On 8 June1924 George Mallory and Andrew Irvine attempted to climb to the top of Mount Everest via the North Col route. The keen-sighted Odell reported seeing them at 12:50 p.m. ascending one of the major "steps" on the North-East ridge on "the last step but one from the base of the final pyramid" 1 and "going strongly for the top" but no evidence thus far has proved conclusively that they reached the summit. They never returned and died somewhere high on the mountain. Odell was the last person to see the pair alive.
In his first two accounts, written between June and November 1924, Odell was entirely sure he had seen Mallory & Irvine at the Second Step. But in the expedition account published in 1925, and after meeting pessimism by a number of individuals as to whether it was the Second Step or lower on the mountain, doubts had entered Odell's own mind and he thought it might had been the First Step where he had seen the pair.
Following their disappearance, Odell climbed from the North Col up to almost 28,000 feet (8,500 m) searching in vain for the two climbers. 2
In 1936 Noel Odell with Bill Tilman successfully reached the summit of Nanda Devi which at the time, and until 1950, was the highest mountain climbed. Odell returned to Everest with the expedition led by Tilman in 1938.
Noel Odell had a colourful career outside mountaineering as well, serving with the Royal Engineers in both the World Wars, as a consultant in the petroleum and mining industries, and teaching geology at a number of universities around the world, including Harvard and Cambridge.
He was of course also an accomplished rock climber, famous for his solo first ascent in 1919 of Tennis Shoe on the Idwal Slabs, in Snowdonia. Odell Gully in the Huntington Ravine of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington is named after Odell, who was the first to demonstrate its ascent in winter.3
