Utah Utes grad talks about Everest's mystique

SALT LAKE CITY — Conrad Anker says when he found the body of legendary mountaineer George Mallory, five miles up and 75 years after the fall, he wasn't afraid — at least not of Mallory.

It was the mountain that made him tremble.

Which makes sense when you're at an altitude where "you're starting to die; you're starved of oxygen, you're on borrowed time."

And where the remains of an estimated 150 failed climbers are strewn across an area called the Death Zone.

Once you've summited the 29,000-foot Mount Everest, he said, "You're elated but also scared. You're on top of the world. It's a dangerous place."

Anker had already passed the bodies of two modern-day climbers that morning in 1999. His climbing party had hoped to find the long-lost Mallory on its way to the summit, and it did. Anker met history at 27,000 feet. There, face down in the scree, was the man many believe was the first to summit Everest, in 1924.

"It was a very humble moment, one with respect for people in my life and the people who came before me," Anker said.

Anker, who graduated in 1988 from the University of Utah in parks and recreation, is a well-known figure in international climbing circles. But he became considerably more famous with the release of his film "The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest," which opened nationwide in August. It is showing at the Clark Planetarium IMAX Theater.

While Edmund Hillary is credited with having been the first to summit Everest, in 1953, some say it was actually Mallory, 29 years prior. Evidence suggests Mallory and/or climbing partner Sandy Irvine had made it to the top but fallen during an evening descent. The fact Mallory had promised to plant a picture of his wife on the summit — yet no picture was found on his body — presents the possibility he left it on the peak.

His snow goggles were in his pocket, suggesting he had summited in daylight and was descending after sunset.

In 2007, Anker and Leo Houlding agreed to climb the mountain along with a film crew, hoping to verify whether Mallory and Irvine had made history. They wore the same type clothing and heavy leather shoes as Mallory and even used old-fashioned cotton ropes. For authenticity's sake, they removed a ladder that had been installed by Chinese climbers on the sheer Second Step.

And they made the top.