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.
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.
On the night of 1–2 February 1959, nine experienced Soviet ski-hikers died on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl in the northern Ural Mountains after fleeing their tent, which they had cut open from the inside, into a blizzard at temperatures near −25 to −40 °C. They died of hypothermia and traumatic injury within roughly a mile and a half of the tent, most without proper boots or outer clothing. The party was led by 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov, and the place where they died has carried his name ever since: Dyatlov Pass.
The group had set out as a ten-person ski tour toward the peak Otorten, an ambitious winter route undertaken by students and graduates of the Ural Polytechnic Institute. One member, Yuri Yudin, turned back early because of illness, which is why nine, not ten, died. When the party failed to return on schedule, searchers found the abandoned tent on 26 February, slit open from within, with the skiers’ boots, coats and supplies still inside. The first bodies were found nearby that month; the last four were recovered in early May from a snow-filled ravine, some bearing severe injuries — crushed chests and a fractured skull — and showing soft-tissue loss to the face that decomposition and the environment can explain.
The strange details — the cut tent, the lightly clad night flight, the violent injuries on some bodies — fed decades of theories ranging from a military weapons test to the wholly invented. The original 1959 inquiry closed by attributing the deaths to an unspecified “compelling natural force.” When Russian authorities reopened the case in 2019, they concluded in 2020 that an avalanche had most likely driven the party out of the tent; in 2021 a peer-reviewed study by the avalanche scientists Johan Gaume and Alexander Puzrin offered a physical mechanism — a small slab avalanche, triggered hours after the hikers cut into the slope to pitch their tent — consistent with both the flight and the crushing injuries.
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.”