The Wildest Dream - Conquest of Everest (The Wildest Dream)

Mount Everest...

Twenty-nine thousand feet...

The highest point on Earth...

Captivating and deadly.

In the 1920s, to conquer this mountain

was the greatest challenge remaining in a golden age of adventure.

Everest was the edge of heaven,

where many believed no human could survive.

But not George Mallory.

"Everest is the last great conquest for man...

The Wildest Dream."

George Mallory dreamed of being the first man to climb Everest.

On June 8, 1924,

dressed in gabardine and hobnailed boots,

he and his fellow climber, Sandy Irvine,

were last seen 800 feet below the summit.

Then the clouds rolled in...

They were never seen alive again.

Many believed that almost 30 years before Everest was officially conquered,

George Mallory was the first man to set foot on the top of the world.

Seventy-five years after Mallory and Irvine vanished,

mountaineer Conrad Anker took part in an expedition

looking for their bodies high on Everest.

Conrad, come in please.

I'm down at 26,7 - over.

Anker struck off on his own.

Conrad, you're way below the search zone.

You need to be higher - over.

I was curious.

I stopped, turned around...

and there was a patch of white.

It wasn't snow; it was matte -

a light-absorbing color, like marble.

As I got closer, I realized this was the body

of one of the pioneering English climbers,

frozen onto the mountainside.

For a moment I thought...

maybe I can just keep walking and keep it to myself.

But then, that's what we were there for.

Group Meeting.

Mandatory group meeting - over.

Here, wait! This is George Mallory!

Oh, my God! Oh, my God!

You see that? George Mallory.

Oh, my God!

George Mallory and I -

our two paths have intersected 75 years apart.

My aunt called me and said in a rather small voice on the phone:

"Suzie, they've found my father's body on Mount Everest."

I was amazed,

I was absolutely shocked.

It was very powerful to know

where my grandfather was and how he died.

He had a compound fracture of his right leg, above the ankle -

fatal on Everest.

His arms were outstretched as if he had tried

to dig his fingers into the side of the mountain.

He was last seen up on the ridge,

heading west for the summit.

But I found him far to the east.

So Mallory was on his way back,

maybe returning from the summit itself.

His sun goggles, vital against the glare from the snow,

were in his pocket.

So it must have been getting dark.

He and Irvine were tied together by a thin cotton rope.

They were tired, absolutely beat, no energy left,

minds not functioning clearly.

Mallory crossed his left leg over the broken one

to ease the pain.

It was a matter of minutes,

a half hour at the very most,

before he died.

Did Mallory reach the summit

almost three decades before the first official climb?

We discovered many things on his body...

Documents and letters perfectly preserved 75 years later.

His wristwatch, rusted in at 10 after 5.

The goggles that were inside of his vest.

An altimeter - the face broken and the hands missing.

But one very significant item was missing:

The photo of his wife Ruth,

which he'd promised to leave on the summit.

Was the photo missing

because Mallory had reached the summit and placed it there -

the ultimate tribute to his love of Ruth?

He was last seen about 800 feet below the summit,

near the notoriously difficult Second Step.

If Mallory was able to make it to the summit in 1924,

he and Irvine would have had to have climbed this overhanging cliff

at about 28,000 feet.

There's never been a confirmed free climb of the Second Step.

Everyone who climbs it today

uses a metal ladder bolted to the rock

by Chinese climbers in 1975.

I want to go back to Everest

to try and climb the Second Step,

under the very same conditions Mallory faced.

It was a pure cliff when Mallory and Irvine approached it.

No one had ever been there.

It would have been an incredible feat of climbing

if they had pulled that off.

Adventure, risk...

There are some people that thrive on it,

that seek it out,

they want to push their own limits.

Mallory is one of those people.

Mallory grew up in Cheshire, Northern England.

He made his first fateful climb in Mobberley, his home village.

Mallory's father was a vicar here at this church.

And it was here that the young boy escaped

and climbed to the top of the church - age seven.

You can imagine that...

Finding climbing, it's his true passion in life.

I actually think that some people who climb

are wired a little differently from the rest of us.

My grandfather really didn't feel fear of heights

or precipices or anything like that.

He had a way of climbing that was not quite like everyone else's.

His arms and legs would just sort of eat up a mountain

and he would start flowing over it like a wave.

Aged 19, Mallory entered the University of Cambridge

at a time of great cultural upheaval.

When Mallory arrived in Cambridge in 1905

he pitched into this ferment and bubble of ideas,

excitement, intellectual, sexual, social, secret societies.

He obviously possessed some remarkable charisma,

sort of charmed presence that drew the eye,

compelled the gaze.

"My mind is in a state of constant rebellion.

I believe that will always be so."

He was a dreamer...

And he was in Cambridge at a time of great and powerful dreaming.

And eventually that dream took its form in the shape of Everest.

This was the golden age of exploration.

Mallory watched with the rest of the world

as explorers from America, Norway, and Britain

raced first to the North and then the South Pole.

In 1912, Captain Scott, the legendary British adventurer,

died in the attempt to be the first to the South Pole.

Mallory was among those inspired by the tragedy.

Britain is at the waning of the empire at this time.

It is looking for ways to reinvigorate itself.

So attention inevitably turns to Everest as the final possibility -

The Third Pole.

Surveyors had calculated that Everest was the highest mountain in the world.

But no Westerner had ever been within 40 miles.

Mallory became obsessed by a mountain he'd never even seen.

"Everest is the highest mountain in the world.

No man has reached its summit.

"Its existence is a challenge to man's desire to conquer the universe."

Mallory wasn't just enthralled with Everest...

He had also fallen in love with 21-year-old Ruth Turner.

Right from the start, they wrote each other adoring letters.

"My darling,"

I'm longing for you.

I would kiss your lips and look into your eyes

and you, you, you all near me and with me,

"strong and glorious and loving and laughing."

"I cannot find words that would be sure

to convey what I feel about you.

What I really want is to know you

and to love you more and more.

"Dearest and most beloved, your loving Ruth."

George and my grandmother Ruth fell madly in love in 1914.

They were both idealists,

really seeing kindred spirits in each other.

They were married three days before the start of World War I.

Mallory enlisted and came face to face

with death once more,

fighting in the Somme,

the bloodiest battle known to man.

"There is no reckoning with death here.

Life presents itself very much to me as a gift."

Mallory had witnessed the mass slaughter of the first World War.

His fellow soldiers, some of them six feet away,

killed by German shelling.

He knew how fragile life was.

And knowing this, he wanted to live it to the fullest.

He wanted the ultimate challenge.

And that, in the 20s, was Mount Everest.

Once the war was over,

the Royal Geographical Society in London

planned the first-ever expedition to Everest.

They needed Mallory for his supreme climbing skills;

He needed their backing to realize his obsession.

When Mallory undertook that first expedition in 1921,

he had to approach Everest through Tibet from the north.

The Nepalese refused to allow access to the easier south side

used when Everest was first officially climbed in 1953.

After an eight-week journey,

Mallory finally set eyes on the mountain

that had haunted him for so long.

"Like the wildest creation of a dream - Everest!"

A rugged giant...

A prodigious white fang...

A colossal rock plastered with snow.

From the mountaineer's point of view,

"no more appalling sight could be imagined."

When he first saw Everest,