Q&A: Conrad Anker

The man who found Mallory

Conrad Anker is legend among climbers. During his 34-year career, he’s ascended some of the world’s hardest climbs, from Baffin Island to the Karakorum. He’s become entwined in the history books for another reason, too: discovering the body of the enigmatic climber George Mallory, who was lost in an early attempt to summit Everest in the 1920s. His discovery sparked a frenzy among the public, since it raised the question: did Mallory get to the top first? In an exclusive WideWorld interview, Conrad tells us about his connection with Mallory, and also his latest mission to save the disappearing glaciers of the Himalayas.

It’s ten years now since you found the body of George Mallory on Everest. Do you feel connected with his story?

I have a lot of empathy for Mallory and what he did as a pioneer and climber. It was May 1st 1999 when we were there on the north side of Everest and I came across his frozen, well preserved body. It opened up the question whether he could have summitted in 1924, 29 years before Sir Edmund Hillary. Mallory was a very complex person: a teacher, he studied at Cambridge, he was part of the Bloomsbury group and he had seen combat in the Great War. Overarching it all was his love for the mountains and his sense of adventure, and that’s what I really hope to share with people.

What is it about mountains that compels you?

It’s cathartic for humans. When we’re outside we’re able to process the information that we’re completely bombarded with on a day-to-day basis. They’re an antidote to the over-stimulated world that we find ourselves in.

But isn’t the world of technology encroaching more and more into the mountains?

Yeah – for one thing, there’s the transportation. An Everest trip is 10 weeks or something like that, while in Mallory’s day they were talking six months, with steam ships and trains and the rest on foot. And now we have this change in communications. Every Everest trip has its own web page and blog and you can find how fast they went to....

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