In the spring of 2019, I led a team to the Chinese side of Mount Everest to try and solve one of mountaineering's greatest mysteries: Who really was the first to leave their boot prints on its summit? Officially, the tallest mountain on Earth was first ascended by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary on May 29, 1953. But there has always been a chance that pioneering British mountaineers George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Sandy Irvine, who were last seen at 28,200 feet on June 8th, 1924, still "going strong" for the top, might have beat them to the punch. Mallory and Irvine, wearing wool and gabardine, hobnailed leather boots and homemade oxygen sets, disappeared into a swirling cloud on that fateful day, never to be seen alive again. Ever since, the question of whether they might have made the top before falling or succumbing to the elements has stirred the collective imagination of the mountaineering world.
