NatGeo expedition hunts for 1924 climber’s body in Lost on Everest documentary

• 

  Base camp of the National Geographic crew, illuminated below Everest. [credit: Renan Ozturk/National Geographic ]

Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay made climbing history when they became the first men to successfully summit Mount Everest on May 29, 1953. But there's a chance that someone may have beaten them to the summit back in 1924: a British mountaineer named George Leigh Mallory and a young engineering student named Andrew "Sandy" Irvine. The two men set off for the summit in June of that year and disappeared—two more casualties of a peak that has claimed over 300 lives to date.

Lost on Everest is a new documentary from National Geographic that seeks to put to rest the question of who was first to the summit once and for all. The gripping account follows an expedition's attempt to locate Irvine's body (lost for over 95 years) and hopefully retrieve the man's camera—and photographic proof that the two men reached the summit.

NatGeo is also premiering a second companion documentary, Expedition Everest, narrated by actor Tate Donovan (MacGyver, Man in the High Castle), following an international team that included multiple scientists as they trek up the mountain. Along the way, team geologists collected sediment samples from the bottom of a Himalayan lake; biologists surveyed the biodiversity at various elevations to track how plants, animals, and insects are adapting to a warming climate; and climate scientists collected ice cores from the highest elevation to date to better understand glacier evolution. Finally, the team installed the world's highest weather station in Everest's infamous "death zone," above 26,000 feet, to gather real-time data on weather conditions at that altitude.