Note: I dashed this off, and the video post, pretty quickly on May 1, in between other work and heading to the airport to pick up my friend and teammate from 1999, Jochen Hemmleb. It's far from perfect, and probably quite boring. But, I needed to get it off my chest, so here it is. Enjoy the read, or enjoy the video; both are essentially the same. And, when you have a moment, please raise a glass of whatever you choose in honor of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine. I know Jochen and I will.

Twenty-five years. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. That long since that day, the day we climbed high, risked much, worked hard, got lucky, made mistakes, did our absolute, imperfect best, made history unintentionally, told a story bigger than any of us, bigger than us individually and collectively, a story that went bigger, that garnered more attention, than any of us ever imagined.

I won’t go into all the details of that day, as it’s been written and filmed and shared many times over. If you want to read about it, or watch it, drop down into the description below for some firsthand accounts of May 1, 1999, our discovery of George Mallory’s remains, and what we learned from it all. And, I’m thinking about doing a livestream presentation next week on the story of Mallory and Irvine, of 1924 and 1999 and the other searches I’ve been a part of; let me know in the comments if that is something you’d be interested in.

So, I won’t go over all of that again. Suffice it to say 25 years ago, May 1, 1999, remains a day etched into my memory, one of poignance and emotion and fear and reverence like nothing else I’ve had in 40 years of climbing. I get goosebumps and chills to this day remembering it, remembering the discovery, the time we spent with Mallory that day, the things we learned about he and Irvine’s final days and hours on the mountain.

What I’d like to talk about now, address somewhat, is the conspiracy theories being batted about, the fever dreams and innuendo and outright imagined “facts” spewed by those who seem convinced they know what was in the minds and hearts of the five of us sitting for hours at 27,000 feet on that day 25 years ago, what was in the minds and hearts and motives of the rest of our team at Basecamp, and those we worked with throughout the project.

I’ll start by saying I was hesitant to even broach this topic, as today we as a people, as a species, seem more polarized, more angry, distant, separated from one another, than anytime in the past. We seem less able to listen to one another, to hear one another, to hear ourselves at times, as we sit in the siloed chambers of internet anonymity, able to spew vitriol without looking the recipient in the eye, remembering they’re a real person, imperfect, flawed, with thoughts and emotions and actions that can easily be misinterpreted through the monodimensional lens of a singular reading or watching or hearing.

A big part of me thought, and thinks still, that there’s no point in confronting the misinformation, the innuendo, the “alternate facts” being shared as hubristic gospel; after all, if it can’t be cured in the larger society, how could I cure it in this tiny, ultimately-unimportant corner of the info-sphere.

But, I guess I’ve never been one who wants to sit silent. I hate confrontation, but I also hate dishonesty. I don’t want to be a part of either, but I’ll take the first to confront the last, and to make sure that, for my part at least, I’m being as transparent as I can.

To start, I’ll admit readily a couple things: memory is an imperfect thing, especially after a quarter century. What I share here is my memory - it’s not fabrication here to discount stories and rumors, or to discredit anyone. It’s just what I remember, and as such it’s only what I remember - I could be wrong about certain elements, and others may remember things differently. I’ll be happy to stand corrected. But, what follows is my recollection of events.

Second, I am speaking only for me, not for my teammates. I cannot and will not speak for them; this is my memory, and my recollection, and my story of our collective story. I will say this, however: Our team in 1999 was an amazing one. From the bottom to the top, we had great people joined together for a great endeavor. We were, individually and collectively, there for the right reasons. Eric Simonson picked the team for that purpose: people who would climb high to search, to learn, to help gain a better understanding of 1924, and not be out for their own personal gain. Those five of us who gathered around Mallory that day? They are my heroes. Dave and Tap and Andy and Conrad, salt of the earth. I’d clip into any rope with any of them on any mountain any day, and I don’t say that lightly. And the same goes for Eric and Jochen, without reservation.

So, let’s dig in a bit.

I’ll start off with the admission that none of us, not one of us on the team, was a trained archeologist. We were climbers, we were amateur historians, we had advice from archeologists and others, but at the end of the day we were climbers. And, I think it’s safe to say - without ego - that it is because we were climbers that we were able to get to the site, to the search area, search it, make findings, and come down again in one piece.

Did we do everything right? Without a doubt, no, we did not. Any archeologist worth his or her salt would likely raise issues with what we did and how we did it. But, that same archeologist might be inclined to give us a bogey given the location, and realities of life at 27,000 feet.

Did we do our best? I firmly believe we did. We may at times have been, as Conrad chose to describe it, like punch-drunk kids: there was certainly excitement, not the excitement of treasure seekers or bounty hunters, but the excitement of having found what we were looking for, of touching history, of learning in that visceral, first-hand, personal way something you’ve wanted to learn about your whole life. Did we say things in the heat of it all, the nerves of it all, the headiness of it all, that we may wish we hadn’t said? Well, I’d imagine that yes, we did, but I haven’t ever seen the raw footage from 1999; to my knowledge, Wade Davis is the only one outside a NOVA or BBC studio that has, and he never shared it with me or bothered to talk to me before writing his book. So, I cannot say with any certainty.

Rocks. Rocks. Lots of rocks. Yellow Band rocks and Grey Band rocks and North Face rocks. They were everywhere, inside everything, gravel and dust and bits of decomposing Everest as far as the eye could see. But, no, we didn’t look for them. Honestly, we didn’t think to, and perhaps in hindsight that was a mistake. As I’ve said, we made them, but not with intention. So, no, we didn’t look for summit rocks in his pockets, and for that I reckon I’m regretful.

Gloves and rope and souvenirs. This is one of the more curious and - to give credit where credit is due - inventful imaginations, that we, for some reason, absconded with bits of rope from Mallory’s waist and even swiped a glove. I have no idea where the former comes from, and the latter comes from a discrepancy between our official expedition book, Ghosts of Everest, and Conrad Anker’s book, The Lost Explorer. Both are linked below. Ghosts says we found one, fingerless glove, Conrad’s book (written by the late David Roberts) says a pair were found. I can only say regarding the gloves that I only remember finding one glove, and Tap Richards and I were doing most of the finding of artifacts on Mallory’s body. My hunch is that David Roberts made a mistake, and it was not caught in the final edit because, simply, it was not of great consequence. None of us were interested in keeping souvenirs from Mallory’s remains.

On the burial we did on May 1, and the decision to send Andy Politz and Thom Pollard back for a second search on May 16, I guess again it comes down to best intentions and hindsight. On the first search day - May 1 - we made the decision to search before our upper mountain infrastructure was ready, before the route was fully fixed and before Camp VI was in, because we were concerned the monsoon could break early and hamper our chances. 1999 was one of the driest years recorded in the high Himalaya, and we wanted to be able to take full advantage of it all. So, we launched our first search, a cursory one, intended to mainly give us a feel for the area. We didn’t expect to find much, if anything. But, of course we did find something, and it was a big discovery. However, given our expectations for the day, and the fact that we were carrying loads to Camp VI before searching, we did not take a metal detector with us. Thus, while we searched Mallory thoroughly, upon returning to Basecamp and going over all the details, we realized that, sadly, we could not say without a shadow of a doubt that there was nothing left to search for, no reason for anyone to disturb Mallory again. We decided that we needed to send people back to Mallory with a metal detector, we just were unsure who, or when.

Ten days or so later, on May 15, all six of us - Dave, Andy, Conrad, Tap, Thom, and I - sat pinned down in a windstorm at Camp V. We were moving up to make summit bids, but the storm had messed up both schedules, and more importantly, time and supplies. We didn’t have enough for everyone to try for the summit and to launch a secondary search. Eventually, Andy Politz and Thom Pollard volunteered to do the second search for logical reasons: Andy had summitted before, so that wasn’t a motivating factor, and Thom was contracted to shoot video for PBS. We needed a cameraman on both the second search and the summit attempt, and Dave, who was contracted by BBC, had more experience up high than Thom, so it made sense for him to accompany and film the summit attempt.

None of us relished the idea of a second search. We hoped that the metal detector would not ping, would not indicate we missed something, and Mallory could remain undisturbed. But, it did, and we had. Thom and Andy got a signal from the detector, investigated, and found Mallory’s wristwatch in his pants pocket, an item Tap and I had missed the first time around. Andy and Thom then reburied Mallory and again consecrated the site with Psalm 103 as we had two weeks prior. As I was not there, I cannot say much more about what went on. I can say none of us wanted a second search to be needed, but it was, and so we did it as best possible.

The final bit I’ll cover is about good old oxygen bottle #9. After Tap Richards, Dawa Sherpa, Ang Pasang, and I turned around at Mushroom Rock on summit day, May 17, Tap and I decided we would, as had been discussed previously, look for the oxygen bottle Eric Simonson saw on his summit bid in 1991. We rappelled the First Step and prepared to look. Tap went off to begin searching while I first tended to Fran Arsentiev’s remains; she had passed away the year before, and was still attached to the fixed lines. Her family had sent a request to move her if possible. I tried, but she was as fused to the mountain as Mallory was, and I could not budge her. So, I moved the climbing route up by 30 feet or so, tying off and re-anchoring the fixed line so the route no longer went right to her. I then moved down to near Tap and began looking around as Eric gave some guidance over the radio. For whatever reason, I was drawn to the ridgecrest beneath the First Step, and was walking in whiteout conditions along the cornices one is led to in this part of the Ridge. I saw a shadow, faint, but strange, in front of me. Wary, I reached and probed with my ice ax, eventually discerning what it was: a body-sized hole in the cornice, dropping down the Kangshung Face. It was quite possibly where my friend Vasily Kopytko met his demise a week earlier. I moved away from the cornice quickly and descended from the ridgecrest, looking for Tap who was down below. We met up minutes later, him carrying something: a long, brown, rusted cylinder, obviously from another era. This turned out to be Oxygen Bottle #9, one of Mallory and Irvine’s from 75 years prior.

I never saw the spot where Tap found the bottle, nor did we have GPS to take coordinates. And, it was a whiteout, so photos would have done no good. The issues here, the conspiracy theories, are twofold. First, I’ve been accused of “moving” the bottle’s location by improperly placing it on the Virtual Mount Everest I created during Covid. Michael Tracy kindly pointed the issue out to me, and I moved the pin for it to a location he suggested. My excuse? Carelessness, in all honesty, and ignorance. Carelessness in that I wasn’t making the virtual Everest as a research tool, but rather as a fun, informative, interactive thing, so I placed the marker for the body in roughly the right place, without precision. And, admitted ignorance as I didn’t really know where the bottle was found, as Tap was the one who found it.

Second, Dave Hahn has said that one of the Sherpa said they found an old bottle on our summit day and moved it to a place where it could be found more easily. I do not remember that, but I believe Dave. That said, we don’t know - or at least I don’t - if that was truly an old bottle, or just an older one, like from 1975 or 1960. The latter look quite old, but aren’t as old as the ones we wanted to find. And, the only Sherpa with us that day were Dawa and Ang Pasang. They stayed with us until we were back at Camp VI, so if there was another bottle to be found - after they saw what bottle #9 looked like - I think they would have said something. And, finally, if a different old bottle was found by either Dawa or Ang Pasang and moved to a better spot, a spot easier to find, it seems odd they would have put it off the climbing route, on the ridge proper, instead of in the rocks of the climbing route, tied to the fixed line, where it would certainly not be missed.

So, I’m pretty certain the bottle Tap found is the bottle Eric saw in 1991 and directed us to in 1999.

Finally, one funny - to me at least - thing that keeps coming up is I’m repeatedly accused of (a) not putting my entire Everest photo library up on the web, and (b), for not releasing the drone footage shot by Renan Ozturk for National Geographic in 2019. On the first count, my Everest library is a couple hundred thousand images, and I don’t have time, energy, or desire to put them all up on the web and do so in a way that anyone could find anything they were looking for. That said, I’ve put up and shared most of the shots from my archive that have any relevance to the story, and have no problem with sharing more if and when asked. As for Renan’s drone footage? I’d love to see it, too. But, it’s his, not mine. I haven’t seen it, I don’t own it, I can’t release it. Hard stop. (But, I don’t think his not releasing it is an indication of anything aside from time, energy, no one asking, and the footage showing a lot of…nothing to see.)

At any rate, this is a lot of information, and a long video/blog post. I could go on, but part of me wonders: To what end? Sadly, those prone to distrust and disbelief, those who want to assume the worst rather than assume the best, those who see nefariousness and conspiracy around each corner rather than seeing the world as it is - imperfect and full of imperfect people doing their best - well, I’m not going to change their minds in a boring YouTube video. So, to them, to those of you who are certain we did wrong in 1999, who botched the story and messed up the evidence and hid the truth and lied about it all…Well, I invite you to go up there and have a look yourself. It’s a beautiful place, I can assure you. Search around and see what you find; it’s not easy, but I for one hope you find something, and if you do, I’ll believe what you say, applaud your efforts, forgive your errors, and hope it tells us more of the story. In 100 years, we’re the only only team that found much of anything, and we only did so because of an amazing convergence of a great team, great leadership, solid partners, hard work, tenacity, and a heavy dose of luck.