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Here's what it takes to fly a drone on Mount Everest

April 18, 2021 | by Julian L. Mertz | No comments

PLUS: Why data brokers are a threat to democracy, and the joy and nuttiness of Doge coin.

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04.18.21

This week, we published an excerpt from The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession, and Death on Mount Everest, by Mark Synnott. Here's a taste:

Climbing Mount Everest had never been a personal ambition of mine. I saw the world's tallest 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. For me and many other climbers of my generation, the world's highest mountain was not a worthy objective.

But that was before I found myself inexplicably drawn into an expedition that hoped to solve one of mountaineering's greatest mysteries. It had been almost 100 years since George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were last seen at 28,200 feet on June 8, 1924, still "going strong" for the summit. Ever since, we have been left to wonder whether these two intrepid explorers might have stood on top that day, nearly three decades before the official first ascent by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in May of 1953.

George Mallory's body was discovered on Everest's North Face in 1999, but his partner Sandy Irvine had never been found. Our plan was to search for his final resting spot and the pocket-size Kodak camera that he is supposed to have carried. It was like looking for a needle in a frozen haystack. But if we could find the camera, and the film was salvageable, it just might hold an image that would rewrite history.

The Editors

Here's What It Takes to Fly a Drone on Mount Everest

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