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 14 July 1865 a party of seven led by the English illustrator Edward Whymper made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, the 4,478-metre Alpine peak straddling the Swiss–Italian border above Zermatt — and then, on the descent, four of them fell to their deaths when the rope linking the party snapped. The victims were the French guide Michel Croz, the young and inexperienced Englishman Douglas Hadow, the experienced clergyman-climber Charles Hudson, and Lord Francis Douglas. Whymper and the two Zermatt guides, Peter Taugwalder the elder and Peter Taugwalder the younger, survived because the rope broke between them and the falling men. The accident closed what later chroniclers called the “golden age of alpinism.”
The Matterhorn had been the last great unclimbed summit of the Alps, and the 1865 contest for it was a race. Whymper had failed on it repeatedly from the Italian side, partnered with the local guide Jean-Antoine Carrel; when Carrel committed to a rival Italian team, Whymper hurried around to the Swiss side and assembled a scratch party for an attempt up the Hörnli ridge. They reached the top on the afternoon of 14 July, with Carrel’s party still several hundred metres below on the Italian flank, and beat them to the summit.
The descent was the killing ground. About an hour below the top, on steep rock made treacherous by the order of the rope, Hadow slipped and knocked Croz off his stance; the shock pulled Hudson and Douglas after them, and the four fell roughly 1,200 metres down the north face to the glacier below. The connecting rope — later established to be the oldest and weakest length the party carried — parted under the jerk. Three bodies were recovered; Lord Francis Douglas was never found. Throughout, the Zermatt guides Peter Taugwalder father and son carried the local knowledge and labour that made the Swiss-side route possible, and the elder Taugwalder would spend the rest of his life under an unproven suspicion of having cut the rope to save himself.
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 1985, on the descent from the first ascent of the West Face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, the British climber Joe Simpson shattered his right leg, and his partner Simon Yates — lowering him blind down the mountain in a storm and being dragged toward his own death — cut the rope, dropping Simpson into a crevasse. Both men survived. That is the rare and central fact of this case: a decision that should by every reasonable expectation have killed one climber instead left both alive, after Simpson, presumed dead, hauled and crawled himself across a glacier and down a moraine for roughly three days to reach base camp.
Simpson and Yates, both young and accomplished alpinists, climbed Siula Grande — a 6,344-metre peak in the Cordillera Huayhuash — by its previously unclimbed West Face in alpine style, carrying everything with them and leaving no fixed ropes or stocked camps behind. A third man, Richard Hawking, a non-climber, waited at their base camp. The ascent succeeded; the descent, down an unfamiliar and dangerous ridge in worsening weather, did not.
When Simpson fell and drove his lower leg into his knee, the two improvised a system of lowering him in 90-metre stages on their roped-together lengths. In darkness and storm, Yates lowered Simpson over an unseen ice cliff, leaving him hanging free in space, unable to climb the rope or descend it, and out of all communication. After holding the dead weight for more than an hour as his own snow anchor failed, Yates faced being pulled off the mountain to certain death, and cut the rope. Simpson dropped into a crevasse, survived on a ledge, and — rather than wait to die — lowered himself deeper, found a way out, and began the crawl that defines the story.
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.
In August 1953, an eight-man American expedition led by Charles Houston was driven into a desperate, storm-bound retreat high on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth, when one of its members, the geologist Art Gilkey, was felled by a life-threatening blood clot at roughly 7,800 metres. Gilkey died on the descent — almost certainly swept away by an avalanche while anchored to an ice slope on 10 August — and his body was never recovered intact, though clothing and remains positively identified as his emerged from the glacier forty years later. The other seven men survived.
The expedition, the third American attempt on K2, was attacking the Abruzzi Spur on the mountain’s southeast side, the route that remains the standard line today. The team had pushed Camp VIII to about 7,800 metres and was poised for a summit bid when a violent storm pinned them in their tents for days. There, Gilkey collapsed with thrombophlebitis — a clot in his leg that soon threw emboli to his lungs, a condition that is grave at sea level and effectively a death sentence in the thin air of the death zone.
What makes the episode famous is not the death but the rescue that nearly failed and the single act that saved the rest. As the exhausted party lowered the immobilized Gilkey across a steep traverse on 10 August, George Bell slipped on hard ice and his fall, transmitted through the tangled ropes, plucked five more men off the mountain. Pete Schoening, the youngest member at twenty-five, held all six on a belay improvised around his ice axe and a frozen boulder — an act mountaineers know simply as “The Belay.” It is remembered as one of the great feats of self-rescue, and as a model of the team ethos its members called the brotherhood of the rope. Throughout, the climb depended on Hunza and Balti porters who carried the loads on the lower mountain.