Mallory and Irvine on Everest — Last seen near the top, never seen alive again

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.

Boardman and Tasker on Everest — Two of Britain’s best, gone on the unclimbed ridge

On 17 May 1982, high on the unclimbed Northeast Ridge of Mount Everest, the British climbers Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker disappeared while attempting to force a passage through the rock towers known as the Pinnacles, at roughly 8,250 metres. Watched from below through a telescope, they were last seen in the late afternoon moving slowly toward the Second Pinnacle, then lost to sight; they were never seen alive again, and both died on the mountain. Boardman’s body was found a decade later, in 1992, near where they vanished. Tasker’s was never recovered.

Boardman, 31, and Tasker, 34, were among the most accomplished mountaineers Britain had produced — partners on the audacious 1976 first ascent of the West Wall of Changabang and the 1979 oxygen-free ascent of Kangchenjunga, and authors both. They were the lead climbers of a small, four-man expedition organised and led by Chris Bonington to attempt Everest’s last great unclimbed line, the Northeast Ridge, from the Tibetan side and largely in alpine style — without the vast siege of fixed ropes, stocked camps and bottled oxygen that had carried earlier parties to the summit.

The ridge defeated them at the Pinnacles, a series of steep rock-and-ice towers above 8,000 metres, in the heart of the death zone. The fourth climber, Dick Renshaw, had already been forced off the mountain after suffering a minor stroke; Bonington had turned back lower down; and the expedition doctor Charles Clarke and support climber Adrian Gordon remained below. When Boardman and Tasker pushed on toward the Second Pinnacle and did not return, there was no one within reach to help. The most probable explanation is a fall or collapse from exhaustion on appallingly difficult ground at extreme altitude.