Word: summiteer
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...Falcon Scott's doomed race to the South Pole. Shortly after noon on June 8, 1924, the 38-year-old English schoolmaster and Alpinist George Leigh Mallory, along with a young companion, an Oxford engineering student and oarsman named Andrew ("Sandy") Irvine, 22, vanished into the mists surrounding the summit of 29,028-ft. Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain, never to be heard from again...
...rocky, windswept slope some 2,000 ft. below the summit, expedition member Conrad Anker spotted "a patch of white"--brighter, he says, than any of the snow or rocks around it. Sprawled facedown on the mountainside, with arms outstretched and hands dug into the frozen ground, lay the bleached, mummified remains of a man. It was Mallory, his body almost perfectly preserved in the thin, dry air, a safety rope around his waist, and still partly clad in remnants of his tattered cotton, wool and tweed climbing clothes, the ragged collars stitched with markings G.L. MALLORY. He had apparently tumbled...
...trying to descend in fading light. There was, however, no sign of Irvine. With the Mallory family's permission, the team took a snippet of tissue from the forearm in order to compare any surviving DNA with samples from his descendants, including perhaps his grandson George, who reached the summit in 1995. Then they covered the body with rocks and read the Anglican service of committal before descending 10,000 ft. for a few days' rest at their base camp...
.../wgbh/nova) will continue searching in the few remaining weeks of Everest's busy spring climbing season. Besides Irvine's remains, the expedition is eager to find a Kodak vest-pocket folding camera given to Mallory just before the ascent. If he and his young partner made it to the summit, they would undoubtedly have photographed themselves at the top of the world--and those images would probably still be retrievable from film kept in so deep a freeze even after three-quarters of a century...
Meanwhile the arguments continue to rage over whether Mallory and Irvine made it all the way, beating New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay by 29 years. "It's an interesting, romantic thought, but until someone shows a clear image of them at the summit, I'm happy to stick with Hillary and Tenzing," says veteran climber David Breashears. As for the 79-year-old Sir Edmund, he isn't losing any sleep over the matter. "Getting to the bottom is an important part too," he told Television New Zealand...