A Boot Melted Out of Everest's Ice With a Name Stitched Inside. It May Solve a 100-Year Mystery.

A National Geographic film crew was crossing the Central Rongbuk Glacier below Mount Everest's North Face in September 2024 when someone spotted a boot melting out of the ice. Inside it was a foot, still inside its sock. Stitched into the sock was a small red label: A.C. IRVINE.

That name belongs to Andrew Comyn Irvine, the 22-year-old Oxford student who vanished on Everest on 8 June 1924 with his climbing partner George Mallory, in what is still, a century on, mountaineering's most argued-over disappearance.

Mallory and Irvine were last seen alive by teammate Noel Odell, who watched two tiny figures climbing steadily toward the summit ridge through a break in cloud, then disappear. Whether they reached the top 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's confirmed 1953 ascent has never been settled. Mallory's frozen body turned up in 1999, startlingly well preserved, lying face-down at 8,159m — but the camera the pair carried, which might hold summit proof if its film survived, was not with him. Irvine, thought to have been carrying that camera, stayed missing for another 25 years, the last unanswered half of the story our own Everest region guides have followed for decades.

Chin's team was filming for a National Geographic documentary when they found the boot — notably lower on the mountain than where Mallory lay. That gap points to something anyone who has followed recent glacier news will recognise: ice does not sit still. It creeps downhill under its own weight, carrying whatever froze inside it. A body caught in 1924 can resurface a century later, hundreds of metres from where it fell, wherever the glacier's slow current finally thins enough to let go. The same process just closed a 31-year case in the Swiss Alps, and gave a Peruvian mountain back a body it had held for 22 years.

What is speeding that process up on Everest is well documented. The Hindu Kush Himalaya glacier system, which includes Everest, lost ice 65% faster in the 2010s than in the decade before, according to ICIMOD's 2023 HI-WISE assessment, the most detailed study of the region's ice to date.

The same report found the region has lost up to 27 metres of ice thickness since 1975, and that the Eastern Himalaya — Everest's own zone — is on track to lose up to 75% of its remaining ice this century at 3°C of warming, roughly where current policy has the world headed.

Chin carried the boot and foot off the mountain in a cooler and handed them to the China-Tibet Mountaineering Association, which oversees Everest's north side, while a DNA sample went to the British Consulate for comparison against Irvine's living relatives. His great-niece, Julie Summers, has described the find as something close to closure for a family that has waited a hundred years for an answer. A confirmed match would not settle whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit — the missing camera would still need to surface, and its film would still need to survive developing after a century in the ice — but it would finally fix where, and roughly when, Irvine's climb ended.

What this means for trekkers

Source: National Geographic

Cover photo: Luca Galuzzi (Lucag) via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).