(wind whistling)
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MALE REPORTER 1 (over TV): It's the traffic jam atop the world:
droves of climbers
waiting for their chance to summit Mount Everest.
MALE REPORTER 2 (over TV): With a large number of people,
the longer wait means climbers are spending more time
in what's called the Death Zone.
FEMALE REPORTER (over TV): The second American dying in just days,
bringing the total to 11 deaths already this season.
RENAN: Locals view Everest essentially as a god,
and by climbing the mountain,
you're stepping on the heads of their gods.
MARK: I've never been an Everest person.
The definition of adventure for me
is an endeavor where the outcome is totally unknown.
The Mallory and Irvine mystery is one of those stories,
like, you can't imagine an endeavor with more unknowns
than what they were facing in the 1920s.
Climbing to the highest point on Earth,
I think, in those days,
wasn't too much different from the idea of going to the moon.
George Mallory pioneered the first expeditions to Everest.
The world was shocked
when he and his climbing partner Sandy Irvine disappeared.
They were spotted just 800 vertical feet from the summit
and were never seen again.
♪ ♪
The essence of the Mallory and Irvine story for me
is the spirit of the climbers themselves.
What was driving them.
What happened to those guys?
♪ ♪
It's not just solving the mystery of two guys who disappeared.
It's solving the mystery to try to figure out
if they might have been the first
to summit the greatest mountain in the world.
THOM: Back in 1999, I had the opportunity
to go look for the bodies of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine.
Our goal was finding the Kodak VPK,
or vest pocket camera,
they're believed to have carried with them on that final day.
The hope is that the film inside it
will prove if they actually made it to the summit.
On the very first day of searching, we found a body.
His body appears to be mummified.
There's rope around his waist.
Can see a boot.
MAN: Here, wait, this is George Mallory.
THOM: Really?
MAN: George Mallory.
THOM: Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
MAN: See that? George Mallory.
THOM: Oh, my God.
THOM: He was face down in the surface.
His face was completely in, and his hands were like this.
Around, especially around the left part of his waist,
it looked like the rope really pulled tightly.
You could actually see the rope
kind of imprinted into the side of his waist.
Below his right knee, his leg was broken completely in half
and it was an open wound fracture.
And up there, an injury like that,
there's no way you're getting out of it.
And I can remember how overwhelming it was
to be in the presence of this guy, this man,
this icon of exploration.
But we had a job to do.
We wanted to try and tell his story.
So we searched the body as carefully as we could.
We found some personal effects,
but the most important thing that was not with Mallory
was of course the camera.
THOM: Burying George Mallory.
We didn't find the camera.
We looked fairly hard.
MARK: Since then people have speculated,
and I think this is logical, that Irvine had the camera.
Mallory was the leader.
So it would have made sense for Irvine, you know,
as his almost like assistant
to be the one taking pictures of the-- you know, the boss.
THOM: Can you imagine that camera?
It's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
If we find that camera, let me tell you something,
it's gonna just change things.
This is gonna be the greatest event
in the history of mountaineering.
MARK: History books say the first climbers to summit Mount Everest
were Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953.
If Irvine took a photo on the summit in 1924,
it would rewrite history.
It's out there somewhere, the camera exists.
It's there.
It just has to be found.
♪ ♪
We're on our way to go see Tom Holzel,
who is an Everest historian.
He has more knowledge about this than anyone alive,
and he just contacted Thom the other day
and said that he had GPS coordinates
for the location of Irvine.
He did the first expedition to try to find these guys in 1986,
but there was too much snow on the mountain
so they got shut down.
And when they eventually found Mallory in '99,
he was very close to where Holzel
had thought that he would be.
TOM: It's interesting to see when you have an assembly of facts,
can you figure out what happened?
Can you get to the conclusion?
I think you can.
That's what is so interesting about history.
Mallory and Irvine went missing on June 8, 1924.
In 1960, the Chinese made their first attempt
from the north side,
and one of the climbers climbed down a more direct route
and he said he saw a dead British climber.
A British? How do you know that?
He was wearing braces. Braces are suspenders.
All the English wore braces.
So that was a fantastic clue.
And then in 1995, a Sherpa named Chhiring Dorje
also took a more direct route and also saw a body.
So we have now two eyewitness accounts.
That means there is a body there.
So that's when I went to Brad Washburn at the Museum of Science
and I said, "Brad, do we have any good aerial photographs?"
And he says, "Tom, you've come to the right place."
(film projector running)
They flew over Everest in a Learjet at 40,000 feet
and did extensive mapping photographs.
And they seamed them together
and I made this eight-foot picture.
You can see the two trails where they diverge.
And there's only a very short area
where the more direct route, the lower route,
passes by these slots.
So if he's in a slot, and we know he is,
because two people say he is,
there's only one place where Irvine can be.
MARK: This is what you've come up with.
TOM: Yep.
MARK: Thom and I are proposing to be your boots on the ground.
TOM: Yep.
What are you giving the odds that he's actually there?
TOM: He can't not be there.
MARK: So you're saying, "He can't not be there."
Yes.
MARK: Wow.
THOM: He has worked for years
on identifying the exact location of that spot,
and he swears, if we go there, we will find Sandy Irvine.
(child talking indistinctly)
MARK: Climbing and adventure and exploration for me
is kind of like a compulsion.
I've been on a lot of expeditions in my life.
And it's just something that you feel, where it feels right.
Thom Pollard is an old friend of mine,
and I said to Thom, "This is a story that needs to be told.
This is the trip that you and I
were always meant to take together."
THOM: Ever since that day in May of 1999,
this thing has just become part of the fabric of who I am.
Here we are, 20 years later, I'm finally getting back
to have another look around, to try to wrap things up.
MARK: I shared the idea for this expedition with Renan Ozturk.
Renan is a film maker.
We've done a lot of adventures together in the past,
and he's one of the very best climbers in the world.
Mark has specifically avoided Everest in his career
because Everest isn't true exploration.
And I think this mystery
is his way of connecting with Everest.
He's the chief detective.
MARK: I have no idea what it will be like up there.
I've never done anything like this.
But I know what it will be like for me,
it will be similar to what it was like for them 100 years ago.
♪ ♪
RENAN: We can actually see what that expedition was like
for them back in 1924.
Team member John Noelle brought a film camera all the way to Everest,
and he captured incredible footage
of the entire expedition.
♪ ♪
(cowbells clanging)
♪ ♪
RENAN: We're gonna go, just like they did,
through the mountains on the south side of the Himalaya.
Cross the border onto the north side of China.
♪ ♪
RENAN: Up into the Tibetan Plateau.
♪ ♪
MARK: The focus is on the Irvine location and finding the body,
but it's the whole journey to get there.
And seeing the places that they were,
and putting myself into some of the exact positions
that they were in,
makes this so compelling for me.
THOM: I've pictured finding Sandy Irvine many, many times.
His mom and dad left their back door
open and unlocked for three years,
just in case he came home.
And I feel like if I could go and find Sandy Irvine,
they could lock their door.
♪ ♪
MARK: We're getting our first proper view of Mount Everest
and it is absolutely off the hook.
Spectacular.
Awe inspiring.
More than a little intimidating.
Mallory wrote in his journal,
"It is like the wildest creation of a dream.
Everest. A rugged giant.
A prodigious white fang.
A colossal rock plastered with snow.
From a mountaineer's point of view,
no more appalling sight can be imagined."
THOM: Mallory and Irvine were really special.
Mallory was this guy who just couldn't get it out of himself,
that he had to go to every length to try to be the first person
to stand on the summit.
And now here comes this young kid,
22 years old, Sandy Irvine, who's really strong,
great athlete, knew how to fidget with the oxygen apparatus.
And there they are just sealed together in history for eternity
as the symbol of going after things that everybody thinks is impossible.
It's 100 years later and I'm very unsure about whether
I could do any of this stuff, using oxygen with fixed ropes
the whole way, and a guide.
And these guys were doing it back when doctors were telling them
that if you slept at 23,000 feet that you would die.
So the daring, the boldness
and their role as explorers in history is unparalleled.
JAMIE: I'd like to take all the gear out of the vehicle.
We can drop it in the dining tent.
MARK: Jamie is the guide.
He's summited Mount Everest five times.
His primary job, apart from logistics
and getting us from point A to point B,
is to make sure that we come home from this expedition.
JAMIE: When we're on Everest, life is simple.
It's much more about life or death, black or white, yeah?
It's not about a color world up there at all.
And the basics of it is Everest is so tall
that it sticks up in the jet stream.
When the jet stream's on top of Everest,
there can be raging winds.
There might only be one or two or three days suitable to climb Everest.
For the whole year.
MARK: In terms of what it's like to search
high on Mount Everest for a body, I have no idea.
That's one of the reasons
why I'm so enthralled with this expedition
because I just have this singular focus,
which is Mallory and Irvine,
Mount Everest and following in their footsteps,
and there's kind of nothing else.
Mallory and Irvine were last seen
climbing a rock face just below the summit.
Climbing that high has to be done in stages,
by hiking along a glacier from Base Camp to Advanced Base Camp.
Then climbing to the top of a ridge called the North Col.
From there, it's a final two-day push up the ridge,
all the way to the summit.
(Sherpas singing)
RENAN: Today is a big day.
We're doing our Puja, which is a ceremony that the Sherpas do
to ask for permission and good luck
to climb the mountain.
♪ ♪
MARK: We just crested 18,000 feet,
so we've gained about 1,000 feet from Base Camp.
This is another milestone in the journey,
in that we just turned off the main Rongbuk Glacier
which is the route that we're gonna follow up to the North Col.
I'm really psyched.
I'm excited and I'm looking up at this mountain
and the thing's calling to me.
I wanna get up there.
♪ ♪
JAMIE: Final push.
MARK: Ah. Wow.
JAMIE: It's been a great day.
But I think everyone's hurting a little.
The last push is... is hard.
(wind whistling)
RENAN: Climbing Mount Everest has to do with cardiovascular fitness,
how your physiology of your body actually handles the altitude.
(coughing)
RENAN: You can be one of the strongest climbers in the world,
but your physiology just doesn't work for Mount Everest.
THOM: It's a slow, cold, agonizing process.
It slams you.
MARK: What I want to do right now
is I want to chart out where we're gonna go,
and then the point at which we're gonna fix our rope
and rappel down to Holzel's spot.
Okay.
MARK: Here's the second step,
and then this is the Holzel/Xu Jing area.
So we have to go to this spot.
Our search zone is high on the mountain,
in an area known as the Death Zone.
Our time at that altitude will be extremely limited.
The plan is to follow Mallory and Irvine's route to the summit,
then traverse back across the ridge
to find Tom Holzel's spot.
And go off rope, searching,
across a steep slope of loose rock,
with a 7,000-foot drop below.
THOM: The sun's just hit,
we're moving out of ABC to the North Col.
I know I'm not dying because I desire coffee so badly.
RENAN: It's pretty important to note that
Everest doesn't get climbed alone.
We've got all of our Sherpas
taking all of our advanced camera loads
and all of the little things we need to survive the North Col.
MARK: Off we go.
RENAN: Not sure how it's gonna go, but a lot of vert to climb.
2,000 feet.
♪ ♪
We just started up the technical part to the North Col.
I can't believe the conga line.
There must be 200 people up there.
It's a little scary.
If you look above us, there's a giant serac
just waiting to cut loose in the hot sun.
Like textbook (bleep) you don't wanna be under.
Let's move.
♪ ♪
(wind whistling)
MARK: That was burly.
My lungs are... not feeling great.
RENAN: We're all just hurting, just trying to acclimatize.
It's just a lot.
I was feeling decent and then hit a pretty big wall, but...
(coughs)
At least we all made it.
RENAN: Yeah.
MARK: You literally were only like,
20 minutes behind, like no big deal.
THOM: Yeah, yeah, don't worry about it.
RENAN: You're looking really good, Matt, I gotta say.
Ah, yeah. Yeah.
RENAN: It was a suffer-fest.
We were all suffering,
and the hundred-mile-an-hour death winds were coming.
Charts of the jet stream passing right through the summit.
That does not look good.
MATTHEW: Are we going to be alright?
(wind buffeting)
THOM: Broken tent.
(yawns)
MARK: When we woke up in the morning,
poked my head out the door of the tent,
looked up at the North Face, which had been beautiful.
That was now replaced with this nasty, swirling cloud.
Holy crap.
(wind roaring)
MARK: Ahhh!
Renan.
THOM: Do you wanna come in here?
(wind roaring)
MAN: Oh.
MAN 2: Is everyone okay?
RENAN: It threw a tent in the air
and nearly killed a few people.
I'm glad they were clipped into fix lines
'cause it threw 'em off the ridge
and they were just hanging limp, halfway down the face.
(wind roaring)
♪ ♪
MARK: Pretty windy now, but not nearly as bad,
so I'm going next door.
Renan's gonna launch the drone.
See what happens.
(drone humming)
RENAN: We can search 1,000 times more
just through this technological advancement
of what the drones are capable of.
MARK: It was kind of our vision to do all these drone flights
and to photograph the terrain
rather than having to put boots all over the mountain,
which is incredibly dangerous.
RENAN: This is, this is good, we're cranking.
It's unbelievable what you're doing, Renan.
♪ ♪
RENAN: Take a photo here.
MARK: Yeah.
(click)
RENAN: And then should I go in a little tighter?
MARK: If you can.
RENAN: Just gonna get right in there this time.
Gonna really push it.
MARK: Oh, my God, dude.
You're frickin' right there.
You're so there.
Yep, get that ledge...
and up in here.
(click)
RENAN: Getting a thumb workout.
MARK: Holzel would be losing his mind
if he could see this right now.
(click)
RENAN: Alright, I'm gonna come home.
MARK: Bring her home.
We just flew a drone to 28,300 feet on Mount Everest.
No one's ever done that (bleep) before.
You're in uncharted territory.
♪ ♪
(drone humming)
(beep)
RENAN: Okay.
First-hand view. Drone POV.
MARK: Yeah. Just a little.
THOM: Oh, man.
I haven't seen these, holy (bleep) dude.
MARK: So we have two eye witness accounts,
Chhiring Dorje and Xu Jing,
but Xu Jing said that Irvine was in a slot.
I see a slot there but it's shadowy.
THOM: Wow.
MARK: I think this matches up really closely with Holzel's theory.
Holzel's theory goes like this.
Mallory and Irvine are returning together down the North Ridge.
We don't know if they made it to the summit
but we know they're on the way back down, and they're in a hurry.
It's a snow storm.
Mallory falls.
The rope catches him, but Irvine can't pull him up.
So he cuts Mallory loose.
Mallory continues on but he falls again
and dies from his injuries.
Irvine is still working his way down,
following the line of least resistance.
He's exhausted, he's cold, he's run out of oxygen.
He crawls behind a rock to take shelter from the weather
and he freezes to death.
This zone right in here,
this is where I wanna go, on foot.
Okay. Let's talk a little strategy, quickly,
in terms of what we should do for the next few days,
with our weather forecasts, we go to ABC.
It's hard work going down, but we recover so well.
With Everest, with Chomolungma,
it's not a question of when we're ready.
It's a question of when she's ready for us.
The equivalent of going for a three mile run
is the energy it takes to put on your boots.
Alright, dude. I'll follow you down.
MARK: It's a tiny bit demoralizing to lose
all this ground that we've gained,
but that's what we have to do.
Gotta go down, recover as best we can,
then come back up.
RENAN: Honestly, it feels like a low point in the expedition.
We're all just really tired.
And a lot of us are getting sick.
But the main mission was to fly the drones really close to the search area
and we, I think we really accomplished that.
We gotta pull them up on the laptop, take a closer look.
And there's all these little crevices
where we think the body might be.
This photo right here, it's absolutely incredible
and...
I think I'm looking at the Holzel spot right here.
What's that?
THOM: Whoa. Yeah, there's something.
It's a dead body.
MARK: Oh. Holy (bleep).
THOM: Not an old dead body.
MARK: That black, that's his leg.
THOM: Yeah, faded red jacket.
JAMIE: This is probably a Japanese guy.
Now, during the night somebody said,
"Did you see him in trouble?" and we said "No,"
but he was only 10 meters away from the trail.
THOM: There's over 100 bodies on Everest,
frozen in the place where they died.
It's crazy but there's just no good way to get them down.
Imagine dragging a 200 pound frozen, stiff body
down the mountain.
It's nearly impossible.
And the fact is, is that no matter how many bodies are on it,
it is the highest point in the world.
There's nothing that's gonna stop people from wanting to touch it.
(wind whistling)
Oh, wow. The conga line at the top.
Holy (bleep).
There's only a few days a year suitable for a summit climb,
and there was an early weather window.
And there was, I don't know, something like 200, 300 people
trying to climb Mount Everest from the north.
Every single one of 'em went for the first weather window.
Wow.
That's really inspiring to see that, that's incredible.
THOM: Do you wish you were there with them?
MARK: Yes.
THOM: Let's be real.
I do, I mean.
I'm not gonna lie.
It feels weird to be sitting here
while all the action is going on up high.
JAMIE: There are queues of people,
lines and lines of people waiting.
MARK: Jamie said to us, "You know what?
This is a bad idea. I got a bad feeling about it.
There's gonna be huge lines,
and we're gonna get entangled up in the whole thing.
And it's gonna be a mess. It's gonna be a (bleep) show."
MALE REPORTER 1 (over TV): It's the the traffic jam atop the world.
An image now emblematic of a deadly new normal,
droves of climbers waiting for their chance to summit Mount Everest.
MALE REPORTER 1 (over TV): On Everest, climbers are forced to wait
for windows of good weather.
When it clears, everyone moves to the summit
and with a larger number of people, the longer wait means
climbers are spending more time in what's called The Death Zone,
that's above 28,000 feet,
where the lack of oxygen can be lethal.
MALE REPORTER 3 (over TV): Most of the fatalities this year
came on the way down,
with climbers dying from exhaustion, dehydration,
heart attack, stroke, or simply running out of oxygen.
FEMALE REPORTER (over TV): That growing crisis on Mount Everest,
a second American dying in just days bringing
the total to 11 deaths already this season.
THOM: The news is going crazy.
I've gotten texts from people I haven't heard from in ages.
We are not these people who are on this line,
getting to the summit.
First of all, that's the south side.
We stayed down to let the crowds disappear.
The press goes crazy.
Every frickin' reporter is talking about
what a bunch of arrogant (bleep) people are, who climb that mountain.
It's not true.
MARK: And you're sitting at home and you're looking at the photos on CNN
and you just think, "Ah, what a bunch of selfish jerks."
But when you're here, you realize, um...
that it's actually something kinda special going on here.
The spirit that's driving those people
is I think the same spirit that was driving Mallory and Irvine.
We wanna solve the mystery,
but this mountain is pretty, um, alluring.
THOM: It's a lot of freakin' people waiting in line.
It sucks you in.
THOM: I had the opportunity to actually
experience and be beside George Mallory's body.
I looked right into his face.
This is the face of a man who had three children.
He had a wife at home.
He was just a guy who was out there doing what he loved.
People have lost their lives here
for almost 100 years.
And they're gonna keep coming here no matter what,
no matter how many people die.
A hundred could have died.
They'll be coming back next year.
MARK: We were waiting in Advanced Base Camp
for the crowds to clear,
and the day before we were set to leave,
we went for a little hike around camp
and on the way back
Thom had some kind of bizarre neurologic episode.
Thom, what's going on?
THOM: Getting my blood pressure taken.
I had this, just before I popped into my tent,
I had this really, this tingling,
kind of almost pleasant,
believe it or not, feeling here in my cheek,
and it moved kinda up into my eye area.
Throughout the expedition
I've been communicating with Dr. Peter Hackett.
You know, he's a high altitude doctor.
And I told him about Thom's symptoms.
He said, "Mm, that doesn't sound good.
You know, it's possible that he had a TIA,"
which I think stands for trans ischemic attack,
it's kind of a miniature stroke.
"Numbness can occur from Diamox,
but not trouble moving lips."
So you definitely had trouble moving your lips?
Yeah.
MARK: Yeah?
"He probably shouldn't go up because a chance this is a TIA."
If it was a TIA, you don't wanna go up.
THOM: Yeah.
No one would go up, because...
Yeah, then you're (bleep).
...you could have a stroke and die.
Yeah.
♪ ♪
MARK: I don't wanna go up there without him.
I kinda wanna encourage him to just go anyway but I feel like
that would be irresponsible because if he really did have a TIA
and then he died up on the mountain,
you know, that would be on me, if I encouraged him to go.
It's your call, Thom.
RENAN: It is your decision, it's just a really hard one
because this story isn't life or death.
And uh... yep.
MARK: Yeah, you've got kids.
I mean, I have four of my own so I kinda have a unique perspective on that.
And for me, I think about them, you know,
like, is it worth it for them?
Alright.
MARK: Thom's my original partner in this whole endeavor.
He's sitting right next to me and I'm looking at him
and he's realizing that his climb is over.
His dream, you know, to try to find Sandy Irvine
and try to solve this mystery,
it's over.
Oh, my God.
That's the hardest thing...
in the world.
Watching your blood brothers go onward.
♪ ♪
MARK: Five minutes later
we were on our way up the trail without him.
♪ ♪
RENAN: How you feeling? What's going on?
MARK: I'm just trying to frickin' survive
so that I can actually climb up near the top of Everest
and look for Sandy Irvine.
And as we get deeper and deeper into this,
I realize how absolutely insane this whole project is.
RENAN: You know, that's the whole reason we're here
is because of the mystery.
If fate had dealt them a different hand in that last attempt,
maybe they would have lived.
TOM: The last photograph of Mallory and Irvine
was taken at the North Col Camp.
Irvine just standing there sort of with a hurry up stance.
He's got his two oxygen bottles.
Mallory is fiddling around with some strap or something like that.
The apparatus was heavy, 35 pounds for three tanks.
They would have had to take three if they wanted to make the summit together.
Mallory wrote in a note, "It's a bloody load for climbing."
But it makes a huge difference.
It at least doubles your climbing speed.
MARK: We're going up to the next camp.
All serps packing up.
This was the final push up the mountain.
I think we all understood that if we made a misstep,
the entire endeavor could just go off the rails.
It was grueling.
It's incredibly tedious,
and the altitude is kicking your ass.
Imagine what that must have been like in 1924,
back in the day when it wasn't festooned
with fixed ropes like it is now.
MARK: I can't believe those guys did this, with no modern gear.
TOM: It was really pathetic what they had.
The tents were drafty.
The sleeping bags were inadequate.
The stoves were woefully weak.
MARK: To be dressed the way that they were in tweed and Burberry
and all these layers of silk
and with their bomber caps and their little goggles.
And their leather hobnail boots.
And their 100-foot manila rope that was that thick.
It's mind-boggling.
TOM: Professor George Havenith in England
did a complete replica of the clothing they wore and said,
"The clothing they wore was enough to keep them going
when it was sunny and not too windy
but if the weather got bad, they could not survive."
(wind buffeting)
MARK: We start moving up from Camp 2.
And it's windy enough that it's not comfortable.
You can't just, like, hang out.
You get cold even with a down suit.
♪ ♪
MARK: A little scary.
A snow storm above 8,000 meters.
♪ ♪
This is the spot where Odell had his last sighting
of Mallory and Irvine.
And it's kind of fitting that it's a snow squall,
because there was squalling
and then it lifted out
and he turned the corner here...
and had that famous sighting.
♪ ♪
RENAN: Team member Noel Odell
was the last person to see Mallory and Irvine.
He describes them high on the ridge,
going for the summit.
And then the mist came over and engulfed them,
and they were never to be seen again.
MARK: Everybody's been disputing since 1924
about Noel Odell's sighting of the two climbers.
He saw them surmounting a rock step.
And the question is whether it was the first step
or the second step.
And the idea is that if they were that far along
and that if Odell saw them surmounting the second step,
that they probably could have made it to the summit.
Because it's the crux of the whole route.
♪ ♪
MARK: You can sort of see [second step] now.
♪ ♪
If Odell says he saw them over the second step,
I'm pretty sure nothing would stop them going to the summit.
♪ ♪
MARK: We got to Camp 3.
We got there at like, 5:00 or 6:00 p.m.
and we were told we were gonna leave at 10:00
and we were gonna go to the summit.
RENAN: We have about six hours of relaxing.
How do you feel about going to Holzel's spot?
MARK: I'm trying to recover so I can do so.
To be honest, I feel less confident than I did before.
God, it's freakin' hard getting up here. 8,300 meters.
MARK: It's been, uh...
(coughing)
It hurt. It hurt.
THOM: The Death Zone is correctly named.
There's nothing dramatic about it, it's just the truth.
You can't eat enough, you can't sleep enough,
you can't drink enough.
Your body is literally wasting away up there.
And if you fall asleep one too many times,
you never wake up again.
♪ ♪
RENAN: It is 10:30.
We just slept in some abandoned tents up here in the Death Zone.
Scrounged some random food.
And against all odds
we're launching to try to solve this mystery.
MARK: We were working our way up to the summit
and how are we gonna have the energy to do this?
I mean, we'll be lucky if we even make it to the top.
♪ ♪
Oh.
♪ ♪
We get to the first step, you know, it's pitch black.
This is like a 60-foot-high vertical cliff.
I'm like, "Holy (bleep), this is the first step?
What the hell is the second step like?"
RENAN: I think we all underestimated how hard
Everest and the climb was gonna be.
Eventually you get to the second step.
You know, this is the most famous part of the route.
TOM: The big question has always been,
"Could Mallory have even climbed it?"
David Breashears estimates that Mallory
had a 5.8 climbing ability and it was a 5.9 climb.
So that makes it right at the borderline
of what Mallory could possibly have done.
MARK: I've been a climber for my whole life,
so I wanted to make my own assessment.
And I had this little fantasy that maybe I would try
to free climb the second step to get my own sense of whether
I think Mallory and Irvine could have done it.
Marking the second step.
It does look doable, but not doable enough
that I wanted anything to do with it.
And so, I hopped on the ladder.
I think Mallory in particular, being as skilled of a climber
and as determined as he was, I think he probably could have done it.
RENAN: I just see Mark climbing up the ladder
and I had a little panic.
The regulator on the top of the oxygen bottle,
which feeds the oxygen down the hose, cracked.
And there's dead bodies on either side.
One of them from a couple weeks ago.
RENAN: That's (bleep) spooky.
This (bleep) is horrifying.
MARK: (bleep) gnarly, huh?
RENAN: Yeah, I just lost almost half my oxygen.
MARK: You did?
RENAN: Yeah.
MARK: You run out of oxygen,
you become one of the dead guys lining the side of the route.
But one thing you realize quickly when you're up there
is that it's kind of every man for himself.
I mean, I was barely even alive myself,
so I couldn't really do anything for anybody else.
♪ ♪
RENAN: The severity of the whole situation really hit home.
And from that point on, I had the hardest climb of my life.
♪ ♪
MARK: Mallory wrote to his wife Ruth
that other members of the expedition didn't have the guts
to like really lay it on the line.
And I think that he had taken Irvine's measure
and he knew that Irvine would follow him no matter what.
And that he had the heart to just lay it all out,
go right to the edge.
(breathing heavily)
RENAN: Third step.
(breathing heavily)
♪ ♪
RENAN: How you feeling?
MARK: Hammered.
Couldn't have picked a better day.
(breathing heavily)
Incredible.
(breathing heavily)
♪ ♪
Woo!
There's no one on the mountain, except for us.
We had the entire peak to ourself.
And it was an absolutely perfect day.
♪ ♪
RENAN: That was something really special.
To feel the power and the energy of the tallest place on Earth.
The same power that drew Mallory and Irvine.
MARK: After that last sighting by Odell,
Mallory and Irvine were never seen again.
Odell led a search party up to their high camp.
And after two days, they marked a signal in the snow.
It was a black cross made out of sleeping bags.
Whether they made it to the top or not,
they probably died on the way back down.
RENAN: We went for the summit.
And now we're trying to make it down safely.
Yet to be determined if we go searching for Irvine.
Personally, I barely made it
and I just hope to have a safe descent at this point.
MARK: Yeah, let's get going.
(coughing)
MARK: We're on the summit of Mount Everest.
(coughing)
We're supposed to descend and on the way down
go off the routes and go out exploring, solo,
across the yellow band.
And I thought to myself, "I'm gonna do this.
I'm gonna find Holzel's spot.
I'm gonna find Sandy Irvine, I'm gonna find the camera."
TOM: I've showed them where I think it is,
and I hope they follow that advice and find it.
To me, it's been a science project,
and the nice thing about a science project is at the end,
you prove your theory or you disprove it.
But hey, they're the explorers, not me.
MARK: We're getting closer and I'm thinking, OK,
when and if I find this spot,
am I really gonna be able to do this?
Oh, my God.
I was smoked, more tired than I'd ever been in my life.
You have to be able to move under your own power.
And if you can't, that's it.
Then you're gonna die.
And as evidence of that, you see dead bodies.
RENAN: I can see Mark's brain thinking,
when we stopped at Mushroom Rock
with our backs against a frozen body.
MARK: I'm looking at the GPS
and I'm trying to collate things in my mind, like, where am I?
I'm trying to get oriented.
And one of the distinguishing features, unfortunately,
was a dead body of this Japanese climber
that we had spotted when we were looking at the drone footage.
And then I looked down and all of a sudden, I could see it.
MARK: There's the Japanese [climber].
Yeah.
There's Holzel's spot.
♪ ♪
Yeah, I wanna do it.
♪ ♪
Where's the ax?
RENAN: Here it is.
RENAN: Be careful.
MARK: And it was the moment of truth.
SHERPA: No, no, no!
It's in right there.
SHERPA: No, no, no!
Very dangerous.
MARK: I was off the rope and it was very clear
that it was not something that they had wanted me to do.
SHERPA: Very dangerous.
MARK: Just an absolute emotional roller coaster.
Determination, "I gotta do this, I have so much into this."
And then self-preservation.
"Dude, you have four kids. Like, this is not worth it.
It's not worth risking your life."
(breathing heavily)
Finally I just said, "(bleep) it, I'm going for it."
SHERPA: No, no, no!
RENAN: He cast off into the unknown.
And neither Matt nor I had...
had the wherewithal to follow him.
♪ ♪
SHERPA: Careful.
RENAN: I was on the edge of my seat
wondering what the answer to the mystery is going to be.
♪ ♪
SHERPA: Very dangerous. Very dangerous.
(radio chatter)
MARK: As I started dropping elevation and traversing on these ledges,
I realized that I was very close
to where Mallory might have fallen
and where Irvine might have fallen.
And there were spots where if my crampons skated off,
I would just fall into the abyss.
♪ ♪
As I was going, I was looking into these slots
because the two eyewitness accounts
said that they saw the body in a slot of rock.
♪ ♪
(radio chatter)
MARK: As I came to the various slots,
I was five foot above the drop
where if I slipped and fell
I would essentially suffer the same fate as Mallory.
♪ ♪
I didn't see anything.
(wind buffeting)
And that was it.
I went to Holzel's spot.
There was nothing there.
(breathing heavily)
I went against the Sherpas, which I feel really bad about.
I almost didn't go.
But I spent so much time studying that spot,
I just had to go there.
Even after going to the summit, I, seriously,
this is the hardest day that I've ever had in my life.
I had to get boots on the ground
to either prove or disprove Holzel's theory.
I think that's ultimately our...
our contribution to this mystery.
And I think that Irvine was there in 1960.
I think it's corroborated by Chhiring Dorje in 1995.
And I think sometime between then and now
Irvine and the camera went to the bottom of the North Face.
And I don't think there's a chance in hell
of anyone ever finding it.
Because I looked down there, and I saw the size of the crevasses.
And just the way that the sweep of the avalanches
would just flush things down into the abyss.
Never gonna... never gonna find him down there.
(breathing heavily)
♪ ♪
This was the most frantic, intense,
dangerous thing that I've ever done in my life.
We gave it absolutely everything that we had,
and the mystery remains.
♪ ♪
THOM: People who don't really know about this mountain
are very quick to criticize it.
What happens when people set their focus on this mountain
is that the people become driven by ambition.
And ambition is a really tricky thing
because sometimes it will cause us to cross over this line
that can bring us to the point of no return...
which is exactly what happened
to George Mallory and Sandy Irvine.
MARK: We all have sort of an imaginary fence that we draw
as far as how much risk we're willing to take.
And I think, for a father of four,
I stepped over onto the wrong side of the fence on this trip.
What I hope people will understand
is that everybody that's here, that's trying to climb Everest,
they're embodying the same spirit of Mallory and Irvine.
RENAN: What they did is unimaginable.
The sheer grit it took to climb that high
and into the unknown at that point in time
and the odds of them making it to the summit
and being the first to stand on top of Chomolungma, Everest.
I don't know, man.
That's the story that keeps us coming back.
(wind whistling)