Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/05/03

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Subject: Re: [Leica] MALLORY FOUND!
From: Marc James Small <msmall@roanoke.infi.net>
Date: Mon, 03 May 1999 16:56:20 -0400

At 03:30 PM 5/3/99 -0400, Derek Folmer wrote:
>       morning is that Mallory (and his climbing partner I believe) was
>found 270m from the summit! Reports said he was well preserved. With all
>the traffic up there in the last years it is incredible to think that
>no-one has stumbled into him previously. No camera was found.  Would
>Mallory have had a Leica? 

If CBC reported this, it is bunk.

Mallory's corpse was found where we have known a body was to be found for
twenty years and more, in the Snow Terrace at 27,000 feet, some 2,000 feet
(600m) from the summit.  No trace has been found of Irving as of this
writing.  

No Leica:  Wager carried a Leica with him in '33, but that was the first.
Mallory's camera was a Kodak VP belonging to Howard Somervell.  And, as of
now, no trace has been found of the camera -- but Mallory's body would have
bounced a number of times in the course of the fall which killed him, and,
as my secretary observed, "it just must have shot out of the pocket on one
of those bounces".

The normal routes to the summit do not cross the snow terrace.  Getting
climbers interested in summiting to take time off to seek for a body has
proven impossible until Somervell's nephew got BBC, PBS, and Mountain Zone
to co-operate in paying the fee for a climb just to find the body.

More reports will follow, as I learn more.

Marc

msmall@roanoke.infi.net  FAX:  +540/343-7315
Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!