A peek inside the gear bag of Everest's most famous casualty.
After his 1924 disappearance, George Mallory became the Amelia Earhart of alpinism. He was last spotted with his climbing companion, Andrew Irvine, the men visible as two tiny specks making good progress up Everest's North Ridge, somewhere above 28,000 feet. In 1975 a Chinese climber reported finding what he called "an old English dead" on Everest, but it wasn't until last year that climber Conrad Anker found a surprisingly well-preserved corpse at around 27,000 feet that he and the rest of the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition verified as Mallory's remains.
Compared to the expensive, superlightweight, superdurable gear the average expedition schlepps up the mountain now, the Mallory expedition's equipage makes one marvel they ever made it above base camp. Yet, apparently, they nearly succeeded. Here, according to the climbers who found Mallory, is some of what the two took along.
