A frozen human foot found on Mount Everest revives a century-old mystery

Andrew Comyn “Sandy” Irvine was on the journey of his life, traveling through India, Tibet and the Himalayas, as the youngest member of a 1924 British expedition that aimed to be the first to summit Mount Everest.

But that wasn’t to be. Irvine, a 22-year-old University of Oxford student, and his colleague George Mallory perished somewhere near Everest’s peak in June 1924. Whether they made it or not remains mountaineering’s greatest mystery.

Any proof showing they had conquered Everest would alter history: New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay are credited with the first confirmed Everest summit, in 1953. Irvine and Mallory would have done it three decades earlier.

Historians suspect that a Kodak camera they were carrying may have photographic evidence of a successful summit, but the 1999 discovery of Mallory’s body did not turn up the camera. Ever since, hopes of finding Irvine’s body and the camera have been fading.

Last week, the mystery resurfaced after a National Geographic documentary crew on Mount Everest stumbled upon a worn-out boot on the mountain’s Central Rongbuk Glacier. Inside it was a frozen human foot and a sock labeled with an unmistakable “A.C. Irvine” in red letters.

Mark Fisher, one of the three filmmakers who discovered the boot, said he and his colleagues Erich Roepke and Jimmy Chin freaked out. “Oh my god, we just found Irvine.” Fisher likened it to unsuspectingly finding a pot of gold in the middle of the desert. The 30-square-mile glacier is filled with icy, disconnected corridors and ice pyramids from 5 to 50 feet tall poking out toward the sky.

“There’s been so many expeditions over the past 100 years, entire films made about Mallory and Irvine, multiple expeditions whose sole purpose was to look for Mallory and Irvine,” Fisher said in an interview Sunday from his home in Victor, Idaho. “The fact that we found the boot is a miracle.”

Fisher said he suspects the glacier had partially melted and thrown out the boot barely a week or so before the group came across it.

The boot and foot are now in the hands of the China Tibet Mountaineering Association, the Chinese government agency overseeing access to Mount Everest’s north face, where the boot was found. The agency declined to comment beyond confirming that it possessed the boot and foot. DNA samples are being compared with those of Irvine’s closest surviving relatives, according to National Geographic.

Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers got the call last week. It was her friend Jamie Owens from Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, whose members had helped organize the 1924 Everest expedition. “Could you speak to this guy from Kathmandu?” Owens asked.

The next morning, Summers, who wrote a book about Irvine and researched him for years, hopped on a Zoom call with Chin, who introduced himself and explained that he had been to Everest recently and had found a boot.

“And we know it’s Sandy Irvine’s boot,” Summers recalled him saying. She was stunned.

Summers said she felt a sense of relief upon hearing those words. “I had two reactions. One was, ‘Oh my God, you found part of my great uncle,’” she said in an interview Sunday. She also took comfort in the fact that the discovery seems to contradict unconfirmed theories that Chinese climbers had removed Irvine’s remains from the mountain.

She and the majority of Irvine’s surviving relatives want Irvine to remain on Everest if his body is found, as was the wish of Mallory’s family when his body was found.

The death of Irvine - the third of six children - devastated his family. Summers’s grandmother Evelyn refused to ever talk about her lost brother, Sandy, whom she was greatly attached to. His parents - Summers’s great-grandparents - suffered in silence “in a very British, stoical way,” Summers said. But they were “absolutely grief-stricken,” she said.

In October 1924, Irvine’s mother wrote to her oldest son, Hugh, four months after Sandy had vanished on Everest. “Your father and I never questioned the right or wrong of Sandy going on Everest. But it does not mean it will ever mend the hole in our hearts.”

The boot doesn’t answer the question of whether Irvine and Mallory made it to the top, Summers said. But it should reduce the difficulty of trying to find that Kodak camera, she said - although that task remains immensely difficult. In the end, the mystery is likely to endure, she said.

“We will probably never know,” she said, because even if the camera is found without a photo of the summit, it could have malfunctioned. “It doesn’t mean they didn’t make it.”

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Lyric Li contributed to this report.