In June 1924, a British mountaineer named George Leigh Mallory and a young engineering student named Andrew "Sandy" Irvine set off for the summit of Mount Everest and disappeared—two more casualties of a peak that has claimed over 300 lives to date. Mallory's body was found in 1999, but Irvine's was never found—until now. An expedition led by National Geographic Explorer and professional climber Jimmy Chin—who won an Oscar for the 2019 documentary Free Solo, which he co-directed—has located a boot and a sock marked with Irvine's initials at a lower altitude than where Mallory's body had been found.
The team took a DNA sample from the remains, and members of the Irvine family have volunteered to compare DNA test results to confirm the identification. “It’s an object that belonged to him and has a bit of him in it,” Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers told National Geographic. "It tells the whole story about what probably happened. I'm regarding it as something close to closure.”
As previously reported, Mallory is the man credited with uttering the famous line "because it's there" in response to a question about why he would risk his life repeatedly to summit Everest. Mallory had already been to the mountain twice before the 1924 expedition: once in 1921 as part of a reconnaissance expedition to produce the first accurate maps of the region and again in 1922. He was forced to turn back on all three attempts.
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