On 8 June 1924, high on the northeast ridge of Mount Everest, the British climbers George Leigh Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappeared into cloud and were never seen alive again. They were the lead pair of the third British expedition to the mountain, attempting the first ascent of the highest point on Earth from the Tibetan side. Both men died — Mallory’s body was found in 1999, more than a kilometre below the summit, and partial remains believed to be Irvine’s were located in 2024. Neither return nor success was ever established.
The expedition was led in the field by Lieutenant Colonel Edward Felix Norton, after the nominal leader, Brigadier General Charles Bruce, fell ill with malaria on the approach. Days earlier, on 4 June 1924, Norton had climbed without supplementary oxygen to roughly 8,573 metres (28,126 ft), a confirmed altitude record that would stand for nearly three decades. Mallory, the driving spirit of the British Everest effort since 1921, chose the young and mechanically gifted Irvine — and the controversial bottled oxygen — for one last attempt.
The geologist Noel Odell, climbing in support below, caught the last confirmed sighting: two tiny figures moving on the upper ridge, by his account “going strong for the top.” Then the weather closed in and they were gone. Whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit twenty-nine years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood there on 29 May 1953 remains one of mountaineering’s enduring unanswered questions. Throughout, the expedition relied on Tibetan and Sherpa porters who carried loads and built camps high on a freezing, unmapped mountain, and whose labour made every British attempt possible.
On the night of 14–15 June 1937, an avalanche of ice swept down onto Camp IV of a German expedition on Nanga Parbat, in the western Himalaya, and buried sixteen men as they slept. All of them died — seven German climbers and nine Sherpa porters, almost the entire climbing party — without warning and, by every later account, without waking. It was the deadliest single event in the history of mountaineering to that time, and it remains one of the worst. The mountain stands at 8,126 metres in what is now the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan; Camp IV lay at roughly 6,180 metres on a snow terrace above the Rakhiot Glacier, beneath the ice cliffs of Rakhiot Peak.
The expedition was led by Karl Wien and was the latest German attempt on a mountain that had become a national obsession after the disaster of 1934, when Willy Merkl’s expedition lost climbers and porters in a storm high on the same Rakhiot face. The 1937 party was working its way up that face, establishing camps in heavy snow, when the entire camp was overrun. The dead Germans were Karl Wien, Hans Hartmann, Adolf Göttner, Günther Hepp, Martin Pfeffer, Pert Müllritter and Otto Fankhauser. The nine Sherpas killed alongside them — men whose labour carried every load up that mountain and whose deaths were long recorded more faintly than the climbers’ — were Pasang, Nim Tsering, Mambahadur, Kami, Gyaljen Monjo, Jigmay, Chong Karma, Ang Tsering II and Da Thondup. This record names them in full.
The disaster left no survivors at the high camp to describe it, so its sequence was reconstructed only weeks later, when a relief expedition under Paul Bauer dug down through the avalanche debris to the buried tents. What they found — men still in their sleeping bags, faces calm, killed in an instant — established what had happened: a mass of ice had broken from the cliffs hundreds of metres above and crossed the supposedly safe terrace in seconds, entombing the camp under metres of snow and ice before anyone could stir.
In July 1936 four climbers — the Bavarians Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz and the Austrians Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer — attempted the unclimbed north face of the Eiger in the Bernese Alps, and all four died. The last to die was the 23-year-old Toni Kurz, who survived the deaths of his three companions only to perish on a rope a few metres above his rescuers, unable to pass a knot with a frozen hand. His end is among the most harrowing in mountaineering, and it sealed the early reputation of the Eigerwand as the deadliest wall in the Alps.
The Eiger’s north face — the Nordwand, soon nicknamed the Mordwand or “murder wall” — is a concave sweep of rotten limestone, ice fields and constant rockfall rising roughly 1,800 metres beneath the 3,967-metre summit. In the mid-1930s it was the last great unsolved problem of the Alps, and its danger had already killed: in 1935 the German climbers Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer had died high on the face at a spot thereafter called the Death Bivouac. National prestige hung on the wall in the Nazi era, drawing ambitious German and Austrian climbers to a route the local Swiss guides regarded as suicidal.
The 1936 party started up on 18 July and made good early progress, in part thanks to a bold sideways pitch Hinterstoisser found and fixed with rope — the move ever after called the Hinterstoisser Traverse. But rockfall injured Angerer, the weather turned, and the team decided to retreat. They could not recross the traverse, because the fixed rope had been pulled through, and were forced into a desperate downward struggle. An avalanche then swept Hinterstoisser to his death, killed Angerer against the wall, and left Rainer to die of asphyxiation crushed by the ropes. Kurz alone survived the night. The next day, 22 July, Grindelwald guides reached a point on the face close beneath him, but could not bridge the last overhang, and he died on the rope as they watched.
In late May 1934, on the East Rongbuk Glacier beneath the North Col of Mount Everest, the British adventurer Maurice Wilson died alone in a small tent at roughly 6,400 metres, having tried to climb the highest mountain on Earth with almost no mountaineering training. He had reached India by light aircraft, slipped illegally into Tibet disguised as a monk, and walked to the foot of the peak convinced that prayer and fasting would carry him to the summit. They did not. His body, tent and diary were found the following year, in July 1935, by Eric Shipton’s reconnaissance expedition.
Wilson was not a member of any organised effort; he was a thirty-six-year-old solo enthusiast acting against the advice of the Royal Geographical Society, the Air Ministry and the British authorities in India. A decorated veteran of the First World War, he had become persuaded after a period of illness and recovery that a thirty-five-day regime of fasting and faith could cure any ailment and overcome any obstacle, and he chose Everest as the public proof of his idea. His plan combined two feats he was unqualified for: a long-distance flight in a de Havilland Gipsy Moth he had only just learned to fly, and the ascent of an 8,849-metre peak that the best-equipped expeditions of the age had failed to climb.
His three Sherpa companions — Tewang, Rinzing and Tsering, all veterans of the official 1933 Everest expedition — guided him from Darjeeling across Tibet to the Rongbuk Monastery and waited at Camp III as he made his final attempts. They are central to the story and were treated kindly by Wilson in his diary, even as his judgement failed; they urged him to turn back, and when he would not, it was their later testimony and Shipton’s expedition that established how and where he died. Wilson’s last diary entry, dated 31 May 1934, read simply: “Off again, gorgeous day.”
On 1 September 1905, an early attempt on Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain on Earth, ended in an avalanche on the Yalung face that killed the Swiss climber Alexis Pache and three local porters. The expedition was co-organized by the Swiss doctor and photographer Jules Jacot-Guillarmod and led on the mountain by the British occultist Aleister Crowley. The disaster came amid an open revolt against Crowley’s leadership; the slide struck a party descending in the late afternoon, and Crowley, hearing the survivors’ cries from his tent at a higher camp, did not climb down to help. The four dead were left where the snow buried them.
The attempt was one of the first serious efforts on Kangchenjunga, made decades before the technology and acclimatization practices that would eventually allow an ascent in 1955. The climbers approached from the south, up the Yalung Glacier, and pushed a chain of camps onto the steep, avalanche-prone face — terrain whose danger Crowley himself reportedly recognized, having warned against descending it late in the day. The expedition reached roughly 6,500 metres, far below the 8,586-metre summit, before friction over Crowley’s autocratic command brought it to the brink of collapse.
The episode is remembered chiefly for Crowley’s conduct: his refusal to leave his tent as men died below, his cold dismissal of the accident, and his departure for Darjeeling the next morning past the disaster site without stopping, carrying with him the expedition’s funds. The judgement of mountaineering history has been severe. But the deeper record is also a sober one about early Himalayan climbing — the lethal avalanche exposure of the great faces, the absence of any rescue capacity, and the routine erasure of the local porters who made up most of the dead and most of the labour, and whose names the record never preserved.