The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession, and Death on Mount Everest

by Mark Synnott Narrated by Steve Campbell

Overview

*One of the 57 Most Anticipated Books Of 2021-Elle 

Shivering, exhausted, gasping for oxygen, beyond doubt . . .
 
A hundred-year mystery lured veteran climber Mark Synnott into an unlikely expedition up Mount Everest during the spring 2019 season that came to be known as “the Year Everest Broke.” What he found was a gripping human story of impassioned characters from around the globe and a mountain that will consume your soul-and your life-if you let it.
 
The mystery? On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine set out to stand on the roof of the world, where no one had stood before. They were last seen eight hundred feet shy of Everest's summit still “going strong” for the top. Could they have succeeded decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay? Irvine is believed to have carried a Kodak camera with him to record their attempt, but it, along with his body, had never been found. Did the frozen film in that camera have a photograph of Mallory and Irvine on the summit before they disappeared into the clouds, never to be seen again? Kodak says the film might still be viable. . . .
 
Mark Synnott made his own ascent up the infamous North Face along with his friend Renan Ozturk, a filmmaker using drones higher than any had previously flown. Readers witness first-hand how Synnott's quest led him from oxygen-deprivation training to archives and museums in England, to Kathmandu, the Tibetan high plateau, and up the North Face into a massive storm. The infamous traffic jams of climbers at the very summit immediately resulted in tragic deaths. Sherpas revolted. Chinese officials turned on Synnott's team. An Indian woman miraculously crawled her way to frostbitten survival. Synnott himself went off the safety rope-one slip and no one would have been able to save him-committed to solving the mystery.
 
Eleven climbers died on Everest that season, all of them mesmerized by an irresistible magic. The Third Pole is a rapidly accelerating ride to the limitless joy and horror of human obsession.

*This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF containing maps, notes on sources, and acknowledgments from the printed book.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2021 - AudioFile

Did George Mallory and Sandy Irvine summit Everest in 1924 and perish while coming down? It’s a mystery that continues to captivate. Mark Synnott alternates the story of that expedition with his own search in 2019 for Irvine’s body. Steve Campbell’s narration proves to be an excellent guide up Everest. His deep voice, enthusiasm, and brisk pacing are a perfect match for Synnott’s candid and journalistic style. He captures Synnott’s transformation from initial disinterest in Everest as a climb—because it lacks technical difficulties, wealthy amateurs can summit—to a summit fever excitement. Perhaps most fascinating is the politics on Everest: Sherpas must summit for professional success, the Chinese government wants Synnott’s expedition off the mountain, and then there’s that famous traffic jam picture. A.B. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

One of the 57 Most Anticipated Books of 2021—Elle
Summer's Most Transporting Books list—Newsweek
One of 5 Action-Packed New Nonfiction Books for Summer—AARP
Ultimate Summer Reading List Pick—E!

“Almost seventy years after my father, Tenzing Norgay Sherpa, climbed the summit of Chomolungma with the British 1953 Expedition, Western narratives about Mount Everest continue to be haunted by the question whether it was Mallory and Irvine who had been the first to stand on the summit. Mark Synnott’s The Third Pole pursues this mystery and brings us closer to closing this chapter of mountaineering history. I learned a lot from this book.”  
—Norbu Tenzing Norgay

“[A] vivid, heart-pounding dispatch from the top of the world.”
—Liz Baker, NPR

"This account of climbing Mt. Everest from the Tibetan side in search of a climber lost ninety-seven years ago and a camera that might change everything is both a gripping adventure story and an engrossing historical mystery."
—Maggie Shipstead, author of Great Circle

“The author and adventurer Mark Synnott skillfully describes early-twentieth-century exploration, then dives into a story about Everest that merges mystery, adventure, and history into a single tragic bundle. . . . Synnott knows how to keep readers turning the pages, and they will speed their way to his mystery’s resolution.”
—The New York Times

“If you’re only going to read one Everest book this decade, make it The Third Pole. . . A riveting adventure.”
—Outside

“Uncovers the dangerous obsession that tackling this behemoth holds today.”
—Newsweek

“A hold-your-breath story that features the author's own hazardous journey and exploration of the motives behind climbers’ obsession with reaching dangerous heights.”
—AARP

“Captivates with mystery and adventure.”
—National Parks Traveler

“The book is a fascinating tale and forces the reader to constantly ask themselves, What would I do? in each situation.”
—Fodor's

“Mark Synnott’s new book . . . is as rewarding as any Everest book can be, with history and geography wonderfully woven into the author’s own climb, in 2019.”
—Air Mail

“As in his previous book, the author’s writing comes alive when he recounts life on the mountain. . . . This is a must-read for outdoor enthusiasts and readers of Everest and exploration history.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“[A] hair-raising mountaineering story . . . A fine tale of adventure and exploration sure to please any fan of climbing and Everest lore.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Synnott weaves back and forth between the early climbing pioneers' experiences and his 2019 expedition, harrowing in its own right. A gifted storyteller, he proves firsthand the irresistible lure and perilous dangers of climbing Mount Everest.”
—Booklist

“The Third Pole is an elegy of extremes, a white-knuckle tale of obsession and survival. From the archives of London’s Royal Geographical Society to a tent battered by howling winds on the edge of the Death Zone, Mark Synnott puts it all on the line in his quest to solve Mount Everest’s most enduring mystery.”
—Susan Casey, author of national bestsellers The Wave and Voices in the Ocean

“A hundred-year-old detective story with a new twist. A high-altitude adventure. The best Everest book I’ve read since Into Thin Air. Synnott’s climbing skills take you places few will ever dare to tread, but it’s his writing that will keep you turning pages well past bedtime.”
—Mark Adams, author of Tip of the Iceberg and Turn Right at Machu Picchu
 
“Join Mark Synnott on a quest for an artifact that could change Everest mountaineering history. Part detective story, part high adventure, Synnott engages obsessed historians, dodges Chinese bureaucrats, and ultimately risks his life high on the mountain’s North Face. As the tension rises, he discovers astounding strengths in his fellow climbers, tragic frailty, and an ineffable truth he never imagined.”
—Andy Hall, author of Denali’s Howl

Library Journal

★ 04/01/2021

Were George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine the first to summit Mt. Everest, in 1924? Journalist and professional climber Synnott (The Impossible Climb) joined National Geographic's 2019 Sandy Irvine research and documentary expedition with the goal to find Irvine's body on Everest's uppermost slopes, and more importantly to find the pair's camera, which could definitively solve this mystery. Synnott enlisted the help of experts who specialize in the 1924 expedition to aid in locating Irvine's body. (Mallory's body was found in 1999; see The Lost Expedition by Conrad Anker and David Roberts.) Throughout the book, Synnott skillfully intertwines Irvine's story with his own expedition's progress, while highlighting some of his fellow travelers' stories. He also discusses the physiological effects of altitude, the development and use of supplemental oxygen, the environmental impacts of Everest tourism, and the challenges of filming at an elevation where altitude plays havoc on bodies and equipment. As in his previous book, the author's writing comes alive when he recounts life on the mountain, including low visibility and high winds, along with his determination to find answers. VERDICT Did Synnott and his team solve mountaineering's greatest mystery? No spoilers here, but this is a must-read for outdoor enthusiasts and readers of Everest and exploration history.—Margaret Atwater-Singer, Univ. of Evansville Lib., IN

OCTOBER 2021 - AudioFile

Did George Mallory and Sandy Irvine summit Everest in 1924 and perish while coming down? It’s a mystery that continues to captivate. Mark Synnott alternates the story of that expedition with his own search in 2019 for Irvine’s body. Steve Campbell’s narration proves to be an excellent guide up Everest. His deep voice, enthusiasm, and brisk pacing are a perfect match for Synnott’s candid and journalistic style. He captures Synnott’s transformation from initial disinterest in Everest as a climb—because it lacks technical difficulties, wealthy amateurs can summit—to a summit fever excitement. Perhaps most fascinating is the politics on Everest: Sherpas must summit for professional success, the Chinese government wants Synnott’s expedition off the mountain, and then there’s that famous traffic jam picture. A.B. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2021-01-28
The author of The Impossible Climb (2019) returns with another hair-raising mountaineering story.

Professional climber and journalist Synnott chronicles his climb of Mount Everest in hopes of finding the remains, and an all-important camera, of George Mallory’s climbing partner, Andrew Irvine. In 1924, Mallory made an ill-fated attempt to be the first known human to summit Everest. Irvine joined Mallory for the final push, and neither man returned. If found, Irvine’s camera might provide evidence that the men attained the summit, or didn’t. This is the story of that attempt, narrated by Synnott with easy grace—even when the climbing and weather were anything but. The expedition also ran into the usual bureaucratic delays from the host nation (they were climbing the north face, which is in China), but the author introduces readers to a side of the mountain and its routes not typically seen, as most expeditions start from the Nepalese side. In addition to describing all of the roadblocks in their way, he populates the harrowing text with excellent background material to convey a rich sense of what summiting the great peaks entails. Synnott offers important pocket-sized biographies of Mallory and Irvine, of course, but there are also discerning forays into British colonial geopolitics, the ongoing disputes between China and Nepal, Tibet’s tortured relations with China, and the many vested Chinese political interests in the history of Everest mountaineering. Unsurprisingly, given his experience as a mountain guide, Synnott writes with gratifying savvy about all elements involved in the dangerous venture: Everest meteorology, notoriously unpredictable; the effects of altitude on the body and mind; the pleasures of camping in the sky; and the impressive biological adaptations of Sherpas, who “function at high altitudes like highly efficient hybrid vehicles that get many miles per gallon, whereas the rest of us are gas-guzzling SUVs.”

A fine tale of adventure and exploration sure to please any fan of climbing and Everest lore.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172791093
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/13/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

chapter one

 

Among the Dead

 

The body lay facedown and partly embedded in the gravel, as if it had fallen into a slab of wet concrete. The head was partly covered in the remnants of a leather bomber's cap, fringed with orangey yellow hair. Much of the drab, earth-toned clothing had long ago been torn away by the wind, but bits of fabric still clung to the arms and around the waist. The entire back was exposed, the skin so clean and virgin white it looked like a marble statue. The buttocks and thighs had been chewed away by Himalayan ravens, and the holes gave the body the appearance of a plaster mannequin that had been cracked open with a hammer.

 

There were obvious signs of suffering. The arms were outstretched, long thin fingers clawed into the slope. The backs of the hands were the color of leather-in stark contrast to the rest of the skin, which had no color at all. The right foot, inside a leather hobnailed boot, was bent at an unnatural angle, where the leg had broken above the boot top. The left leg was crossed over the right, as if protecting the injured limb. This small, undeniably human gesture is what struck me most. Whatever had happened to this climber, it seemed he arrived at his final resting place conscious of his plight.

 

I looked over at my twelve-year-old daughter, Lilla, sitting next to me in the lecture hall, gripping the armrests of her seat. I put my hand on top of hers. "Are you okay?" I whispered. She looked up at me with a blank expression and nodded slightly. I hadn't known this slideshow would be R-rated, and I realized this must be the first time she had seen a photograph of an actual dead body. I was familiar with the photo. It had made the rounds on the internet when this long-lost climber, George Mallory, had been discovered high on the North Face of Mount Everest almost twenty years earlier.

 

Standing on the stage between a mannequin wearing a yellow one-piece down suit and an orange tent adorned with a New Hampshire license plate that read 29035 (the elevation in feet of Mount Everest) was my friend Thom Pollard. His gray hair belied a spryness in his manner and movements. His dress, like his speech, was typically peppered with nouveau bohemian flourishes, including the string of Tibetan prayer beads around his neck. But on this night, he wore a navy blue blazer, a tan pair of chinos, and dress shoes. His beard was trim, his hair combed neatly in place, the dome of his head shining under the stage lights. My hippie friend was transformed into something like a college professor on this October evening in 2017, and he carried himself as such, strolling casually from one side of the stage to the other.

 

I had known Thom since the 1990s, having first met him through mutual acquaintances shortly after he moved to North Conway, New Hampshire. We both had young children around the same age, and in a lot of ways, we were living parallel lives, struggling to make a living doing what we loved. He worked as a cameraman and filmmaker, and I as a professional climber, mountain guide, and journalist. Our wives were also friends, who shared a bond that was likely forged from the unique challenges posed by husbands who frequently traded family duties for global adventures-leaving them to raise young children in the sticks of New Hampshire, alone. Years later, Thom and I would each end up paying the predictable price for willfully chasing our dreams. Heartbroken and dazed, our scripts converged when both of our divorces were finalized at the same court hearing.

 

As it turned out, Thom was wise to dress up. His talk, titled "Lessons Learned in Pursuit of Everest," had drawn a crowd of nearly four hundred people. In 2016, a year earlier, he had summited Mount Everest for the first time at age fifty-four. It was his third attempt.

 

Truth be told, I wasn't interested in Mount Everest at all. I saw the mountain as a place overrun with inexperienced climbers who stacked the odds in their favor by outsourcing the most significant risks to the climbing sherpas, who carried the weight of everyone's egos on their shoulders-and frequently paid with their lives. The American alpinist Mark Twight summed up the sentiment of many climbers and pundits alike when he wrote, "I think posers have polluted mountaineering. They replace skills and courage with cash and equipment. They make the summit, not the style, the yardstick of success . . . Now I'm embarrassed to call myself a climber, because close on the heels of the admission some dilettante will ask whether I've read Into Thin Air or done Everest." For me and many other climbers of my generation, the world's highest mountain was not a worthy objective.

 

But it hadn't always been that way.

 

When I first started climbing at age fifteen, I quickly became fascinated with climbing lore. One of the first books I read was All 14 Eight-Thousanders, which told about Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler's groundbreaking oxygenless ascent of Mount Everest in 1978. Medical experts had warned them that it was impossible to climb to 29,000 feet without supplemental oxygen. Even attempting to do so, they said, would cause permanent brain damage. So Messner and Habeler climbed as fast as they could, then practically ran down the mountain after they reached the summit. When they arrived in Base Camp, even they were surprised to find themselves perfectly healthy and mentally intact. After I read his book, Messner promptly replaced Evel Knievel as my idol. Who cared about jumping the Snake River Canyon in a rocket car when the roof of the world was waiting for you?

 

The first commercial client on Everest was Dick Bass, a Texas oilman and rancher who cofounded the Snowbird ski resort in Utah. In 1985, David Breashears and Ang Phurba Sherpa led the fifty-five-year-old Bass to the summit via the South Col route, making him the oldest person at the time to climb the mountain and also the first to climb the highest peaks on each continent-now a popular quest called the Seven Summits. Unwittingly, Bass had opened Pandora's box, and by the early nineties, several companies were selling guided Everest ascents. Two of the most successful Everest guides were Scott Fisher and Rob Hall, both of whom died while guiding clients on the mountain during the tragic 1996 season. The storm that killed them claimed the lives of six other people and was soon after memorialized in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. While Krakauer decried the growing trend of well-heeled Everest clients who had not earned their mountaineering spurs, his book only brought into the mainstream the idea that you could buy your way to the top of the world.

 

 

As a preamble to his Everest talk, Thom had taken us on a quick spin around the globe, from the French Alps and Denali to Gasherbrum II, an 8,000-meter peak in Pakistan. The story I loved most was his attempt to sail across the Pacific Ocean-simply to prove it could be done-on a ship that he and a few companions constructed from 2.5 million totora reeds they cut from the shores of Lake Titicaca in Peru. Without a motor, the sixty-five-foot sailboat eventually drifted into the doldrums between South America and Easter Island, where it bobbed for weeks on the glassy water, making no progress toward its destination. The expedition's official line was that Thom had bailed onto a Chilean navy vessel after fifty-six days because of a family emergency. But the emergency, he later told me, was that his wife had threatened to leave him if he didn't get home immediately.

 

I looked again from the corner of my eye at Lilla. She still seemed uncomfortable, but Thom certainly had her full attention.

 

 

"It is almost unthinkable with this plan that I shan't get to the top," Mallory wrote to his wife, Ruth, before his team reached Mount Everest in 1924. "I can't see myself coming down defeated."

 

The question of whether he and his climbing partner, Sandy Irvine, might actually have reached the summit twenty-nine years before the official first ascent in 1953, by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, has haunted mountaineers ever since. The last person to see the two men alive was their teammate, Noel Odell. Early on the afternoon of June 8, 1924, Odell turned his gaze toward the summit, 3,000 feet above his own position, where Mallory and Irvine were attempting to reach the top. A swirling veil of clouds had enveloped the upper reaches of the North Face that morning, but as Odell looked on, the churning cloud cap began to lift. High on the Northeast Ridge, at what he later approximated to be 28,200 feet, Odell spotted two tiny silhouettes "moving expeditiously" toward the summit. "My eyes became fixed on one tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow crest," he would write on June 13 or 14 in an official dispatch. "The first then approached the great rock step and shortly emerged on top; the second did likewise. Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more."

 

The dream of climbing Everest had captivated the British elite for years. At a time when the Himalaya was still terra incognita to Westerners, the idea of scaling the world's highest peak was no less daring than a modern spaceflight to Mars, with all the pressures and dangers that would come with it. In 1905, Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, proposed an expedition to the mountain in a letter to Douglas Freshfield, an accomplished mountaineer and former president of the Alpine Club. "It has always seemed to me a reproach that with the second highest mountain in the world for the most part in British territory and with the highest in a neighboring and friendly state, we, the mountaineers and pioneers par excellence of the universe, make no sustained and scientific attempt to climb to the top of either of them . . . I would be prepared to lend every aid the government can give to a thoroughly well-appointed climbing party, comprised of trained experts with Swiss guides . . . Ought we not be able to do this?"

 

It wasn't until after World War One, in 1921, that the Alpine Club, in conjunction with the Royal Geographical Society, formed the Mount Everest Committee. The committee correctly reasoned that an assault on the world's highest mountain would require a multiyear effort involving reconnaissance, further surveying, and an army of porters. These logistical considerations became more complicated when the Nepali government, intent on preserving its isolation, replied with a firm no to Lord Curzon's request for a permit to approach the mountain from the south through the Khumbu Valley. Tibet was the only other possibility, but the secretary of state for India, John Morley, a myopic, "dry as dust" bureaucrat nicknamed "Aunt Priscilla," was worried about aggravating tensions with the Chinese and Russians. He forbade Britons from traveling in Tibet. Access remained the primary obstacle to Everest until the First World War.

 

In a further affront to the nation's dignity, British exploration was no longer on the leading edge. A series of British expeditions had been beaten in races to the Northwest Passage and to both poles of the Earth.

 

In 1848, while seeking a shortcut to the Pacific Ocean, two British ships-the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror-mysteriously vanished in the Canadian Arctic, with 129 men on board. In 1909, the American Robert Peary claimed the North Pole. Two years later, a scrappy, self-funded Norwegian explorer named Roald Amundsen-who had finally solved the enigma of the Northwest Passage in 1906-beat the Brits at their own game, once again. When the doomed British Antarctic expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole, they were greeted by a flapping Norwegian flag firmly planted in the snow.

 

Mount Everest, which some had dubbed the "Third Pole," offered a last hope for British vindication after the Great War. The final obstacle, the permit to approach the mountain through Tibet, was granted by the Dalai Lama in December of 1920. The news broke in British newspapers shortly thereafter. Francis Younghusband, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, who had led a disastrous military incursion into Tibet in 1904, believed that for the Everest expedition to be successful, it needed to capture the imagination of the British public. During an address to the membership of the RGS, he said that he wanted to get the idea of ascending Mount Everest "enshrined in the very heart of society."

 

"Our forefathers were terrified of mountains," he said, "and called the most ordinary peak inaccessible. Nowadays, we refuse to admit that the highest mountain in the world cannot be scaled, and the man who first stands on the summit of Mount Everest will have raised the spirit of countless others for generations to come." Indeed, with the help of British newspapers, the first Mount Everest expedition soon grew into a popular crusade.

 

By the spring of 1921, the Mount Everest Committee had organized an exploratory expedition to reconnoiter a route up the mountain. No Westerner had been within forty miles of the peak, and no one had the foggiest idea how to get to the base, let alone climb it. They did know that a labyrinthine maze of almost unimaginably huge glaciers guarded access to its slopes. Even if they could find a way through them, techniques of high-altitude mountaineering were in their infancy. Climbers of that era used thin ropes made of hemp and other natural fibers, more similar to clothesline than modern climbing rope. These cords were easily severed and generally used as a token last-ditch safety measure, the way a guardrail might-or might not-prevent a bus from plummeting down an embankment. Climbers and mountaineers made a point to never actually put their ropes to the test. Crampons-metal spikes used for traction on snow and ice-were practically unworkable because the straps that were used to fasten them to the leather boots restricted circulation to toes. The all-essential carabiner, a kind of snap shackle used in almost every imaginable climbing situation, had only recently been invented and had not yet come into widespread use.

 

No one knew if it was even possible for a human to survive at 29,000 feet, and indeed, many physiologists of the day were adamant that it was not. The precedent set in 1875 by three French scientists who took off in a hot-air balloon, hoping to set a new altitude record, was not encouraging. When the balloon landed in a field several hours after takeoff, the instruments showed that it had reached an altitude of 28,000 feet. But two of the three men were dead, with their faces blackened and mouths filled with blood. The third, who somehow survived, had gone deaf. Today, it is obvious that the French scientists died because they had utterly failed to acclimate to the altitude-a process that can take weeks. At the time, there was very little awareness of this physiological reality.

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