Summary

"Mallory's story has been well chronicled, but Irvine has always been overshadowed by his more famous climbing partner and little has been written about him.

"Mallory's story has been well chronicled, but Irvine has always been overshadowed by his more famous climbing partner and little has been written about him. Who was he? Why was he selected by the British Everest Committee to join the 1924 expedition in spite of his limited mountaineering experience? Why did Mallory, sixteen years his senior, choose Irvine for the final assault on the summit?" "Julie Summers, great niece of Sandy Irvine, has been fascinated since childhood by the story of 'Uncle Sandy'. Little information about his short but eventful life was thought to have existed. Nothing was believed by the family to have survived from the expedition apart from the little already in the public domain. But in May 2000 Julie made an astonishing discovery: a long forgotten and unopened trunk in the attic of an Irvine family home turned out to contain a stash of unsuspected source material including Irvine's letters and photographs from Everest." "In addition to the hitherto unknown photographs and letters this treasure trove also includes engineering drawings of his detailed redesign of the expedition's capricious oxygen apparatus - just one example in a long line of his creative solutions to engineering problems." "Fearless on Everest is not only a personal quest. It is a fascinating story of a fearless young adventurer whose life and death linked him with one of the greatest mountaineering legends of all time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved