ever know is if we find a picture in the camera he was believed to be carrying,” Summers said.
Featured image by Depositphotos (for illustration purposes only)