A few days ago, this question got my attention on Twitter: Are there dead bodies on Mount Everest? Apparently over 2,000 people have reached the summit (as of 2004) and of the 189 who died attempting the climb, 120 bodies still remain on the mountain.
I remembered a conversation I had with Armand about a man named George Mallory and as Armand talked, my Google search resulted in a photo of Mallory's frozen remains. You may recall that Google was my way to keep up with Armand as he often talked about people and places I had never heard about.
He (understandably) dismissed my exclamations with a "nothing's private in this world anymore". He had just introduced me to the subject of George Mallory and his fellow climber and alleged lover, Andrew Irvine, not more than three minutes earlier and here I was claiming to have found a picture of his remains!
Mallory disappeared on Everest in 1924, when Armand was ten years old and he was discovered in 1999 when Armand was 85! I responded to the Twitter post by Guy Kawasaki and answered a few resulting comments from a man in Hawaii. A few days later I received a response from a man named Jake Norton:
@BarbaraUechi @GuyKawasaki Yes, Mallory was one of the famous
ones.
Helped find him in 1999. Amazing. See my site: http://bit.ly/9bFCjT
Armand
would have loved to have met Jake, who was 25 when he made his first Everest
climb in '99. George Mallory was an Everest mystery to Armand for most
of his life but a defining discovery for Jake Norton.Watch a brief video of the actual discovery here :
http://www.
(tip:use the scroll bar to the right of the photo)
~~~~~~~
Photo: SummitPost.org
Related Posts:
Now that he's famous...about our conversation regarding Mallory (9/06).
Armand's 1968 Himalayan Trek