Doomed Mt Everest climb retraced

By Mark Dummett
BBC News, Kathmandu

Mallory and Irvine vanished not far from the summit

An international team of mountaineers is trying to climb Mount Everest using equipment designed in the 1920s.

They are retracing the steps of two British climbers who disappeared just short of the summit in 1924.

The climbers are hoping to recreate all but the last moments of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine's famous climb.

They want to discover whether the two were actually able to reach the summit, nearly 30 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

Mallory and Irvine were last sighted a few hundred metres short of the summit before bad weather closed in.

Iceman

The latter-day mountaineers will be using replica equipment - so instead of modern Gore-Tex waterproofs, they are braving the extreme conditions of the world's highest mountain wearing clothes made from wool, silk and cotton.

The most dangerous part of the climb will come just before they reach the summit.

Katsusuke Yanagisawa this year became the oldest Everest climber

There, they will have to scale a 40m-high, near-vertical rock face called the Second Step.

It is so dangerous that permanent ladders have been fixed to the rock to help exhausted climbers.

But for this expedition, the ladders will be removed, so the climbers will have to go up using hemp ropes.

This is the last attempted climb of Everest before the monsoon rains hit Nepal.

A record number of climbers - 514 - have scaled the mountain this year.

They include a Nepali, who climbed the peak for a record-breaking 17th time, a 71-one-year-old Japanese teacher and a British man who made the first mobile phone call from the summit.

Many others tried but failed to reach the top.

They included a Dutchman, nicknamed the Iceman, who attempted the climb half-naked.