Found: Remains of Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, Who Vanished Summiting Mount Everest in 1924

On June 8, 1924, British climbers George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine vanished while trying to summit Mount Everest. Their deaths were accepted with certainty: Everest had claimed lives on this and previous expeditions, and the world realized that the two adventurers could not have survived its snowy heights with scant resources and no shelter.

But virtually everything else about their disappearance was up for debate. What exactly went wrong, and where? One expedition member said he spotted the climbers moving across the Second Step—the penultimate of three rocky expanses just below the summit—though some believed he may have been mistaken. Most tantalizingly, did they reach the peak before they died? If so, they would have been the first to do it (predating Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s successful summit in 1953).

Clues surfaced over the following decades: an ice axe here, an oxygen canister there. Then, in 1999, climbers discovered Mallory’s body. His leg was broken, his skull punctured, and his elbow dislocated at best; his ribs had been bruised by a rope with a frayed edge fastened around his waist. All of this suggested that Mallory and Irvine had gotten separated during a fall—but where was Irvine?

Now we know … sort of. National Geographic broke the news that a team led by climber Jimmy Chin (director of the 2018 documentary Free Solo) found Irvine’s boot—with his foot still inside—somewhere below Mallory’s final resting place at 26,700 feet. They initially thought they might be near Irvine’s remains after locating an oxygen canister dated 1933, apparently left by the expedition that had unearthed Irvine’s ice axe. After days of traversing the Rongbuk Glacier region below the summit, Chin’s fellow climber Erich Roepke spotted the boot. “I think it literally melted out a week before we found it,” Chin told National Geographic. “I lifted up the sock, and there’s a red label that has A.C. Irvine stitched into it. We were all literally running in circles dropping F-bombs.”

Though Chin and company are keeping mum on the precise location of the find “to discourage trophy hunters,” per National Geographic, they’re hoping to uncover more evidence in time. One key missing piece of the puzzle is a Kodak camera that Irvine was known to have on him during that final, fatal climb. If it harbors a photo snapped at the summit, it could prove that Irvine and/or Mallory indeed achieved their goal.

Meanwhile, experts are analyzing DNA from the boot to confirm it belonged to Irvine. “But I mean, dude,” Chin said. “There’s a label on it.”

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