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For climbers and historians, the question has always remained: Did one or both of the climbers make the top before they died? As they made their own way toward the mountain’s upper reaches last spring, the climbers of the Mallory/Irvine Research Expedition debated the question among themselves. Most of the crew were arguing on the doubtful side. The route up the Northeast Ridge, they contended, would simply have been too difficult in 1924.

The expedition, led by experienced Himalayan guide Eric Simonson, was the brainchild of a young German Everest historian named Jochen Hemmleb. Working from scant clues, the mostly American team hoped to find an old "English dead" reportedly seen by a Chinese climber in 1975. The body was generally thought to be that of Andrew Irvine, who, it was hoped, was carrying a Kodak Vestpocket camera Mallory had borrowed for the attempt. If the camera contained shots from the summit, the mystery could at last be laid to rest.

As it happened, the headline-generating discovery the team made, on May 1, 1999, was mostly a product of chance and intuition rather than scientific deduction. The climbers lucked into perfect weather for the search: It had been a dry year in the Himalayas and the mountain was practically scoured clear of snow. And it was only in following his own instincts and wandering far outside the established search zone that climber Conrad Anker stumbled upon a trail of broken bodies that led him to the corpse -- which turned out, spectacularly enough, to be Mallory's, not Irvine's. Eerily preserved at nearly 27,000 feet on the mountain’s North Face, the body was bleached and frozen to the rocky slope, the fingers dug desperately into the rubble.

No camera was found, but the body did yield a few clues. Mallory had died in a fall, although not a long one. In the end, he appears to have been roped to Irvine. As much as anything, the discovery had what climber Anker would later call a "galvanic effect" on the team’s judgment. Opinion now swung strongly in favor of the idea that Mallory had in fact made it. Three days after the historic find, Anker himself was telling NOVA producer Liesl Clark, "After seeing George up there, I now think he may have reached the summit before he fell." But by the time the expedition was wrapping up -- after Anker and teammate Dave Hahn had reached the summit themselves -- his assessment had come 180 degrees again.

That change of opinion has subsequently become a point of bitter controversy among erstwhile teammates. Accusations and recriminations have come on the heels of two competing, and at times contradictory, accounts of the expedition: "The Lost Explorer," by Conrad Anker and David Roberts, and "Ghosts of Everest," the "exclusive team story" by Jochen Hemmleb, Eric Simonson and mountaineering publisher Larry Johnson, as told to ghostwriter William Nothdurft.

Most notably, the two books differ sharply in their conclusions about what might have happened on that fateful day in 1924. Where Anker and Roberts remain skeptical, "Ghosts of Everest" argues strenuously that Mallory and Irvine could have made it. In the process, critics charge, its authors have played fast and loose with a hallowed piece of mountaineering history.

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