Columnist Susan Snyder: Climbing a mountain of mystery

Thursday, Oct. 14, 2004 | 8:16 a.m.

No, you didn't pull a Rip Van Winkle and miss a day.

Valley Views has slightly changed its four-day-per-week rotation and will run each Thursday instead of Fridays. And the best way to slide into the Thursday spot previously filled with the wisdom and wit of late Sun columnist Ruthe Deskin is to tackle something big -- really big.

Mount Everest.

About 40 people ditched the presidential candidate debates and baseball playoffs Wednesday night to hear tales of the world's tallest mountain from Eric Simonson, whose 1999 Everest team discovered the body of George Mallory.

Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, never returned from their 1924 summit attempt. To this day no one knows whether they disappeared on the way up or the way down. If it was on the way down, it would mean the British team crested the 29,035-foot peak 29 years before the historic summit by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

The 1999 discovery, and a subsequent 2001 expedition in which Simonson's team searched Mallory's lesser-used northern route for signs of Irvine and the camera he was believed to have been carrying, rocked the climbing world with awe and controversy.

But Simonson said Wednesday that it was Mallory's third attempt on the summit. Having summited himself in 1991 on a third attempt, Simonson figures Mallory went for it, judging by where they found a spent, 1924-era oxygen bottle.

"I find it very difficult to believe he would've turned back," Simonson said.

Simonson grew up in the shadow of Washington state's Mount Rainier. Now age 49, he said he was hooked on Everest since 1965 when his father took him to a slide show by members of the team who in 1963 became the first Americans to summit Everest.

Simonson's team returned from the 1999 expedition with 1920s climbing artifacts, Mallory's letters and bits of clothing. Their photographs showed his frozen body had taken on the appearance of snow-white marble.

"I was criticized for them," he said of the photos. "But you can't really talk about climbing on Everest and separate out the death. That is a part of it."

They buried Mallory's body and gave all but the spent oxygen tank to his descendants. Simonson's team returned in 2001 to look for Irvine's body, but ended up performing a high-altitude rescue of another team instead. They brought home more decades-old gear, however, and it is in the Washington State Museum.

They went up again this past spring -- without the film crews, corporate sponsors and publicity. But the search was nipped by foul weather.

"So we haven't found the holy grail yet. That camera is still up there," Simonson said. Is it worth it? I don't know. I've had people tell me they like the mystery.

"But if I was George Mallory, and I was lying up there dying, I would want someone to know what happened," he said. "Still, before we even left the (United States) in 2001, I had four attorneys contact me."

The attorneys represented Irvine's family, the family of the man who in 1924 had secured rights to the Mallory expedition's photos, the British National Geographic Society that funded the 1924 trip, and the family of the climber who loaned Irvine the camera.

"So we may go back. We haven't decided yet," Simonson told the group. "But you'll be the last to know."