Finding George Mallory on Mt. Everest - Interview with mountain guide Dave Hahn

so May 1st that day we found Mallory ultimately although we'd been on the mountain for a month and a half at that point this was going to be our first chance in a likely search area since a likely search area was at 27,000 feet and the nature of an expedition like that you've got to work up to that altitude you get a build a series of camps you got a acclimate so this was gonna be our first shot at it and so myself and four others that were involved in the search that day left what we called camp five our camp five was it twenty five thousand seven hundred feet on the north ridge and I can't remember exactly what time we left camp but it was before the Sun was up so it would have been 4:30 in the morning something like that on oxygen cold morning as they all are at that altitude before the Sun is up and even after the Sun is up and we started working our way up to what would become our high camp but of course at this point of the expedition this was was our high point as well so this was new ground for us on this trip I had previous experience on this terrain in from other expeditions but we moved on up we did establish where our high camp was going to be and then we found fanned out to to do a search five of us and we almost immediately found one of our landmarks for this search was the the site of the the 1975 Chinese expedition so high camp has wandered around over the years rather than being stuck in one spot and so the Chinese 75 Heitkamp was actually a little bit higher and a little bit to one side of the modern Heitkamp that's significant because it put the search zone if you were looking for old English dead as supposedly a body was was seen by one of the members of that 75 Chinese expedition within 20 minutes of that Chinese high camp so that was a logical starting point but then the five of us fanned out on the north face of Everest and it's it's tough sitting here on a nice flat place you know you describe a search and you could you could assume that you'd cut something up into grids and walk about at your leisure and explore every little corner of that grid but of course yeah this is the North Face of everest at 27,000 feet it's pretty hard it's not human nature to leave the security of the known climbing route and the fixed rope that you'd put on that route this involves unclipping from rope not having anything to hold on to and going out exploring in essence you've already found the weakness the the safest way would be the route and the least safe would be exploring around out on this you know series of ledges and cliff bans and faces dropping off thousands of feet below you to the central wrong but glacier but but yeah the five of us started looking around to see what we could find and yeah I still think of it we we each were person in our own heads what you know our our ideas of how somebody might have finished up on Mount Everest and and I felt like I was looking for somebody who had maybe gotten exhausted could go no further maybe crawled into a nook or cranny in the rock for protection and Conrad Conrad Anker who found George Mallory wasn't restricted that way he I assume was looking for somebody who who had been in the process of climbing and had taken a fall and that's exactly what he found not very long into the search we'd probably only been searching I can't recall exactly anymore but I think we'd we'd only been searching an hour hour and a half when when Conrad made this discovery we had discussed in the days before this and we would do a code on the radio we knew there we were a prominent expedition we'd gone into this expedition with these very public goals to which a lot of people had had replied you know baloney you guys you don't have all these goals you just want somebody else to pay for your climbing trip so there was some skepticism but as I say we were high-profile people were inclined to listen to what we were doing and and we didn't really want a broadcast to the world each step of our our process so we'd come up with a code in the days before it and in the end we said well that's ridiculous we don't need a we don't need a code you just we can use plain English just not all of it and well so he didn't he didn't actually use the code but he he called us together on the radio but again the nature climbing around at 27,000 feet he got a gigantic down suit you got these big boots on it you know you're wearing goggles it's you're wearing an oxygen mask it's tough to hear anyway most of us had turned our radios down because we were getting a bunch of interference that day so my first clue that something was going on you know I watched we were keeping track of each other so that just the the way you do these things and yeah I could see Andy pole it's moving you know with a sense of purpose down to where Conrad was and then I could see the other guys and then I pulled out my radio and heard Conrad saying you know group meeting mandatory group meeting so that was pretty obvious that that he'd made a find I climbed down from where I was looking I was the last of the five of us to get there they waited for me partly because I was the it seems silly to say this nowadays but I was I was paid on that trip to be the the BBC's high-altitude cameraman and not not having a whole lot to do with my camera skills but but but I could push a button on a video camera back then and so they waited for me to document it but they also waited for me because we weren't sure what to do I was the climbing leader on that team that that wasn't the the authority they were waiting for we as a group weren't sure what to do because this climber that Conrad had found looked at piece so he was face down he was face down head up the hill arms outstretched and you know you're you've come across this person who's had an accident on the mountain and that cost him his life and we took a few minutes the argument was made that you know maybe we shouldn't disturb him and I made the argument that we should you know I said these these men had had died trying to be the very first to climb Mount Everest to me I believed they'd want the world to know whether they had made it or not I believed they'd that their own story was important and that if we didn't do the job if we merely found this person but didn't find out what they could tell us then we were inviting others to do that and so that if we were going to have control over disturbing this man we should do it once and do it well and that argument won and we did start examining this climber initially we made the mistake of assuming that it was Andrew Ervin there are some details as to why we were on the wrong track that way but but at first I didn't didn't question that when I got there the guys said it's Andrew Irvin for a for a number of reasons I mean by this point 1999 plenty of people had died high up on not Everest but the only the only pre-war pre-world War two bodies that you would find high on the north side of Everest would be Mallory or Ervin's so we absolutely knew it was one of them and we jumped to the wrong conclusion and let's let's face it finding Andrew Irvin would have been quite significant but in mountaineering terms Andrew Irvin is is something of a minor a minor figure he's what we we began finding things it was difficult he was not only facing the hill he was frozen to the hill the rocks had built up around him and the rocks were frozen in place so it wasn't a simple thing to reach under him and pull out some ID or something like a driver's license but significantly one of my partners Jake Norton found a label a clothing label at the neck and said hey I found a clothing label here and I asked Jake I said hey hold on a second let me let me get ready with my camera thinking it would be interesting to know where this man got his shirts ins in the 1920s and I did think that would be interesting and Jake must have thought the same because he waited for me and I got the camera already and he flipped the clothing label over and said hey this says George Mallory and you know I was looking at it through the the range behind the camera and and I said oh my god yeah oh my god oh my god and yeah it it was absolutely stunning moment for Jake for me for the five of us George Mallory was this this mythical figure to us still is and the the thought of meeting him on this mountainside you know as I say we we were aware of this climbing history on Everest we had set out to highlight it but but I think you know coming in essence face to face with with George Mallory was was beyond our wildest dreams we we spent several hours with him trying to trying to solve the mystery of what had happened I mean one of the things that that perhaps he could tell us if we could find a camera and if that camera had been protected by the Sun by by virtue of being underneath him you know if you could retrieve that camera the folks at Kodak had said they could maybe develop the film and so that was the Holy Grail we spent a few hours conducting our search and yeah that that would have been the thing to find finding definitively the absence of that takes longer but but so we conducted this search as thorough as we could its 27,000 feet there's a cold wind blowing if you stood up too quickly and fell down you'd fall another 8,000 feet to the central wrong but glacier so I guess I'm trying to set the scene that a that it wasn't as a search here would be but we did our best with it and then we never had any intention of moving George Mallory you know some people say would probably say oh what a terrible place for somebody to end up on this cold lonely mountainside to us you know George Mallory very much is identified with with Everest and the him being at 27,000 feet on this incredible mountain well by now it's fitting it's fitting it's his grave gravestone has was set at the time we covered him in rock we covered him in loose rock and we read an Anglican service that BBC representatives on our trip had had dictated should we find one of them and I filmed that I don't think I filmed it well but we recorded it and then we left if we we came down the mountain we had the good sense not to go through the things that we'd found up there in the wind at 27,000 feet for instance written materials and notes and letters we collected all of that in the bag and then we we carried all that down the mountain but that day we only got back to the camp that we'd started from that morning so we're still at 25 7 on the North Ridge of Everest we're cryptic on the radio to our expedition leader until Johan hem lab this Everest fanatic back down at base camp but but they had no idea what we'd found we did that was the last night that we alone were aware of it so he moved down to it advanced base camp 21,000 feet the next day Eric Simonson the leader of the expedition was down there and we brought Eric into a tent and we brought these things out and blew his mind Eric and I in the middle of the night that night sent out this brief press release via satellite telephone satellite telephones in 1999 were a little more capable but but nothing near as easy as they are to use now but we we sent out a brief statement saying we'd discovered George Mallory and then we went to bed there at it at 21,000 feet and you know our camp was on the moraine of the east wrong but glacier as were the camps of I don't know another eight or nine other expeditions that we're trying to climb the mountain I remember it pretty vividly you know crawling into my cold tent that night when I woke up in the morning I was getting out of my tent at the same time a guy at the next-door tent was getting out of his he was from a different expedition and he looks over at me and he says hey I just heard on the BBC that you guys found George Mallory's body and you know the the world interest in this story at hit me at that moment you know that that we'd transmitted the story out of that tent over there and now it had come back around the world while we were sleeping and came at me from this other tent so that was a novelty we went down to base camp that day 12 miles away 17,000 feet and that was where the are real examination of the things that we'd found began and with our real BBC cameraman with a 16-millimeter camera and lights and we went through carefully went through the things that we'd found a pie on the mountain and tried to make some sense of them and and then it was that night that after that I went and wrote a dispatch it was my job as the web journalist on that trip right the full dispatch of our find so told that story and and figured out a way to transmit the first photographs obviously there was a huge demand for photos these photographs in in great resolution which if you remember in 1999 was you know the thought of a 2 megabyte photo was oh my gosh but but that that wasn't so easy to send back then because the the satellite capability was like 2 kilobytes per second supposedly so I spent like most of the night trying to figure out how to divide up these photos and sent them out for hours and hours and hours tried to send out what I felt were tasteful photographs but but that's subject to different opinions and you know along with the acclaim and the excitement you know people were very excited by the discovery people were amazed by it others flatly denied that we had made that discovery so pictures were part of it and then to be honest there was criticism some people said we were grave robbers some people said that we had violated the man our hero and violated him by by publishing photos of them 20 years later I think we were we were naive we were I mean to us he was a historical figure his children were still alive so you know all these all these years later I still think we did him honor that he deserved and I'm I'm very gratified to see how in the years since how how how the public is still fascinated with George Mallory and his story and that mystery of whether he and Andrew Irvin stood on top of Mount Everest in 1924 you know the mountain wasn't successfully climbed until 1953 on the other side of course it would yeah well that's the thing the more we learn about Mallory and Irvine we learned a lot in 1999 but the more you learn the more you want to know everything you want to know what they said to each other you want to know what they were thinking you want to yeah you want to have been there with the 1924 Mount Everest expedition because what a thing going where nobody had gone before going where most people didn't think it was even possible to go so I that's half the fascination with it is that they were that bold they were so bold you know and I had I look at it now I had misconceptions about them going in I thought in 1999 you know I'm a professional mountain guide and professional Mountaineer I thought well these guys in 1924 they couldn't know couldn't have been worth all that much George Mallory was a schoolteacher who climbed on holiday how how good could he have been we we must be so much stronger than them so much better in every way as professional Mountaineers so I think going into it I assumed that they hadn't climbed the mountain and that they probably weren't capable of it and definitely after looking into it on three different expeditions realizing oh they weren't on our modern route because they didn't know about our modern route but they were climbing was harder in about ten different ways and you know looking at the terrain that they climbed looking at it in the gear that they climbed it in the clothing and equipment available to them I fully changed my view and to be honest when we were there with George Mallory we saw him and I wrote about this at the time you know and I saw those arms saw those shoulders I knew immediately I underestimated him this guy he was a climber 75 years after he died you could see the strength you could see the the musculature there was this guy was a force to be reckoned with he was a climber and far more bold and skilled than I was yeah so I I'm among those who don't think they made it up but now I believe he was fully capable of making

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Keywords: Dave Hahn, Antarctica, George Mallory, Finding George Mallory, Mount Everest, English Mountaineer, America, Mountain guide, Eddie Bauer, searching for George Mallory, Andrew Irvine, Everest, making history, Finding George Mallory on Mt. Everest, mountain guides tale, Everest history, American hero, storyteller, interesting tales, mallory and irvine, Mallory climbing, mountaineering history, mountaineering stories, climbing, everest bodies, tallest peak, everest expedition

Id: 5RY9zRpQEf8

Length: 26min 34sec (1594 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2019