Jimmy Chin
It was the call that the family of a young British climber who went missing on Everest 100 years ago had given up hope of ever receiving.
Last month, a team of climbers filming a National Geographic documentary came across a preserved boot, revealed by melting ice from a glacier.
This boot is believed to have belonged to Andrew Comyn “Sandy” Irvine, who disappeared while attempting to climb Everest in June 1924 with his partner George Mallory.
Additionally, it could potentially help solve one of mountaineering's greatest mysteries: whether or not the two men succeeded in becoming the first to summit Everest, 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reach the top.
Famed adventurer Jimmy Chin, who led the National Geographic team, hailed the discovery of the boot – with one foot inside – as a “monumental and moving moment”.
But for Irvine's great-niece, Julie Summers, it was simply “extraordinary.”
“I froze… We had all given up hope of finding him,” she told the BBC.
A number of people have searched for Irvine's body over the years, in part because the 22-year-old was allegedly carrying a camera with undeveloped film inside, potentially with a photo of the couple on top .
Could the discovery of the boot be the first step in finding his body – and the camera?
The family have now given a DNA sample to confirm the foot is Irvine's – but the film crew are pretty sure it belongs to the climber. The sock found inside the boot has a name tag sewn into it with the words “AC Irvine.”
“I mean, man… it's got a label on it,” said Chin, known for directing the Oscar-winning climbing documentary Free Solo alongside his wife, as cited in a National Geographic report.
Jimmy Chin
The team made the discovery while descending the Central Rongbuk Glacier, near the north face of Everest, in September.
Along the way, they found an oxygen cylinder marked with the date 1933. That year, an Everest expedition had found an item belonging to Irvine.
Energized by this possible sign that Irvine's body might be nearby, the team searched the glacier for several days, before one of them saw the boot emerging from the melting ice.
It was a chance discovery: they estimated that the ice had only melted a week before their discovery.
The stand has since been removed from the mountain due to concerns that crows would disturb it, according to reports, and has been passed to the Chinese Alpine authorities who govern Everest's north face.
For Irvine's descendants, the discovery was moving, especially in this year of the centenary of his disappearance.
Summers had grown up listening to stories of his grandmother's adventurous younger brother, an Oxford graduate, whom they knew as “Uncle Sandy.”
“My grandmother had a picture of him by her bed until the day she died,” she recalls. “She said he was a better man than anyone ever would be.”
Getty Images
Sandy Irvine, as he was popularly known, was 22 years old when he disappeared
Birkenhead-born Irvine was just 22 when he disappeared, the youngest member of an expedition that has intrigued the mountaineering world for a century.
He and Mallory were last seen alive on June 8, 1924 while heading to the summit.
Mallory's body was not found until 1999 by an American mountaineer. In recent decades, the search for the climbers' remains has been mired in controversy, as the bodies were suspected of having been moved.
Summers always dismissed these stories and suspicions, revealing his feeling of “relief” following the Chin's call that “he was still there on the mountain.”
But what if it was now possible to prove that Irvine and Mallory reached the summit, becoming the first to do so – an idea that Summers acknowledged would “turn the history of mountaineering upside down” ?
“That would be nice, we would all be very proud,” she said. “But the family always maintained the mystery, and the story of how they came and how brave they were was really what it was about.”
And anyway, she added, “the only way we'll know is if we find a photo in the camera he was wearing.”
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The last photo of Mallory (left) and Irvine (right) before they left for their climb in 1924
The search, she suspects, will now continue to find this camera. “I think it will be irresistible,” she said.
Whether this will be found remains to be seen.
Chin, for his part, hopes that the discovery of the shoe – “a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team in the field” – “will finally bring peace of mind to his loved ones and to the climbing world in general”.
For Summers, it's an opportunity to remind the world of a young man “who took life and lived it,” seizing every opportunity – and above all, “having fun.”
But perhaps surprisingly, she and her cousins are grateful that the older generation isn't around for this discovery.
“For them, Everest is their tomb,” she explained.
