Excerpted from Ghosts of Everest by Jochen Hemmleb, Larry A. Johnson and Eric R. Simonson

At 8:00 A.M., as Mallory and Irvine approached the crest of the Northeast Ridge, Noel Odell left Camp V. He spent the next several hours with his nose to the ground, studying the geology of the mountain and searching for fossils. Sometime around noon, he spotted his fossils. At 12:50 P.M., he spotted his colleagues, Mallory and Irvine.

But where? In his diary he wrote, "nearing the base of the final pyramide [sic]." His initial dispatch was similar: "the prominent rock-step at a very short distance from base of the final pyramid." In his second dispatch, he added a cryptic "[at] the last step but one" from the final pyramid. Then, a full year later in the expedition report, he began to change his story. His initial accounts, including his accounts in Britain's Alpine Journal, tell us that his view of the mountain was clear and unobscured; he says he saw "the whole summit ridge and final pyramid unveiled." He used virtually the same phrase in the expedition report, but then contradicted himself only a few sentences later: "Owing to the small portion of the summit ridge uncovered I could not be precisely certain at which of these two 'steps' they were, as in profile and from below they are very similar, but at the time I took it to be the 'second step.' However, I am a little doubtful now whether the latter would not be hidden by the projecting nearer ground from my position below on the face."

Here, clearly, Odell was trying to satisfy the disbelievers: his observation is topographically impossible; given the general tilt of the slope, the projecting ground obscures the First Step before the Second, not the other way around.

Which account, then, are we to believe, the clearly stated firsthand account or the much later, much fuzzier account so obviously affected by public debate? Odell was a scientist trained in careful observation. He was also the fittest and most well-acclimatized member of the entire expedition team on that day (both of which he would demonstrate only twenty-four hours later). And we now know, thanks to Andy Politz's observations of the summit ridge from Odell's viewpoint, that Odell's doubts about what he saw, a year after the event, were unfounded. From where he had stood that morning, the First and Second Steps would have been clearly separate and distinct, as would the Third Step higher up the mountain.

Move on to Identifying the Step

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