Changemaker Speaker: Mark Synnott

Everest has always loomed large in our collective imaginations as the perfect embodiment of what a mountain should be: beautiful, terrifying - and yet, irresistible. But who really was the first to answer its siren call? History tells us that Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made the first ascent in May 1953, but there has always been a tantalizing possibility that British mountaineers George Leigh Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine may have beaten them to it. Mallory and Irvine were last seen on June 8, 1924, at 28,200 feet - just 800 feet shy of the summit - still going strong for the top. Could they have summited before they vanished into the clouds? The Everest Enigma is the tale of Mark Synnott’s quest to solve this 100-year-old mystery, a modern-day detective story that will take you from the archives of the RGS in London to high in the Death Zone, and then finally to the base of the North Face - where Sandy’s partial remains recently emerged from the ice.
Mark Synnott is a New York Times best-selling author, a pioneering professional climber, a North Face athlete, and one of the most prolific explorers of his generation. His search for unclimbed and unexplored mountains has taken him on more than three dozen expeditions to places like Alaska, Baffin Island, Greenland, Iceland, Newfoundland, Patagonia, Guyana, Venezuela, Pakistan, Nepal, India, China, Tibet, Uzbekistan, Russia, Cameroon, Chad, Borneo, Oman and Pitcairn Island. In Yosemite, he has climbed El Capitan 24 times. In 2019, Mark summited Mount Everest via the Northeast Ridge, an adventure chronicled in his book The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession and Death on Mount Everest.